A weak president among strongmen poses risks to U.S.

For a long time in arguments about the perils posed by the Trump presidency, my watchword has been: Trump is weaker than you think. Too weak to pass legislation. Too weak to get his hacks appointed to Federal Reserve seats. Too weak to use the bully pulpit, or any instrument, to boost his approval ratings above roughly 42%.

But if Trump’s weakness makes him less of a threat to the constitutional order (such as it is) than some critics imagine, in foreign policy it’s a different matter. There, a weak and flailing chief executive can do as much damage as a ruthless and aggressive one.

Before he took office this was one of my major fears for Trump — that his erratic, feckless qualities would inspire ambitious foreign leaders to test him in ways that made Jimmy Carter’s presidency look like easy sailing.

As with my other major fears (domestic unrest on a late-1960s scale and a stock market plunge), the worst-case scenario did not initially materialize. Trump’s foreign policy filtered through a bodyguard of generals produced something that almost seemed strategic: near-victory over Islamic State, de-escalation in the Koreas, a reasonable focus on containing China. And the world under Trump was in certain respects more tranquil than the world of Barack Obama’s second term.

It isn’t lasting. Trump’s betrayal of the Syrian Kurds is a moral travesty, but the Kurds have been betrayed by America before. What distinguishes this fiasco is its utter thoughtlessness, its disconnect from any strategic purpose, the sheer obviousness with which Trump allowed himself to be rolled by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the inability of his advisers to salvage the situation before it led to war.

The blunder itself, the bluster and excuse-making afterward, our pretend-strongman president’s transparent admiration for the foreign tough guy — were all exactly what Trump’s campaign style led one to expect. So were the dead bodies, the refugees, the anger from allies, the glee from rivals. So was the message sent to those allies and rivals.

Trump became president because the smart people in charge of U.S. foreign policy failed in disastrous ways, and even after this past week his own failures haven’t nearly matched their body count.

But the comparative defense only holds up until it doesn’t. Maybe Erdogan’s war can be contained, but maybe there’s a regional conflict and a reconstituted ISIS downstream from this debacle — in which case Trump will have repeated the blunders of his predecessors, but with vastly less excuse.

And even if this particular crisis stabilizes, the decision-making approach that Trump used makes Kaiser Wilhelm look like a model of cool statesmanship, and its application in a crisis involving a real great power could be catastrophic.

Which points us to the central issue for Republican-leaning voters and Republican senators alike. Both groups have grown used to Trump, in part because the most alarmist predictions, mine included, did not accurately describe his first two years in office.

But those voters and legislators have to ask themselves, at the polls in 2020 or sooner in a Senate trial, what seems more likely to predict Trump’s governance going forward: The relatively restrained pattern of the McMaster-Mattis-Kelly period, or the unchecked impulses that just gave us death and betrayal and humiliation for no reason, none at all, save that our president is unfit for his job.