Travel ban tool could change up foreign policy

WASHINGTON — A little-noticed provision in President Donald Trump’s revised restrictions on entry into the country could remake how the U.S. conducts foreign policy, creating leverage for a president who promised to bring his hard-nosed deal-making mind-set to American diplomacy.

In his new directive, Trump ordered a global review to determine whether citizens from additional countries should be blocked from coming to the U.S. as well. He asked the Departments of State and Homeland Security, along with intelligence agencies, to determine which countries come up short on cooperating with U.S. immigration officials who are vetting travelers who want to enter the country.

“We’re looking at an entire — at the rest of the entire world and all of the procedures that we use to address all countries,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Monday.

The review gives Trump, who spent his adult life working out real estate transactions, the opportunity to demand concessions from more than 190 countries. At stake is the ability of their citizens and nationals to travel to the United States.

For decades, the U.S. has welcomed a relatively free flow of travelers on the assumption that when people visit, they spend money, invest and learn about American culture and values and are able to take those impressions back to their home countries.

Negotiating over travel restrictions is risky, warned Stewart Baker, the former head of policy at Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration.

“We have leverage, but it is not leverage you really would want to use in a real way,” Baker said, adding that countries could begin blocking the entry of U.S. citizens. “It is like a nuclear exchange, and nobody comes off better in a nuclear exchange — everyone is weakened,” he said.

The Trump administration has already shown signs of being willing to horse-trade.

In exchange for excluding Iraq from the new travel restrictions, for example, the Trump administration persuaded officials there to accept Iraqi citizens deported from the United States, a demand U.S. diplomats have fruitlessly been making for years.