President’s ‘good cop, bad cop’ is unsettling but that’s why it may work

‘The discordant make-up of the US national security team might reproduce the Nixonian Madman Theory’

At the heart of Donald Trump’s foreign policy team lies a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, it is composed of men of experience, judgment and traditionalism, all well within the parameters of mainstream American internationalism as practised since 1945. Practically every member of the team – the heads of state, homeland security, the CIA, and most especially Defence Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser HR McMaster – could fit in a Cabinet put together by, say, Hillary Clinton. The commander in chief, on the other hand, is quite the opposite – inexperienced, untraditional, unbounded. His pronouncements on everything from the “one China” policy to the two-state (Arab-Israeli) solution, from Nato obsolescence to the ravages of free trade, continue to confound and, as we say, disrupt.

Can this arrangement work? The answer, surprisingly, is: perhaps.

The sample size is tiny but take, for example, the German excursion.

Mr Trump dispatched his grownups – Vice-President Pence, Defence Secretary Mattis, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson – to confabs in Germany to reassure allies with the usual pieties about America’s commitment to European security. They did drop a few hints of Mr Trump’s loud complaints about allied parasitism, in particular shirking their share of the defence burden.

Within days, Germany announced a 20,000-man expansion of its military. Smaller European countries are likely to take note of the new set-up. It’s classic good cop, bad cop. The secretaries represent foreign policy continuity but their boss preaches America First. Message: Shape up.

John Hannah of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies suggests the push-pull effect might work on foes as well as friends. Last week China suspended coal imports from North Korea for the rest of 2017. Constituting more than one third of all North Korean exports, this is a major blow to its economy. Yes, part of the reason could be Chinese ire at the brazen assassination of Kim Jong-un’s half- brother, who had been under Chinese protection. None the less, the boycott was declared days after a North Korean missile launch – and shortly into the term of a new US president who has proven erratic and disdainful of Chinese sensibilities.

His wavering on the “one China” policy took Beijing by surprise. Mr Trump also strongly denounced Chinese expansion in the South China Sea and conducted a love-in with Japan’s prime minister, something guaranteed to rankle the Chinese. This suggests that the discordant make-up of the US national security team – traditionalist lieutenants, disruptive boss – might reproduce the old Nixonian “Madman Theory”. That’s when adversaries tread carefully because they suspect the US president of being unpredictable, occasionally reckless and potentially crazy dangerous. Henry Kissinger, with Nixon’s collaboration, tried more than once to exploit this perception to put pressure on adversaries.

Mr Trump’s people have shown a deft touch in dealing with his bouts of loopiness. Mr Trump has gone on for years about how we should have taken Iraq’s oil for ourselves. In Baghdad on Sunday, Mr Mattis wryly backed off, telling his hosts that “all of us in America have generally paid for our gas and oil all along, and I am sure we will continue to do so in the future”.

Off-centre comments can have their uses. Take Mr Trump’s dismissal of a US commitment to a two-state solution in the Middle East. The next day, US policy was brought back in line by his own UN ambassador. This diversion might prove salutary. It’s a message to the Palestinians that decades of rejectionism may not pay off with an inexorable march toward statehood.

To be sure, a two-policy, two-reality foreign policy is unsettling. But the experience of the first month suggests that, with prudence and luck, it can yield benefits – that radical rhetoric and conventional policy may induce better behaviour both in friend and foe.

There is also a worst-case scenario. It needs no elaboration. Charles Krauthammer is an author and political commentator for the Washington Post.