Trump’s ruthless foreign policy might win out after all
Donald Trump’s boastful ramblings and glaring deficiencies as a human being should not blind us to the possibility that he has a coherent, if ruthless, foreign policy doctrine, knows what he wants and may succeed in getting it. What he’s doing is not normal, but that’s the point.
He sees the US as Gulliver tied down by ideologically hidebound Lilliputians wedded to an outdated global order, whose creation Washington drove after the Second World War and has long needed serious reimagining.
In Trump’s view, leaders both Democratic and Republican have sold out ordinary Americans by ceding sovereignty to international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation, alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and multilateral agreements such as the Paris climate accord.
However, Trump is no isolationist. Rather, as the Hudson Institute’s Walter Mead wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Trump is “a revisionist who wants to alter the terms of the world system in America’s favour”. What, Trump wonders, is the point of the Group of Seven and its annual summit?
He didn’t want to attend the latest gathering in Quebec because he sees the institution as defending a global order that puts the US at a disadvantage in spite of its economic and military might.
Meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was a far higher priority, given the existential threat posed by Kim’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. So he left early for Singapore, where he showered outrageous compliments on the tubby commandant of the world’s largest prison camp. Why not? It was not as though treating Kim as a monster had achieved much.
The establishment is now in a tizzy about how Trump will behave at the Nato summit in Brussels this week and in his subsequent one-on-one with Vladimir Putin. There’s a broad consensus in the commentariat that Putin will get the better of him — to Nato’s detriment.
Trump obviously sees things differently. He thinks that if anyone is getting played it is the US, which is having to shoulder a disproportionate share of the costs of an obsolescent military alliance whose post-Cold War existence chiefly serves to keep alive the threat it was established to deter. In Trump’s view, Nato’s expansion eastwards after the end of the Cold War, plus US support for the overthrow of a Moscowfriendly government in Ukraine, are what triggered Putin’s notunjustified anschluss into Russian-speaking Crimea.
Show Putin respect, Trump figures, help him look good to his own people, don’t get into titfor-tats over the cyber games both sides play, stop encouraging his opponents, congratulate him on winning reelection, and maybe he will be less of a thorn in the side, perhaps even helpful.
You don’t have to believe Putin has the goods on Trump to see why Trump does not waste breath calling out the former KGB man for wanting to punish Hillary Clinton in 2016. Didn’t she interfere in Russia’s elections when she had the chance as secretary of state?
Trump’s disruptive realpolitik is now being tested in the Middle East, where, having pulled out of the Iranian nuclear arms deal his predecessor secured with European partners and Russia, he is stepping up pressure on Tehran for a much broader set of concessions. Russia, hitherto close to Iran, has reportedly signed onto the new effort in return for US dropping support for rebels fighting Russia’s client, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Also on board are Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab states, united in hostility towards the mullahs and their proxies.
Trump is loathsome as a person. Be prepared for cognitive dissonance if he shakes things up for the better.