Bilateral President Trump seeks deals one at a time
Merkel taking center stage, her bright red jacket standing out all the more from a sea of black business suits.
Trump was on the outskirts, unable to shove his way through the crowd to get to the center as he did with the Montenegrin prime minister at the NATO summit in May. Instead, he was in the corner, engaged in small talk with French President Emmanuel Macron.
It was a visual representation of Trump’s brand of diplomacy. While he loves to command a room, he prefers to work one-onone as opposed to groups.
If President George W. Bush was accused of being a unilateral president, too often going it alone on the world stage; and President Barack Obama was a multilateral president, seeking broad consensus on issues like climate change, trade and security —then Trump is a bilateral president, seeking to make deals one at a time.
That preference for bilateral relationships is based on personality, experience in business and a philosophy that puts narrow national interests ahead of broader global concerns like wealth inequality, refugee resettlement and climate change.
It’s a worldview Trump articulated in his speech in Warsaw on Thursday, where he extolled the virtues of national sovereignty, self-determination, strong borders and nations paying for their own defense.
While he pledged to defend NATO allies from attack — something he pointedly did not do at the NATO summit — he also expressed a deep skepticism of international bureaucracies.
Bureaucracies like the G-20. the group of 19 of the largest national economies (plus the European Union) founded in 1999 to address the world’s most pressing economic issues.
Trump now has three major foreign summits under his belt, plus two other smaller group meetings in Saudi Arabia and Poland. While he often seemed on the sidelines, aides say Trump “will not “lead from behind.”
Trump is driven by a “cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster and economic adviser Gary Cohn wrote in the Wall Street Journal after his first foreign trip.
A SHARED WORLDVIEW
That’s a view of the world largely shared by Putin. He, too, favors the one-on-one relationships to broader action.
“If we want to have a positive development through bilaterals and be able to resolve most acute