Trump abroad Our view:
The president said some of the right things on his first foreign trip, but missteps and blind spots still dog him
here were some odd moments on Donald Trump’s first trip abroad as president — the glowing orb he fondled in Saudi Arabia, the effusive praise for Egyptian strongman Abdul Fatah el-Sisi’s shoes, the remark upon landing in Israel that he had just come from the Middle East, the note he left in the visitor’s log at Israel’s most prominent Holocaust museum that sounded better suited to a middle school yearbook. But on substance, there were some positive signs.
Mr. Trump was clearly eager to turn the page from what he calls a failed foreign policy by former President Barack Obama — and which we would acknowledge hardly lived up to the high hopes he brought for his own reset after the second Bush administration. But Mr. Trump didn’t do it in the brash way his campaign trail rhetoric might have suggested. The man who decried his predecessor’s reluctance to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” didn’t utter it during a speech in Saudi Arabia. The notion that “Islam hates us” was nowhere in evidence. What had previously seemed a simplistic view of international relations morphed into an understanding of how shifting relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors could offer new opportunities for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. When pressed to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Mr. Trump demurred.
Still, he could not entirely leave behind the missteps and flaws that have dogged him in Washington. His best hope for bringing to fruition the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that has eluded his predecessors is to provide Israel with the confidence it needs to make the sacrifices such an agreement would entail. But his bragging to Russian officials about classified intelligence the U.S. got from Israel related to a potential Islamic State plot undermines the degree to which Israelis can trust him. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may not have downplayed that breach when asked about it, but that doesn’t make it unimportant in the delicate calculus of Middle East peacemaking.
TIt’s not just that the president exposed sensitive intelligence and potentially its source, it’s that he did so with Russia. The fatal flaw in Mr. Trump’s idea of wrapping an Israeli-Palestinian deal around the mutual interest of Israel and Arab states to contain Iran is that Iran’s chief ally is Russia. Cozying up with Moscow and uniting the Middle East against Iran are mutually exclusive.
Mr. Trump was similarly blind to the consequences of his amoral attitude toward human rights abuses in the region. The president announced a major arms deal with the Saudis, including certain weapons the Obama administration had been unwilling to sell the kingdom for fear they would add to the mounting civilian casualties in the bloody conflict in Yemen. In his address in Saudi Arabia, generally considered among the world’s most repressive regimes, Mr. Trump promised, “We are not here to lecture — we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.” But after’s Iran’s relatively moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, was re-elected during the trip, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he must restore “the rights of Iranians to freedom of speech, to freedom of organization, so that Iranians can live the life that they deserve.” Apparently we are willing to lecture, just not to countries with whom we have multi-billion dollar deals.
We are also, it seems, willing to lecture our oldest and most important allies, the members of NATO, about the proper levels of military spending but not to clearly and unambiguously affirm our decades-long commitment to coming to their defense.
Mr. Trump believes in unpredictability and ambiguity as essential tools of dealmaking. But building coalitions to oppose ISIS or seeking an end to one of the world’s longest and deepest conflicts is not like buying and selling real estate. It requires steadiness and adherence to principle. Mr. Trump may have avoided much of the loose talk and bellicose rhetoric that has gotten into trouble at home — convincing world leaders, as one Vatican adviser said, that his “bark is worse than his bite” — but the president didn’t set a new path of American leadership either.