The emerging presidential doctrine: Don’t follow doctrine

As he confronted a series of challenges from the Middle East to Asia last week, President Donald Trump made certain that nothing was certain about his foreign policy. To the extent that a Trump Doctrine is emerging, it seems to be this: Don’t get roped in by doctrine.

In a week in which he hosted foreign heads of state and launched a cruise missile strike against Syria’s government, Trump dispensed with his own dogma and forced other world leaders to re-examine their assumptions about how the United States will lead in this new era. He demonstrated a highly improvisational approach that could inject a risky unpredictability into relations with antagonists, but also opened the door to a more traditional American engagement with the world that eases allies’ fears.

As a private citizen and candidate, Trump spent years arguing that Syria’s civil war was not America’s problem, that Russia should be a friend, and that China was an “enemy” whose leaders should not be invited to dinner. As president, Trump, in the space of just days, involved the United States more directly in the Syrian morass than ever before, opened a new rift with Russia, and invited China’s leader for a largely convivial, let’s-getalong dinner at his Florida estate.

In the process, Trump undercut critics who have portrayed him as a Manchurian candidate doing the bidding of President Vladimir Putin after the Kremlin intervened in last year’s election on his behalf. Given his unpredictability, none of this means that Trump has pivoted permanently in any of these areas. He hates to be boxed in, as he mused in the Rose Garden last week.

“I like to think of myself as a very flexible person,” he told reporters. “I don’t have to have one specific way.” He made clear he cherished unpredictability. “I don’t like to say where I’m going and what I’m doing,” he said.

That flexibility was a hallmark of his rise in real estate, and if critics preferred the word erratic, it did not bother Trump.

On Syria, Trump had mocked President Barack Obama for setting a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons and urged him not to launch a punitive strike against Syria after Assad crossed it in 2013. That attack, with a death toll of 1,400, dwarfed last week’s toll of 84.

Intentionally or not, Trump adopted language similar to that used by Obama and many other presidents in defining American priorities. While in the past Trump said the United States did not have a national interest in Syria, last week he said instability there was “threatening the United States and its allies.”

Until now, Trump has largely eschewed such language. Just three days earlier, he had hosted Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, and made no mention of the thousands of people the government has imprisoned in a political crackdown.

“What is striking to me is a subtle yet clear shift away from the rhetoric of pure American self-interest narrowly defined, as espoused by candidate Donald Trump,” said Robert Danin, a former Middle East negotiator who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “What has emerged is a new language of American leadership in the world that we have not heard before from President Trump.”