Erratic foreign policy shows President Trump unbound

WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is looking dangerously erratic — and that’s being charitable.

He threatens to bomb Iranian cultural sites, but aides say he still wants to negotiate with the mullahs in Tehran.

He’s announced several times that he’s withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, only to reverse himself and leave the troops in place.

He demands North Korea’s Kim Jong Un dismantle his nuclear weapons, then says it doesn’t matter that Kim continues to build more.

No wonder allies and adversaries alike can’t figure out what our red lines are.

Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general killed by a U.S. drone strike last week, had been plotting against American interests in the Middle East for decades, but no president gave the order to take him out until last week.

There were several versions of how and why Trump ordered Soleimani’s death. But the stories agreed on one thing: Trump was especially angry that an Iraqi militia apparently directed by Soleimani had staged violent protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

There’s an underlying consistency in Trump’s goals, even if his messages are contradictory and his methods chaotic.

He wants to withdraw U.S. troops from the Middle East — but only if he can portray the exit as a victory march.

He wants to make deals with America’s adversaries, including Iran and North Korea — but only if he can claim the deal was an unalloyed win for the United States.

He believes applying “maximum pressure” will force his adversaries to back down. So far, it hasn’t worked.

In his first months in office, Trump relied mostly on generals to guide him through the unfamiliar terrain of foreign policy: retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis as secretary of defense, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser and Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.

The so-called “axis of adults” managed to restrain Trump — convincing him not to withdraw from NATO, not to scrap trade pacts with South Korea and other countries, and at least for a while, not to tear up the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran — even though that had been one of Trump’s clearest campaign promises.

Unsurprisingly, Trump bridled under those restraints.

So in 2018, the president cut his shackles. He fired Tillerson, then McMaster. He pulled out of the Iran deal. He launched trade wars against China and Canada, among other countries. At year’s end, he said he was withdrawing U.S. troops immediately from Syria, an abrupt decision that prompted Mattis to resign.

Trump appointed successors to the generals more in tune with his instincts, including John Bolton as national security adviser.

But Bolton later resigned after he tangled with Trump over the North Korea negotiations and Trump’s desire to pull out of Syria.

The result is Trump Unbound.

In 2019, he sought dramatic deals to provide success stories for his 2020 reelection campaign: an ambitious trade agreement with China, another nuclear agreement with Iran and a deal with Taliban rebels in Afghanistan to allow U.S. forces to withdraw.

But the deals were harder to land than he expected.

He repeatedly promised a big trade pact with China was coming. It hasn’t happened; a modest, interim deal was announced in December.

His nuclear talks with North Korea are at an impasse. Last week, Kim Jong Un said he no longer felt bound by his self-imposed halt on testing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

And Trump spent much of 2019 seeking vainly for a way to open negotiations with Iran. But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stonily rebuffed every overture. “I do not consider Trump as a person worth exchanging any message with,” he said.

Now, with Iran’s missile attacks on two bases used by U.S. forces in Iraq, we are at risk of full-scale war with Iran.

Trump says he wants to deescalate the conflict with Tehran, and his record suggests his desire is genuine.

And what if Trump wins a second term?

Then the restraint on his actions imposed by voters would disappear. Trump could pursue the goals he’s believed in for decades: an end to multilateral trade agreements, withdrawal of U.S. troops from overseas, an exit from NATO — a modern version of isolationism.

That’s when we and the world will learn what Trump Unbound is really like.