TrumpWorld: January 2018
By David A. Andelman
January 20, 2018. One year into the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Welcome to TrumpWorld and an entirely new global landscape. The tectonic plates have begun to shift as the Axis of the Strong — Russia, Syria, North Korea, China and the United States — has replaced NATO as the principal guarantee of American security since so many NATO nations were “totally infected with Islamist extremists ready to kill law-abiding Christians.”
In August 2016, 26 percent more Americans thought Hillary Clinton would be more adept at handling foreign policy than Trump, so the thin-skinned new President wanted to make his mark straight out of the gate, to show skeptics that he did know how to handle the world.
He began with what he called a “brilliant money-saving move.” After examining the costs of deploying large numbers of American forces in parts of the world where they “are facing down no enemies of ours,” and where local governments “need to pay their share,” his first move was to withdraw all American forces from Korea (“there hasn’t been a shooting war there in 65 years and besides, Kim Jong Un endorsed me for President”). North Korea promptly abrogated the armistice that ended the Korean War, offering to “negotiate a real peace treaty,” which President Trump promptly agreed was a “great idea — I can get a better document than they got back at Panmunjowl or however you say it.” North Korean forces immediately occupied the demilitarized zone, bringing up long-rang artillery that were now less than 30 miles from the heart of Seoul, or well within range of its 170 mm Koksan artillery shell. With our pullout, Japan promptly revoked its signature of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and embarked on a major nuclear weapons program.
China, no longer seeing any real obstacle to its expansion into the South China Sea, immediately cemented its occupation of a host of islands and atolls, entry points to vast sub-sea oil resources. With the Republican-controlled Senate still refusing to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Trump administration ditching the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade Pact, which the President pointed out, “will win us a lot of points in Beijing,” the Philippines saw little point in confronting China’s expansionist ambitions.
Still, for President Trump, Asia was little more than an afterthought. His main concerns were with “those Moslem terrorists.” Hardly surprising, since the day of his inaugural, a suicide bomber — a French citizen of Somali origin — detonated his vest in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan. Trump’s first executive order, when he’d moved into the Oval Office after the 25 inaugural balls the previous night (“double the number, double the size of any previous inaugural in history”) was to ban all Moslems from entering America. This quickly became complicated. Without no visa requirements for any of the 38 visa waiver countries, there was little means of policing this. So his first executive order was to annul the Visa Waiver Program since most of these countries (especially France and Germany) were “petrie dishes of radical Islamists.” Effective immediately, all entrants to the United States from these petrie dish nations, or PDNs as they quickly became known, would need to undergo “extreme vetting.” Huge lines snaked out the doors and down the sidewalks at U.S. consulates across Europe, not to mention Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Chile. Business travel ground to a near-halt. At Disneyworld and Epcot, there were immediate layoffs of 25,000 workers (a third of the workforce) as tourism began to dry up, while hotels and restaurants catering to tourists from New York to Los Angeles began laying off workers in droves.
The end of the Visa Waiver Program was part and parcel of a general TrumpWorld withdrawal from international commitments. “Fortress America, America First” the President had proudly proclaimed in his Inaugural Address, with little apparent understanding of the origins of either term. The first test was the Trump Administration’s list of NATO member countries that were underpaying their commitment into the organization — among them, the tiny but strategic Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. So, when Russian forces moved three miles into each of these countries, and each invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty that holds “an attack on one nation is an attack on all,” President Trump observed that “all” really referred only to those countries that had paid up. American forces were ordered not to move. President Putin, meanwhile, congratulated President Trump on his good sense and wise understanding of global realities, and promptly warned West European NATO members that any action on their part would mean an immediate end to all natural gas and oil shipments to their nations just as blasts of chilled winter air swept across the continent.
President Putin, for his part, seized on the preoccupation and good will in Washington as a rare opportunity to double-down on his support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Since the United States does not want to depose any more dictators with results similar to the chaos that followed the end of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the Trump Administration jumped in full-force, maintaining the aircraft carrier group Harry S. Truman in the eastern Mediterranean, while moving the John C. Stennis carrier group from the South China Sea where it no longer had any real mission, to the Persian Gulf. All these moves were part of an effort to support the Russian-backed Assad regime which was battling “jihadists and other forces of evil,” as President Trump observed in his order to the military in a meeting in the White House Situation Room.
Such deployments were also important with the repudiation of the Iran nuclear accord (“we can certainly negotiate a much bigger, better agreement if I’m negotiating it,” President Trump observed in his Inaugural address) and the refusal of the ayatollahs even to consider any new talks. Instead, nuclear monitors reported quickly that Iran had de-mothballed more than 14,000 centrifuges including more than 200 second generation IR-2M centrifuges that in six months had produced enough highly enriched material for a half dozen nuclear weapons. No weapon had yet been built, Israeli and American intelligence concluded, but Iran was barely six months away from testing its first device. With such a timetable, Saudi Arabia began its own preparations to receive its first nuclear device from its allies in Islamabad, while Egypt and the United Arab Emirates were deeply into discussions with North Korea about buying nuclear weapons for large quantities of hard currency.
As for the war on terror, particularly ISIS, that wasn’t going all that well either. President Trump quickly made good on his campaign promises to “destroy them quickly and decisively” — dispatching 90,000 troops that had been withdrawn from Europe (63,00) and South Korea (28,000). But at the same time, the entire 34-country Islamic Nations Coalition had withdrawn their forces, with the result that the total numer of counter-jihadis operating in the Mesopotamian region had dropped from Obama-era levels. At the same time, Iran had shifted its counter-ISIS initiative toward the goal of “protecting” friendly Shiite populations in southern Iraq — a thinly-veiled stratagem of seizing control over the lucrative Iraqi oil fields there. Not surprisingly, ISIS fighters, newly energized and with little to fear from a Russian-backed Syrian government preoccupied with other moderate rebel forces, had re-taken all ground lost in the previous two years and was pushing toward the Persian Gulf in a newly-energized effort to build the caliphate that had so nearly been snatched from its grasp.
Frustrated, President Trump exploded in the White House Situation Room, according to one appalled witness, “why don’t we just nuke ‘em? We’ve got all these damned nuclear warheads just sitting there for the last 70 years, only used twice in history, and they won that war for us, didn’t they? I’ve got the codes, I can just push the button and it’d all be over.” He then stalked from the room as his entire national security apparatus sat in stunned silence.
Meanwhile, the long-promised wall across America’s southern border was halfway to completion — a 400-foot tall behemoth that would be “the longest, highest, thickest barrier in the world.” The United States was footing the bill itself since the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto had refused to provide a single peso for the project. Still, as soon as President Trump laid the cornerstone, the Mexican government promptly banned all exports of auto parts and manufactured goods to the United States, President Nieto observing, “if they don’t want our people, they can’t want what our people produce.” In the United States, assembly lines in Flint and Raleigh began shutting down since they were unable to source many parts necessary to assemble new Fords and Chryslers.
The only shares on U.S. stock exchanges that were doing especially well were oil company stocks, many of the major integrated firms surging 200 to 300 percent as oil prices surged four-fold from $40 a barrel before the November 2018 elections to $165 this January. As for the rest, the Dow and the S&P 500 averages had halved in the past year — plunging a new leg down each time another crisis hit: North Korea and the DMZ, Russia and the Baltics, Iran’s nuclear weapons program, ISIS forces nearing the Persian Gulf. But as President Trump observed, when asked about this market meltdown in a CNBC interview, “I told everyone who had a 401(k) that they hadda get outa equities, just like I did.”
There was broad fear among investors and top business executives alike, though, that this was only the first of many shocks to come. To protect American workers, the United States had quickly withdrawn from the World Trade Organization, repudiating vast swaths of mutually-low tariffs from China to Europe with the expectation of a Trump-led more muscular series of negotiations to re-arrange the tariff landscape in America’s favor. But things hadn’t worked out exactly as planned. With post-Brexit Britain in the process of renegotiating its own trade deals with much of the world, and with the United States having repudiated TPP in Asia, NAFTA in North America and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe, American manufacturers found themselves largely shut out of foreign markets. At the same time, the huge surge in oil prices coupled with tariff walls rising against American goods sent the dollar plunging in value, more than doubling the costs of imports from low-wage areas of the world, while American manufacturers struggled to raise their own production. The result was a surge in inflation from 1 percent in June 2016 to 18 percent today. Suddenly the value of savings began to plummet at the same unemployment was tripling from 5 percent to 15 percent. In some regions, a quarter of the American work force was out in the streets, and historians began revisiting the time of the worldwide depression touched off by the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs of 1930.
The calls for impeachment began shortly before the first year of the Trump Administration had ended. But few could find any substantial grounds. Three more long years yawned ahead, beyond the abyss.
Hopefully, of course, this is a fairy tale. But sadly it is based on fact — on off-hand comments, careless tweets and blustery interviews. One can only hope that it remains simply a half-told tale filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.
David A. Andelman, editor emeritus of World Policy Journal and member of the board of contributors of USA Today, is a former correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Paris. He is the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today and with the Count de Marenches, The Fourth World War: Diplomacy and Espionage in the Age of Terrorism. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAndelman.