USA TODAY International Edition
WORLD WILL TAKE TRUMP LITERALLY
President Obama has learned the hard way how much words matter
It is a testament to Donald Trump’s political skills that his supporters were never deterred by his excesses and reversals. Trump explainers say the experts missed this moment because they demanded specificity and facts from the president- elect in a way his devotees did not. “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally,” Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic.
Though Trump supporters might possess a remarkable capacity to suspend disbelief, the rest of the world will not be so forgiving. As the commander in chief of the armed forces and guarantor of the post- war geopolitical order, every statement out of Trump’s mouth will be taken quite literally by both America’s allies and adversaries.
The foundation of deterrence is a clear and unequivocal understanding of what interests a nation will fight to defend. Vagueness in the realm of statecraft leads revisionist powers to test their parameters and, in so doing, risk overreaching and miscalculation. That’s how wars start.
OBAMA’S RED LINE
We don’t have to go diving into the deepest recesses of history to support the contention that U. S. presidents must say what they mean and mean what they say. President Obama drew a red line over the prospect of Syrian President Bashar Assad deploying chemical weapons against civilians, but Obama’s bluff was called and the world saw him blink. The following years were typified by aggressive nations testing Washington’s commitment to defending the status quo.
Not since World War II has a European power invaded and summarily annexed neighboring territory, but that’s what an emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin did in 2014. This brazen test of the Western powers that had guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity occurred only after Obama leaned on Moscow to save him from himself by negotiating the surrender of Assad’s chemical stockpiles. In the end, Assad maintained and still uses his chemical weapons.
Beijing, too, watched Obama back off his red line. When he took office, Obama dedicated himself to reorienting U. S. diplomatic and military posture toward the Asia Pacific. The “pivot to Asia” seemed forever on the horizon and, by 2014, was not yet manifest in the form of appreciably more U. S. naval hardware in the region. Assured of American timidity, China created territory from whole cloth in the contested South China Sea, turning manmade islands into fortresses dedicated to power projection.
Obama was generally prudent about the language he used when he knew that the world was listening. Yet the president’s moment of incaution made for a more dangerous world. What will be the effect of a far less circumspect president tripping over his words on a more regular basis?
TRUMP’S NATO WAFFLE
Trump has already given the West’s adversaries cause to test him. When The New York Times asked whether he’d come to the aid of Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania in the event of a Russian incursion, Trump refused to say and added: “We have many NATO members that aren’t paying their bills.” Yet NATO’s mutual defense provisions require such a military response, and in any case Estonia is one of five NATO member states that met its 2015 requirement to spend the equivalent of 2% of GDP on defense.
This is a signal to Russia’s expansionist president, who will surely take advantage of what he perceives to be new latitude.
China is frequently the subject of Trump’s tough talk, but no state would so benefit from America’s retreat from its financial obligations. The likely death of the 12- member Trans- Pacific Partnership may lead to regional trade pacts that privilege Chinese and Japanese markets and don’t impose U. S. standards on them. Anticipating Trump’s promised “trade war” with China, the Pacific is pivoting unto itself.
Trump also has said that South Korea and Japan might need their own nuclear weapons to protect themselves, because America can’t afford it anymore. It’s only smart for Asia to prepare for a post- American future.
In the cold, hard power logic of geopolitics, history hangs on the American president’s every word. Being coy or offhand about U. S. security priorities can lead to the kind of miscalculations that have the potential to devolve into cascading cycles of proportionately escalating retaliation. Absent cooler heads, those cycles can spiral out of control.
A president does not have the luxury of imprecise language. Trump’s fans may not take his words seriously, but America’s enemies most certainly will.