Realpolitik? More like “amateur hour” at the White House

“So the threats were no more than bluster, and all is well.” That’s one view of President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, said Roger Cohen in The New York Times. But it’s mistaken. True, Trump may not have bombed Iran, or ditched Nato, but he has “upended the world” in another way: by abdicating America’s moral authority. Whatever its failings, the US has always stood up for the idea of democracy and the rule of law. But Trump, who has never “met a strongman whose machismo does not beguile him”, doesn’t even pay lip service to such values. He congratulated the Turkish president for cementing his repressive rule with a dodgy referendum; he rolled out the red carpet for Egypt’s autocratic president, calling him a “great friend”; and now he has gone so far as to extend an invitation to President Duterte of the Philippines, a thug who has sanctioned the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users.

Duterte may be unsavoury, said Tom Rogan in National Review, but Trump was right to ask him to the White House. The reality is that the Philippines, on account of its ownership of the strategic Spratly Islands chain, is an essential bulwark against Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. The US needs to keep it on side. Besides, said Jacob Heilbrunn in The National Interest, the lesson of the Cold War is that detente is a far more productive form of diplomacy than confrontation.

Every US president has, at times, had to keep dubious company, said Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. Franklin D. Roosevelt negotiated with Stalin at the Yalta summit; Nixon met Mao in China; Reagan welcomed Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos to the White House. But there was a wider strategy behind these meetings. Not so in Trump’s case; his invitation to Duterte appears to have been an impulsive gesture born of admiration. Trump didn’t consult anyone about it beforehand, said Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy. Normally, such invitations aren’t made public until after the recipient has been sounded out to check that they’ll accept. Duterte wasn’t, and now, in a humiliating reply to Trump, he says he might be too busy to visit. It’s all part of the general chaos of Trump’s Asia policy. Add this to his early U-turn over challenging the “One China” policy, and his recent crazy threat to renege on paying the $1bn cost of a missile defence system for South Korea (another stance that had to be reversed), and you realise that “this isn’t realpolitik. This is amateur hour.”