Trump’s 100 Days No nuclear war ... for this President that’s a success
AS TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY PASSES ITS FIRST CRUCIAL MARKER, THE WORLD REMAINS WARY AND UNCERTAIN OF HIS ADMINISTRATION’S FOREIGN POLICY AIMS ... IF INDEED IT HAS ANY AT ALL. FOREIGN EDITOR DAVID PRATT WEIGHS UP THE EVIDENCE SO FAR
THE Washington Post headline pretty much summed it up. “Is Trump learning – or ad-libbing – on foreign policy?’ it asked.
Saturday saw the world officially 100 days into the presidency of Donald Trump, and diplomats, commentators and international relations experts have all mustered their thoughts in drawing up a report card on his foreign policy successes and failures. Most have been withering in their assessments.
“If the only measure of national security success during a president’s first 100 days were avoiding catastrophe, then OK, President Trump has succeeded,” said Phillip Carter, senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Security.
“No attacks on the US, no new wars, and no nuclear Armageddon – these are good things, and in the moment we can breathe a sigh of relief,” Carter opined.
Many in Washington’s foreign policy establishment, however, remain nervous about how the rest of the world sees Trump’s apparent reversals of position and contradictory statements on sensitive issues. For many, Trump has become the epitome of the volte-face president.
All candidates say things on the presidential election campaign trail they don’t intend to do after election. But Trump has changed course on some of his most fundamental pledges.
On China, candidate Trump said “we can’t allow China to rape our country”. But last month he suddenly affirmed the truth that China was not a currency manipulator, and vowed to give more trade concessions to the Chinese if they helped deal with the North Korean threat.
On Nato, candidate Trump called the most successful alliance in Western military history obsolete. Now, in one of many foreign policy reversals, he told Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg: “I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.” As some international observers pointed out, it was not that Nato had changed, but rather Trump.
Then there is Syria. Candidate Trump expressed little interest in stopping Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless killing of innocent civilians, saying he would instead focus on fighting the Islamic State and even suggesting at times that the US might join forces with the Russians in that fight.
As President, Trump bombed Assad, embracing humanitarian interventionism after witnessing another horrific chemical weapons attack by Assad against Syrian civilians.
There have been other key moments of foreign policy shifts, too, notably on relations with Russia.
Here the Trump administration oscillates between unrequited love for Vladimir Putin and his regime, and stating that Russia’s actions in Syria and Eastern Europe – to say nothing of US election-related espionage – constitute a threat to American national security.
These apparent reversals of position aside, there are also questions over Trump’s statements on sensitive issues.
There was, for example, his cringe-worthy congratulatory call to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the wake of an allegedly rigged vote.
This was followed shortly afterwards by his unprecedented cheering on of Marine Le Pen and her far-right National Front in the French presidential election.
Critics take all these as evidence that the most obvious foreign policy failure of the Trump administration is that there is no recognisable policy, no doctrine, no strategy.
“Recent incidents have shown that there is something very wrong with the foreign policy process in this White House,” says Nina Hachigian, who served as US ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
from 2014-17 and was on the staff of the National Security Council in Bill Clinton’s White House. We witnessed the UN ambassador, the national security adviser, and the secretary of state saying remarkably different things about the ultimate goal of US Syria policy in the days following the US missile strike,” Hachigian pointed out.
She highlighted, too, how Trump boasted that the US carrier strike group, which he called an “armada”, was barrelling towards the Korean peninsula when it was, in fact, headed in the other direction.
Incidents like these, Hachigian and other critics say, suggests real failings in both foreign policy process and in the personnel tasked with implementing it.
According to Carter at the Centre for a New American Security, “the palace intrigue coming out of the Trump White House could fill volumes”.
Carter points to the ongoing warfare between what he describes as the populist camp led by strategist Steve Bannon – now “benched”– and the establishment camps led by chief of staff Reince Priebus, economic adviser Gary Cohn, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
He says Trump’s White House has failed to staff his national security agencies with the appointees necessary to oversee and direct foreign policy.
“The United States can muddle through for now, though the missteps are damaging US credibility and the confidence of US allies. But it is imperative that the administration irons out its process soon, before a real crisis hits,” warns former ambassador Hachigian.
“When the US government has to react quickly, if there is no clear national security process in place, and if the players are not comfortable with their counterparts and their roles, it will be much harder to avoid mistakes that cost lives,” she adds.
In her assessment she finds it hard to imagine the Trump White House leading a concerted regional or global response of the kind most major crises demand such as the Ebola pandemic, famine in South Sudan or the current dispute with North Korea.
That tense standoff with North Korea escalated to a new level again yesterday when the secretive communist country test-fired another ballistic missile, prompting Trump to accuse Pyongyang of showing “disrespect” towards China and its president. The missile exploded shortly after take-off, the second failed launch in the past fortnight, but it has nevertheless further heightened tensions between Washington and Pyongyang.
If anything, the current standoff has revealed what some observers say is the only discernible and cohesive trait of the Trump administration on foreign policy so far: the increasingly alarming tendency by Trump to want to wield the baton as global policeman, giving rise to what many see as growing US military interventionism.
In some ways Trump appears to be channelling some of the foreign policy strategies of Ronald Reagan. In other words a massive military build-up accompanied by threatening displays of strength as a means of gaining leverage over adversarial powers. Nowhere is this propensity for impulsive militarism more dangerous, analysts warn, than the Korean peninsula, where a provocation or miscalculation could quickly spiral out of control with unthinkable consequences.
Far from putting “America first” through an isolationist approach as his election campaign slogan promised, it is a military-first strategy that some now see as lying at the heart of the Trump foreign policy agenda. There is growing evidence that his administration appears to have reverted to a dangerous dependence on the military.
Trump has proposed cutting the State Department and foreign aid budgets by one-third to fund a $54 billion military budget increase. He has also loosened the Obama-era strictures on military operations, and approved more aggressive and riskier counter-terrorism raids.
Only recently he made clear that his commanders in the field now need no prior approval from Washington to deploy powerful weapons like the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat that was dropped on a base used by Islamic State extremists in Afghanistan.
Far from “isolationism” or a realist repositioning of American foreign policy, Trump, for some, represents nothing more than the continuity of endless warfare and the US pursuit of global hegemony.
As one US commentator half joking put it recently: “Americans say the only sure things in life are death and taxes … and the continuity of a militaristic US foreign policy.”
If there are any differences with the past it’s only that Trump’s approach is cruder and more impulsive, or as the same commentator called it: “Tweeting with bombs.”
Many worry, too, that Trump, clearly a narcissist who craves praise, will simply conduct future foreign policy to please his admirers.
Having received plaudits from some quarters for his order to launch the recent missile strike on Syria, the fear is that it will only encourage him to do it again.
Could it be that following the Syria attack he has drawn the conclusion that the political benefits of belligerence outweigh the risks to global stability?
Last week, Trump described his role as president as involving “more work than in my previous life … I thought it would be easier,” he complained.
While some might console themselves with the notion that he’s getting better at the job and finding his feet in terms of foreign policy, those who think this way remain very much a minority.
The United States can muddle through for now, though the missteps are damaging US credibility. But it is imperative that the administration irons out its process soon, before a real crisis hits