Lack of leadership creates troubles
Former United States President Lyndon B Johnson once said, ‘‘The presidency has made every man who occupied it, no matter how small, bigger than he was.’’
But Donald Trump is testing that maxim. In Trump, who is somehow managing to reduce the position to his size, America’s presidency may have met its match.
The US president – the position, not the person occupying it – is a pillar of the international order. The US presidency gives direction and guidance to the entire system, a kind of rudder that guides the world toward calm waters or, when necessary, through periods of creative disruption.
With Trump in charge, that rudder is broken, and the system could be left stranded in dangerous waters from which it will be difficult to escape, even after he is out of power. Indeed, the true risk of Trump’s presidency lies not in the dangerous conditions of the next four years, but in the emergence, in the long term, of a directionless – and thus highly unstable – world order.
The erosion of the American presidency’s global role did not begin with Trump’s inauguration. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, brought a logical approach to foreign affairs, focusing on discrete areas where he believed the US had an interest and could make an impact. Yet he failed to account for America’s systemic role; as a result, he inadvertently reinforced perceptions of declining US global leadership.
Obama, for his part, was reacting to his own predecessor, George W Bush, whose tendency toward dangerous overreach was exemplified in his global war on terrorism. And that tendency did not start with Bush: the list goes on, taking us back a good century.
Trump is often likened to other presidents. His recent firing of FBI director James Comey, who was conducting an investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia, and the Justice Department’s subsequent appointment of a special counsel to continue that investigation, has invited comparisons to the scandal-ridden final years of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
And those who remain eager to give Trump the benefit of the doubt sometimes compare him to another Republican outsider who was initially viewed as a threat to the global order: Ronald Reagan.
But Trump is no Nixon, Reagan, or anyone else. He is sui generis – a reality-show president optimised for sound-bite socialmedia politics. A uniquely gifted performer in the digital circus, he lacks the vision, consistency, and perceptiveness that today’s fastchanging and deeply interconnected world demands from its leaders. Perhaps most important, the questions he is raising are not about the US presidency’s direction, but about its very functioning.
The mantra pushed by Trump’s handlers since his inauguration has been to look at what he does, not at what he says. We should have faith in the professionals by his side: Secretary of Defence James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and National Security Adviser HR Mcmaster. And we should wait patiently for results, whatever they may look like.
This approach only accelerates the presidency’s erosion.
It is not too late for Trump to behave like a leader, looking beyond himself and speaking clearly to the world. He should start now, as he rounds out his first trip abroad with visits to the Nato and G7 summits. In his earlier stops, in Saudi Arabia and Israel, he may have moved, marginally, in that direction.
Trump’s hosts, particularly Nato, have worked hard to create an atmosphere for such a shift. They recognise that, at a time when institutions everywhere are straining to remain relevant, we cannot afford to lose a pillar of world order.
Of course, when Trump pursues a wrongheaded policy, we should resist. But the world cannot afford to sit back and watch the institution of the US presidency disintegrate.
Ana Palacio is a former Spanish foreign minister and former senior vice-president of the World Bank.