Recipe for Greatness
Trump’s model should be FDR
WILL President Trump’s foreign policy look more like the outgoing president’s, or that of Obama’s hero, Franklin Roosevelt? In 1945, the World War II winners — Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and FDR — met in Yalta, Crimea, to shape the fate of postwar Europe. US-led victory made America the world’s top player, and its wealthiest. We became a global force for good.
A stark contrast with what will be on display next week, when Russian, Iranian and Turkish officials will meet in Astana, Kazakhstan. They’ll try to end the civil war in Syria, which has led to the deaths of half a million and empowered the region’s extremists, and in the process reshaped the Mideast.
President Obama talked a lot about the five-year Syrian war. Russia, Turkey and Iran acted. Which is why they convened the Astana summit, and are calling the shots.
That’s bad for us, the Mideast — and the world.
Obama fans in Washington, Oslo or at the United Nations still believe he regained the world’s respect after Bush’s America lost it. That’s not how it’s seen in Aleppo, and that’s not what our allies believe.
So how can Trump turn it around?
Though he took a liking to the phrase “America first” during the campaign, he’ll have to avoid slipping into the isolationist baggage the slogan comes with. Trump’s national-security team is certainly starting on the right track by pushing to beef up the military budgets Obama has depleted. Let’s hope it succeeds.
Projecting military power is one way to avoid war. And a revamped military will be crucial to reclaiming America’s rightful place on the world stage.
Take China. As its military expanded in the last decade, ours shrank. President Xi Jinping became increasingly aggressive, threatening neighbors, annexing territory and dominating the seas around him. Obama’s “pivot to Asia” turned out to be an empty slogan, giving Chinese adventurism a (mostly) green light to make mischief.
China is a competitor that could quickly become a formidable foe, and Trump seems to get this.
Taking a post-election phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen shocked the buttoned-up diplomats at Foggy Bottom, but it also signaled to Xi that he can no longer do as he pleases in the region. That there’s a new sheriff in town.
As for our allies: Trump will need to leave his campaign attacks on Japan, America’s strongest and most reliable friend in the region, behind. Hopefully, his Trump Tower meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shortly after the election will, as quickly as possible, be followed up by a bilateral US-Japanese trade agreement to replace Obama’s ill-fated multinational Asian trade pact.
A Japan agreement will seal our alliance, and reassure supporters of trade.
“Multinational trade pacts don’t work,” a European diplomat told me recently. Trump agrees — he was making that argument from the beginning, in fact. Which is why he’s promising a bilateral pact with Britain’s Theresa May, who announced she was moving her country full speed ahead toward its break with the European Union last week. Such agreements could reshape world trade.
Closer to home, Trump would do well to bury the hatchet with another friend, Mexico, assuring it doesn’t turn into a foe.
Trump, as his Twitter account will attest, smiles at friends and hard-hits dissers. It’s not a bad mode of statecraft, were he to expand it: He should communicate quite clearly who are our allies and who aren’t.
Which one is Putin’s Russia? As an astute Muscovite observes, the Kremlin adored Presidents Bush and Obama when they were elected, only to hate them by the time they left office. The love affair with Trump “is already beginning to fade,” he said, predicting an ugly breakup soon.
Trump indicated on the campaign trail that (like Obama) he’d farm out to Russia some of our fights around the world. He’ll soon realize, likely, that Moscow’s animosity toward America is too deep for meaningful cooperation.
A self-proclaimed artist of the deal, Trump is fond of saying that unpredictability is strength. So it’s hard to predict whether our future summits will look more like Astana or Yalta. Only the latter will make America great again.