Bulletin from Abroad
Rachel Morris in Washington DC
Early this month, President Donald Trump informed a gaggle of reporters that his administration had completed “one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency”. He was roundly ridiculed because, at the time, he had been in the White House less than 11 weeks and also because his presidency had been – and still is – the verifiable opposite of successful.
It’s almost impressive how lavishly he’s squandered the brief period of breathless media coverage that new presidents bask in before things turn ugly. There have been only two moments when Trump has received extensive praise: when, for a full 16 minutes, he read his inauguration speech off a teleprompter without lurching off-script; and when he unloaded 59 cruise missiles on an air base in Syria.
This second one was deeply revealing – and not only of the president. A lot of people went a bit overboard. “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen,” said MSNBC anchor Brian Williams. “‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’” (Another reason to lament Cohen’s passing is that he wasn’t around to skewer this atrocious misreading of his lyrics.) The CNN foreign policy commentator Fareed Zakaria: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States [last night.]” A “news analysis” in the New York Times: “In truth, it was an emotional act by a man suddenly aware that the world’s problems were now his – and that turning away, to him, was not an option.”
Astonishingly, the Times piece failed to mention Trump’s efforts to ban Syrian refugees or explain how it gelled with his newfound compassion.
What this outpouring revealed is how thoroughly Trump flummoxes the US foreign-policy Establishment. It was a bizarre performance of the standard clichés of American intervention with zero recognition of the abnormal circumstances. The belief that the US should not intervene in Syria is one of Trump’s only consistent positions. He reversed it in a matter of minutes after seeing on Fox News images of children killed in a chemical attack.
His horror is understandable, but his logic is unfathomable: Syrian children have been dying in horrendous ways for years. And since Trump didn’t seek congressional authorisation, the missile attack may have been illegal.
So far, influential foreign policy figures who favour humanitarian or military intervention have been treating Trump like a kid who made it through dinner without chucking his food. Their positive reinforcement is because they support the strike on principle, but it assumes that Trump will read something more complex into it than “people like me when I bomb stuff”.
There is no indication that Trump even considered, let alone understands, what the strike could lead to. The potential consequences consumed the Obama administration for years: Obama was wary of retaliation from Russia, or efforts by either Syria or Russia to goad the US into escalating further.
This last one is terrifying, because Trump may be the most goadable man on Earth. This is the guy who fell for a transparent ploy by his opponents to undermine his chief strategist by referring to him as “President Bannon”. So how can you separate the merits of the strike from those of the man who ordered it? How can you refer to a “Trump doctrine” when Trump himself articulated his rationale like this: “I don’t have to have one specific way – and if the world changes, I go the same way. I don’t change. Well, I do change. And I am flexible. And I am proud of that flexibility. My attitude on Syria and Assad has changed very much.”
It is terrifying, because Trump may be the most goadable man on Earth.