U.S. leadership void never more obvious

Khashoggi, INF responses highlight Trump deficits

“It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president to handle, isn't it? I mean, who gives a s--t if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25 in comparison to something like this?” So said John F. Kennedy in 1961 — to, of all people, Richard Nixon — after Kennedy had just beheld the debacle at the Bay of Pigs. He was scarred by disaster, and needed advice. During the Cuban missile crisis a year later, Kennedy would call Dwight Eisenhower, his predecessor, for counsel. (So unique and lonely is a sitting president's role that even in private conversation, Kennedy referred to Ike as “General,” while Eisenhower referred to JFK, a man young enough to be his son, as “Mr. President.”) Each chief executive comes to office believing what he said in parking lots or high school gyms across the country. But on his first day, he's sobered by the realization that he has the fate of billions of human beings in his hands at every minute of every hour of every day. All, that is, except Donald Trump. This president seems untouched by any knowledge about foreign affairs and is apparently uneducable on the subject. He prefers to agitate crowds with grandiose promises peppered with insult comedy, rather than to buckle down and understand the gravity of the issues before him. Trump now faces two challenges. One carries long-term implications for the future of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East; the other has potentially apocalyptic significance not only for the future of NATO and the peace of Europe, but also for the stability of nuclear deterrence among the United States, Russia and China. The first is the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi security forces. Rather than hunker down and confer with advisers, Trump has outsourced the situation to that well-known Mideast expert Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and a walking tangle of Saudi ethical conflicts. When first confronted by the possibility that the Saudis had cut Khashoggi to pieces, the U.S. president said he wasn't about to endanger billions of dollars of defense purchases for some writer, even if he was a U.S. resident. In the space of a week, Trump has claimed that $110 billion is at stake along with 500,000 U.S. jobs. Wait, 600,000 jobs. Hold on, 1 million jobs. Trump is determined to win what he thinks is purely a round of bad press by roiling his base with threats of mythical job losses. And then there is the IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces Treaty, negotiated with heroic commitment by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to lead the world out of the Cold War. This treaty essentially denuclearized entire swaths of Europe. More important, it removed the class of weapons most likely to lead to a general nuclear war because of their range and flight times to every capital on the continent — including Moscow. Now Trump says he'll withdraw. The Russians are clearly in violation of the INF treaty. They are trying to intimidate the Europeans by testing weapons at prohibited ranges. But this is a political provocation aimed at NATO, not a change in the strategic balance of power, and the right answer is to coordinate with our allies and then drag the Russians back to the table. (This is called “leadership.”) There is no evidence that this move is the result of discussion with arms control experts, or with the Senate. Instead, as the president has reminded us, he knows more about these issues than anyone else, including the risible claim that he knows even more about war than Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Kennedy and his successors were intelligent men who knew when to ask for advice and how to listen when it was given. Trump, among his many firsts, is now the first to approach the midpoint of his first term completely unchanged by the terrifying responsibilities of which he seems only dimly aware. There is still time for him to learn to listen, hopefully before he makes an error that holding a rally cannot fix.

Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School, is the author of “The Death of Expertise.” The views expressed here are solely his own.