If Donald Trump’s foreign policy is any less damaging than it appears, it’s only because he has set the bar so low. Such thoughts were hard to avoid as we viewed split screens yesterday of dozens of unarmed Gazans getting killed by Israeli security forces while Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Sheldon Adelson celebrated peace at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Of course, the consequences of bad foreign-policy decisions tend to reveal themselves months or years after the fact, so what Trump sows today we may not reap for many tomorrows. But how much he has sowed! Without looking at notes: he has withdrawn from trade agreements, from climate accords, and from the nuclear deal with Iran. He has bombed Syria, backed Saudi Arabia in a war with Yemen, and taunted Russia over its missile capability. And that is leaving out countless less-noticed actions like calling for regime change in places like Venezuela. We’re just getting started on the consequences. Just how bad is it, then?
Before we get to the bad stuff, we should at least try to make a case, however far-fetched, for why Trump’s foreign policy could be shrewder than it seems, animated by a grand vision and plan. So let’s give it a whirl.
First, every president deserves a certain amount of leniency concerning foreign policy, which tends to be a lineup of bad choices. While a general set of principles and rules can undergird one’s approach to it, summed up in words like “globalist” or “nationalist,” “neoconservative” or “non-interventionist,” every day brings unique dilemmas for which no formula offers easy answers. Even a resolute non-interventionist would have qualms about standing aside while Rwanda’s Hutus massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, especially given the low cost of stepping in. At the same time, even a humanitarian hawk must know there will always be inconvenient consequences from such a move. U.S. intervention in Libya, at the moment it happened, was driven heavily by a gut impulse to prevent atrocities against protesters, but the long-term effects were immense: regime change, chaos in the country, mass migration from Africa to Europe, and determination by North Korea to race toward nuclear arms.
Second, to the disadvantage of any leader in the public eye, we also have a much easier time assigning foreign-policy blame than foreign-policy credit, for good reason. One bad actor can easily make a giant mess, while many good actors can only with difficulty create order. A country managing foreign affairs is often like a golden retriever playing in a dog run. It can spread a lot of trouble or find a safe place for itself, but it can’t exert much control over its companions. For that reason, we can fairly easily blame George W. Bush for most of the disasters that befell Iraq after we invaded in 2003. Bush had the single-handed power to start that war or prevent it. But how much do we credit Ronald Reagan for the end of communism in Eastern Europe? Or Jimmy Carter for Egyptian-Israeli peace? Both deserve credit, for sure, but success was possible only because of a lucky collection of players. It’s therefore easy to point to Trump’s failures and dismiss any of his successes.
Third, if I wanted to persuade myself that Donald Trump was, in fact, a foreign-policy miracle worker rather than a joker, I’d put forth the Double-Nobel-Prize theory. Trump wins his first Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace on the Korean peninsula. This becomes possible because Trump chose to break an impasse by upending the table. Since relations with North Korea have ranged between murderous and icy for the past 60-plus years, Trump ratcheted up the threats and outdid Kim Jong Un in bellicosity, causing North Korea to blink. Trump wins his second Nobel by listening to Israel and Saudi Arabia and withdrawing from the nuclear proliferation deal with Iran and imposing sanctions so tough that Tehran’s influence in the region shrinks drastically. The Palestinians, with a weaker negotiating position, accept a non-generous but unambiguous two-state solution, at which point diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and several other countries in the region are established.
Look, I didn’t say that my persuasion would be effective.
We can grant that foreign policy, even when it’s “good,” rarely looks pretty, and we can admit that no president after 1945 ever avoided foreign-policy disasters. We can even grant that Trump might have some yet-to-be-determined bright spots in his foreign-policy tenure. But it can’t leave us much consoled. Trump has been doubling down on much of what he seemed to be rebelling against when running for office. Worse, he often seems confused about his own convictions, when he bothers to study them at all, resulting in policy incoherence like demanding the rapid withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria one minute, and ordering fresh bombing runs the next.
The prospect of peace on the Korean peninsula is cheering—exhilarating, even—but as a vindication of Trumpian policy it’s poor evidence. Kim’s conciliatory style has almost certainly come about because he now has a robust set of nukes, the world’s strongest insurance against regime change, and South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, appears to be an exceptional diplomat and statesmen. We’re here despite Trump’s insults of Kim, not because of them. But even if we assume that Trump’s aggression in fact was the key to breaking the deadlock, the lesson would still be limited. Sometimes, kicking your dishwasher winds up fixing it. But it’s not the norm. And that’s something you find out fast if you go around kicking a lot of dishwashers. You could say the Trump Doctrine is to kick dishwashers.
Effective foreign policy happens when alliances are strong and respect is high. When George H.W. Bush led a war (for better or worse) against Iraq after it had invaded Kuwait, he had the backing of the United Nations and an alliance with nearly every country in the region. Trump instead has taken a hostile stance toward the United Nations and our European allies in favor of a tight relationship with Israel’s right wing and the Saudi royal family. Far from bending the world to our will, we’re hastening the arrival of a world order that sidelines the United States or even seeks to contain it. (At some point, you exceed your war allowance.)
Saudi Arabia and Israel are pleased that we have exited the nuclear deal with Iran, but the rest of the world is not, and the move hurts us for the obvious reasons: it signals that U.S. agreements cannot be taken seriously, and it cranks up tensions with Iran, making a conflagration likelier. If Trump is hearing arguments that Israeli-Palestinian peace will blossom in the absence of Iranian sabotage, then the tune is familiar. Some of us recall similar assurances about Saddam Hussein. “The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad,” promised Paul Wolfowitz, The Wall Street Journal, and countless other voices on the right. Fifteen years down the road, some of us are hesitant to add a new stop in Tehran. The just-one-more-war-and-we’ve-got-this approach hasn’t proven ideal.
Good foreign policy can be secretive, since public scrutiny would kill off many promising diplomatic initiatives. But it cannot be built on lies. The George W. Bush administration claimed that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium and that it knew where Saddam’s chemical weapons were stored. Both of these things were flatly untrue, and it’s impossible to believe that the White House presented these falsehoods in good faith. In the present, Donald Trump’s White House has been advancing similarly spurious claims about Iran. Last week, it released a statement claiming that Iran “has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program” and then had to change “has” to “had.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been hyping the threat of Iranian nuclear weaponry for years and seems to have such a casual relationship with the truth that even this White House has been forced to call him out on his claims. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, meanwhile, has been peddling falsehoods about the role his country has been playing in the war in Yemen. If you and your allies traffic in deception, how likely is it that your true aims would find support with the public?
We can speculate about how Trump thinks (is he just a sucker for flatterers, for instance?), but at this point it’s enough to see to how he acts. Those in his first White House who supported the deal with Iran have been steadily purged. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is gone. So is former national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Defense Secretary James Mattis seems to be getting sidelined. The new cast of characters gets worse and worse. Gina Haspel, nominated to head up the C.I.A. despite a record of overseeing and covering up torture, seems all too qualified to provide the White House with bad intelligence based on prisoner desperation. We’ve seen this sort of thing before. We know where it got us.
Could Trump surprise us? We’ve allowed ourselves to hope before. A double Nobel Peace Prize would be a very fine achievement, indeed, and we can hope Trump gets to claim it. It’s not impossible. History can offer amazing twists. But rarely are they in favor of peace. As Trump’s foreign policy comes more and more sharply into view, it seems increasingly bound to go where others recently went. How bad, then, is Trump’s foreign policy? Most of us thought that George W. Bush would long remain unthreatened as the worst president in modern memory. But he must be getting nervous.
