‘America first’? So far, Trump’s
foreign policy mostly puts America last.
In year one, six facets of the
president’s worldview have shown the limits of his global approach.
By Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky December 27
It helps to think of President Trump
not as a foreign policy president, but as a recently minted politician trying
to play one on TV. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Shutterstock)
Concluding the national security
strategy address that he delivered earlier this month, President Trump
described his foreign policy aim “to celebrate American greatness as a shining
example to the world.”
Not exactly.
At the end of his first year in office, the president’s
approach to foreign affairs doesn’t fit the platitude-ridden narrative laid out
in that speech as much as it lines up with six key components that define the
Trumpian way abroad: America first, politics over policy, ego, deconstruction,
risk aversion and dictators over democrats. They don’t make a neatly defined
doctrine, but these components have a certain cohesion — at least in Trump’s
mind — that hints at how he’ll operate for the rest of his tenure.
America first
The point of departure for any effort to decode Trump’s
foreign policy is an understanding of what he means by “America first” — less a
set of rules and more a state of mind. To the president, America has been
getting taken to the cleaners for years via “disastrous trade deals,”
freeloading allies and commitments made by Beltway establishment that have
dragged America into endless, costly wars and nation-building efforts that have
drained American prosperity in the dog-eat-dog world darkly described in his
national security speech. Trump’s view of the world is much like his view of
his business career — a cruel zero-sum game where the weak are to be taken
advantage of and only the strong emerge as the real winners. These are views
he’s held all his life; not an ideological construct imposed on a credulous
first-time officeholder by a manipulative Stephen Bannon. America first is a
variant of Trump first, which is why it subordinates the United States’s
national interest to a solipsistic worldview uniquely ill-suited to dealing
with the complicated challenges we face.
Politics over policy
It helps to think of Trump not as a foreign policy
president, but as a recently minted politician trying to play one on TV. His
approach to foreign policy is guided by his need to constantly assuage the
constituency that elected him, not necessarily by actions that serve the
long-term strategic interests of those constituents or U.S. allies. His
ideological Svengali, Bannon, no longer inhabits the White House, but his
whiteboard to-do list — with items ranging from “Build the border wall and
eventually make Mexico” pay for it, to move the U.S. Embassy from “Tel Aviv to
Jerusalem” — always beckons.
In February, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told Politico that
“at one point” Trump and his team “were ready to move the Embassy” to Jerusalem
“at 12:01 on January 20th” — a move that would have been capricious then and
remained so when it was announced this month, despite warnings from advisers.
Trump’s immediate withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership; his capricious
exit from the Paris climate accord; and the various iterations on his ban on
travelers from several Muslim-majority countries are valuable as gestures to
his base, but mostly worthless as policy. The president’s campaign rhetoric and
his determination to be the un-Obama have so far won out, and as the 2018
midterms and the 2020 presidential election approach, expect Trump’s political
impulses to increasingly dominate governance — at home and abroad.
Presidential ego
Tony Schwarz, who co-wrote “The Art of the Deal,” wrote this
year that Trump’s “sense of self-worth is forever at risk.” The president is
driven by deep insecurities and an inordinate need for adulation and
one-upmanship, on display in his speech accepting the GOP presidential
nomination, when he declared “I alone can fix” what ails the American system.
It was also reflected in his national security address, when he said: “For many
years, our citizens watched as Washington politicians presided over one
disappointment after another.” He fancies himself the greatest negotiator in
the world, but allies and adversaries alike have cracked the code: If you
flatter and fete Trump — as the Saudis and Israelis did in his first trip
abroad, and as the Japanese and Chinese did during the president’s Asia trip —
he is pliable. Witness his failure to push the Saudis on their atrocious human
rights record and military campaign in Yemen, to confront Israel on its
unhelpful settlement activity, and to press China and Japan on trade.
Trump the deconstructionist
Far from a builder, so far Trump has proved more adept at
condemnation and demolition, spending a lot of his time trying to tear down
what was built by his predecessors — particularly President Barack Obama —
without offering viable alternatives to take their place. A prime example is
the Iran nuclear agreement, which has its flaws, but so far has been working
and is far better than no deal at all. Trump provides no logic or specifics to
back up his claim that the Iran deal is “incomprehensibly bad” and as seasoned
diplomats have noted, the president isn’t much of a dealmaker. If it weren’t
for cooler heads such as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson, Trump may already have abandoned the deal (and still could down
the road), leaving Iran to go full-speed ahead with its nuclear ambitions and
isolating the United States from the other parties to the agreement.
Risk aversion
It’s ironic that, for a president who desperately wants to
appear tough and muscular, Trump is as cautious and risk-averse as his
predecessor when it comes to leveraging American military power. Though his
administration just announced the sale of long-denied “lethal” weapons to
Ukraine, in defiance of Russia, in general, on these issues, Trump isn’t the
un-Obama, he’s Obama redux. For all of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric toward North
Korea — “fire and fury,” “locked and loaded” and so on — he has not yet taken
military action; he ordered a small missile strike after Syrian President
Bashar al Assad’s use of chemical weapons (even though, he, like Obama, had far
more robust options); and he mostly adopted Obama’s playbook for combating the
Islamic State. With Trump’s use of military force, far more yellow and red
lights have been flashing than green. The world remains a turbulent and
unpredictable place, but Trump seems to have accepted the military’s view, at
least for now, that projecting American force is an instrument to be used
carefully in pursuit of realistic goals. Let’s hope that remains the case with
North Korea — one scenario where Trump’s ego, his carelessness, domestic
politics and Kim Jong Un’s recklessness could combine to create a catastrophe.
Dictators over democrats
The administration’s new national security strategy brief
brands China and Russia as “competitors” and promises more aggressive push back
to their efforts to upend the global status quo. Maybe the president has had an
epiphany about America’s two main geopolitical rivals, but his rhetorical
flexing is belied by his embrace of the dictators, President Xi Jinping and
President Vladimir Putin, who rule these two countries. It looks increasingly
likely that he’ll soon lower the trade boom on China by imposing anti-dumping
penalties and retaliating against Chinese theft of intellectual property, but
he continues to give Russia a pass. Trump’s favoring of dictators is evidenced
by the way he has sucked up to autocrats and human rights abusers in Egypt,
Turkey, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. All while verbally roughing up
democratic leaders, including allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
whose refugee policy he described as a “catastrophic mistake” and South Korean
President Moon Jae-in, whom he accused of “appeasement” in a Twitter outburst.
Trump deserves credit for dealing a death blow to the
Islamic State’s territorial conquests in Syria and Iraq — his only laudable
national security achievement to date. But the yardstick for judging Trump’s
foreign policy isn’t whether his administration solves the world’s toughest
problems. The question is whether his approach to foreign policy can manage the
challenges the United States cannot resolve in a way that strengthens our
interests while avoiding international crises, such as an escalation of
conflict with Iran or, particularly, North Korea, that might irreparably harm
those interests. A year in, the record does not inspire confidence. His
worldview isn’t one that carefully calibrates means and ends or clearly defines
true U.S. national interests and makes them a priority. Instead, it is one that
will likely end up putting America last, not first, on a range of issues
critical to its long-term prosperity and security.
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