Trump’s new world order: America first — and him, too

Even critics of President Donald Trump, like me, breathed sighs of cautious relief after he managed to meet with leaders of the G-7 and North Korea without starting World War III.

Yet, in characteristic fashion, even that low bar was not enough for Trump. “(E)verybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” and “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he tweeted in perhaps his most upbeat message since declaring “I alone can fix it” during his campaign.

North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat? Ah, how I wish that were true. At least, we’re talking and that’s a good thing, regardless of your political affiliation. Talking is better than fighting, even with a cutthroat dictatorial regime like Kim Jong Un’s North Korea.

Fortunately, he was less grandiose in a news conference following the talks. “Today is the beginning of an arduous process,” he said. “Our eyes are wide open.”

I hope so. As House speaker Paul Ryan reminded us during Trump’s summit with Kim, “We must always be clear that we are dealing with a brutal regime with a long history of deceit.”

But what’s Trump’s long game? His foreign policy fits under the umbrella of his “America First” slogan, according to the White House and his many speeches, “putting the interests and security of the American people first.”

But, like his freewheeling presidential campaign, he is not easily categorized as a traditional Republican or even a traditional conservative. His approach of getting involved but not too involved in overseas con- flicts reopens old debates between the Republican Party’s internationalist and isolationist wings that raged between World War I and the early Cold War.

Unbound by a firm ideology, he is free to be unpredictable.

His provocative push for new tariffs — with their risk of trade wars — is only the beginning of his developing vision. Yet, as we have seen, he likes to leave room to shift gears and change his mind. North Korea, China’s currency manipulation, Syrian civil war intervention and DACA are a few examples.

The result, whether by accident or design, is what I call Trump’s new world order. Old allies, like G-7, have become his diplomatic sparring partners and, if he succeeds, old adversaries like Russia and North Korea become new pals.

Some events, like the breakthrough with North Korea that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo secretly began as CIA director, were secretly developed for months. Trump’s decision to make his first face-to-face meeting with interpreters in the room but no staff was similar to President Ronald Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a lake house in Geneva in 1985. It also fits Trump’s style to meet for informal talks one-on-one before turning the project over to the professional diplomats to iron out the details, apparently relieving him from the chore of having to do more homework.

This meeting with Kim was only the beginning of the negotiations, Team Trump’s spokespeople point out. I wish him luck for the sake of world peace, but he still has a long way to go before we can see whether his new order, now under construction, is any better than the old one.

Clarence Page is a Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial writer. He can be reached at cpage@chicagotribune.com.