Donald Trump and foreign policy: The Short Game
Earlier this year, a former foreign policy staffer in the Obama administration, Derek Chollet, published a book assessing the outgoing President’s legacy on the international stage. In The Long Game, Chollet rejected the consensus Obama’s approach to global affairs had been a failure. The President’s humility about American power had allowed the US to regain global respect, enabling it to take a lead on problems like the Iran nuclear crisis. His natural tendency towards restraint had steered the US clear of situations it would have struggled to extricate itself from. Most importantly, Obama had taken a longer view, intervening and engaging with an eye on where the US and the world would be many decades after he had left office.
As well as offering a coherent defence of the rationale behind Obama’s foreign policy, Chollet contrasted the President’s strategy with that of his Republican critics. He noted how far GOP leaders had moved from an intrinsically conservative approach to global relations — the cautious internationalism of Dwight Eisenhower and George HW Bush — towards a maximalist view of American power sometimes associated with Democratic presidents like Harry Truman and John Kennedy. Chollet also reflected on how far Republicans had become infatuated with strongman leadership, noting how their obsession with toughness often led them into perverse praise of autocrats like Vladimir Putin.
During his campaign for the White House, President Obama’s successor Donald Trump took many of these themes and made them even more explicit. Rather than simply using Putin’s decisiveness to belittle Obama, the President-elect lavished praise upon the Russian President’s authoritarian leadership. He pledged he would respond to minor acts of aggression from nations like Iran with overwhelming force. And he indicated he would contravene international law by reviving torture as a means of interrogating terrorists and by grabbing the natural resources of sovereign nations in the Middle East.
Often however, it was difficult to discern that Trump was expanding on an already crude view of the world held by other Republicans. The GOP nominee’s frequent gaslighting on his Iraq War position and disdain for the idea of America’s exceptional role in global affairs led many commentators and voters to assume he would break from the kind of foreign policy embraced by George W Bush in his first term. In some cases, observers even drew a link between President Obama and his successor, arguing Trump’s positions on issues like NATO spending were an extension of a policy of retrenchment pursued by the Democrat during his eight years in office.
Since Trump’s election victory, much of the attention has been on how far the new President will go in abandoning his predecessor’s domestic priorities. What discussion of foreign policy there has been has tended to follow in the same vein, with commentators wondering whether Trump will uphold the Iran deal and the opening to Cuba. But such a debate has left many in the dark about the overall approach to foreign affairs his administration might pursue, and how he would tackle the global problems that inevitably surprise every US president. The result could be a much more dramatic and disconcerting shift than people are anticipating.
Trump’s choice of staffers for the National Security Council is an early indication that the meticulous and conservative approach to global strategy taken by President Obama will give way to a more belligerent, short-termist alternative. In addition to pushing absurd conspiracy theories, Trump’s choice for National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has demonstrated an obsessively narrow focus on Islamic extremism and flip-flopped chaotically on global flashpoints such as Turkey. Flynn’s deputy KT McFarland has meanwhile echoed the new President’s instinctively aggressive attitude to Iran and loudly praised President Putin as a means of doing down Obama.
There is a possibility those such as Flynn and McFarland will find themselves marginalised if much more heavyweight figures, such as Mitt Romney and General Jim Mattis, join the Trump administration in senior roles. Mattis has already moved quickly to press the new President to adopt more strategic (and moral) positions on terrorism. But these individuals could be relatively small in their number, and would have to contend with the sprawling ecosystem that exists around the President-elect. Other Cabinet members with access to Trump, most notably Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions, would offer a weight of experience but many of the same extreme ideas espoused by those at the new NSC.
And beyond administration personnel, there will be one force at the very heart of the government that risks knocking US foreign policy far off the restrained, long-term path President Obama has set it down. That force will be Donald Trump’s own personality. Listening to a New York Times interview with former Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio recently, I was struck by just how deeply ingrained some of the President-elect’s most dangerous traits are. The Darwinian view of mankind; the insatiable need to hit back at those who wrong him; the persistent refusal to stop and reflect on the suffering he may have caused other people: all could play out in deeply destructive ways in international politics.
The D’Antonio interview also shed light on another side of Trump that could create major problems for America in the world. As a celebrity property magnate, he has acted out an essentially childish view of what a billionaire is, from the wild interiors of Trump Tower to his made-for-the-tabloids romantic life. There are signs his view of the presidency comes from a similarly superficial place: witness his bizarre but seemingly sincere admiration for Harrison Ford’s president in Air Force 1. How will allies so carefully cultivated and adversaries so carefully managed by President Obama react to someone essentially play-acting in the White House?
Several nations may eventually learn to disregard elements of Trump’s outlandish behaviour, but the early signs suggest plenty are struggling to understand the psychological and ideological impulses to which the new President answers. Among those most deeply traumatised appears to be the UK, where politicians and journalists are taking refuge in comforting historical memories rather than looking hard at who Trump is as a person. The idea a meeting between the Queen and the President-elect is going to impress upon him the finer points of alliance-building and make him take the world seriously is laughable.
When President Obama departs office on 20th January, he will — as Chollet concedes in his book — be leaving behind a world facing deep problems. But all around the globe — in East Asia, in Latin America, in Africa, even in Europe — relationships have been strengthened. For every crisis that looks intractable, there are others that have been contained or resolved. Important seeds have been sown that a smart administration could harvest. Americans have not yet begun to appreciate the cost of walking away from the long game and into the world their reckless new leader inhabits.
Photograph: Noopy420
