Kim summit, G-7 fiasco give Trump an historic week
Trump has his supporters, but our longtime allies need to know that others in Washington, D.C., and even some in the Trump administration don’t share the president’s worldview.
President Donald Trump’s summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore was a fascinating historic moment for which Trump deserves credit even if it’s unclear whether Pyongyang will ultimately abandon its nuclear weapons program, as the president asserts.
Nine months after Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man” amid quickly rising tensions, war with North Korea seems a distant risk. No less notable: Two groundbreaking meetings between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in have given their nations the sense that a rapprochement between the vastly different neighbors is possible at last.
It’s fair for Moon and others to credit Trump for this change, too. His bellicosity and unpredictability shook up the diplomatic status quo on the Korean peninsula. That sense of hope may abate, but for now the Koreas are far less worrisome than before.
Yet something else historic happened this month, something almost more unbelievable: Trump’s belligerence at the weekend gathering of Group of 7 leaders in Canada. Far from becoming more diplomatic and discreet after 17 months in the Oval Office, Trump is going the opposite direction — unfailingly saying what’s on his mind and seemingly always spoiling for a fight. Allies is now sadly a quaint word. Whether the issue was trade, foreign policy, immigration or the environment, Trump was eager to tell off the leaders of six nations who historically have been close U.S. allies and who sought some sign that Washington was still Washington — a trustworthy partner. “Never before,” a Bloomberg editorial opined, “has a U.S. president worked so hard to isolate his country from its friends.”
This is a stunning development. The generally bipartisan trade and foreign policies seen under Republican and Democratic presidents alike since World War II’s end have helped to dramatically reduce international conflicts and global poverty. But this break with the past has also seemed inevitable since Trump pushed out a secretary of state (Rex Tillerson) and a national security adviser (H.R. McMaster) who weren’t yes men.
Instead of grasping that the U.S. is a huge beneficiary of a stable world order marked by military, diplomatic and trade alliances, Trump sees a zerosum game that reimagines history as a parade of events in which a humiliated America is repeatedly taken advantage of by lesser nations. This view explains the incredible fact that a U.S. president finds Russia and North Korea more worthy and valuable allies than Canada, Britain and Germany.
Trump has his supporters, but our longtime allies need to know that others in Washington, D.C., and even some in the Trump administration don’t share the president’s worldview. They don’t want Trump to abdicate U.S. leadership of the free world. They want to preserve a U.S.-led international order. They fear protectionism, and they grasp that America and other strong democracies need to closely work together for many reasons — only starting with the need to contain expansionist China and mendacious Russia.
This might be the biggest history lesson of the week: To prevent the Trump wrecking ball from taking too big a toll, Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the bureaucrats in his administration itself need to recognize it’s the president of the United States who needs to be contained. His personal attacks and bluster now need to be followed by private, if not public, reassurances to targeted allies that this behavior should be seen as an aberration.
History will remember a handshake with a foe and harsh words Trump had for America’s “allies.”