Trump’s first 100 days and what they tell us

PRESIDENT Trump’s first 100 days in office aren’t just a cue for retrospection — the most striking event of the week was the President summoning all 100 senators to the White House to discuss the threat posed by North Korea and its alleged capacity to launch a long-range nuclear missile strike on the US. The President’s approach for now is focused on tightening sanctions to force the rogue state to dismantle its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes; officials also talk about “pursuing diplomatic measures with our allies and regional partners”. This is not so very different from the approach taken by President Obama, but the difference is that Mr Trump may well be able to persuade the Chinese government to take a more vigorous stance on North Korea. Its energy needs are met through China.

This is the only realistic approach to take to this despotic and febrile regime, though the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, is right to make clear that the UK would not back the US if it launched a pre-emptive strike. It may be that Mr Trump’s credibility is enhanced by his carrying a big stick, but pre-emptive action would be wrong .

This is not the only issue where the President’s actual stance has not quite been of a piece with his rhetoric: for all his emphasis on destroying Islamic State, the most striking attack on IS was in fact in Afghanistan, where the so-called “mother of all bombs” actually had little practical impact. The administration’s more aggressive stance was directed against the Assad regime, not IS, in response to the Syrian army’s use of chemical weapons. The effect was further to alienate the Russians. Indeed, far from the Trump presidency establishing a closer alignment with Russia, which could have yielded a useful diminution in both countries’ nuclear arsenals, relations between both countries are unprecedentedly frosty.

Is there any lesson to be drawn from this? One is that in foreign policy, this administration is more willing to change its previous positions than we expected. Mrs May, whose priority is to ensure that the UK remains at the head of the queue for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, must take that on board, and hold Mr Trump close.