Although U.S President Donald J. Trump’s recent summit with North Korean leader Kim Jon Un was less theatrically rewarding, as the Trump entourage flew back to Washington it was still clear that tensions with North Koreas were significantly lower. We can thank Trump’s sympathetic manner towards the dictator for the easing of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula. This “win” had me reflecting on the pros and cons of Trump’s foreign policy. Specifically, what is Trump getting right?
Pros
He has not started a war. This may be the most positive aspect of the Trump presidency. There are plenty of presidents who were more knowledgeable about world affairs but who made catastrophic mistakes or based decisions on a momentous misunderstanding of the facts on the ground, or what a friend of mine tells me the military literary calls ‘ground-truth.’ For example, in 1953, after an Islamic nationalist nationalized Iranian oil, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the CIA to topple the regime and replace it with one friendly to U.S. and British interests.
However, there is little evidence that Eisenhower seriously thought about what this intervention would do to the course of Iranian history or, indeed, to the future of U.S.-Iranian relations. In another instance, in 1961, John Kennedy put in motion an Eisenhower administration plan to land a CIA secretly trained Cuban rebel force on the island, with the intention to overthrow Fidel Castro. The WWII veteran, who one would think knew better, was lured by the concept of plausible deniability, meaning that the covert action would not be traced back to the White House. However, the resulting Bay of Pigs Disaster set in motion the events leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.
Trump’s selfish, narcissistic, transactional mentality may actually also shield him from wanting to play the American Hero. Take the example of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which today looks like a colossal mistake. The 9/11 attacks on America shifted Bush from a realist-leaning leader, who campaigned on a ‘humble’ foreign policy and a retraction of U.S. interventionism under Clinton, to one who cast himself in the mold of an American hero, writ large.
It was Bush’s personality factors, such as a need to project resolve and a faith-based view of human nature, that shaped his belief that the use of military force against Iraq was not only justified but also necessary. Contrast this personality with Trump’s, whose wheeler-dealer, opportunistic world-view is largely devoid of firm principles or deep convictions that he may feel needs defending.
Add to this, that there are some policy stances that Trump is right about, for example, on the levels that European nation states spend on their own defense. As a perceptive article in the journal Survival, written by Simon Duke, points out, ‘For all of the actual or potential Trump disruptions, he has put his finger on a real issue: the over-reliance of NATO allies on the U.S., even if the 2% deliberation is an unconstructive way of framing the problem.’
To date, the EU has avoided any serious appraisal of the transatlantic relationship and its own territorial defense. Thus, a positive of the Trump presidency may be that Europeans are finally coming to realize that they can no longer avoid this discussion and self-evaluation.
Cons
Although it is true that tensions in relation to the North Korean nuclear weapons program have declined, it is also true that it was Trump himself who escalated hostilities to stratospheric levels via his name-calling tweets and his September 2017 UN speech, in which he warned that the U.S. would ‘totally destroy North Korea’.
Add to this, Trump’s personal strategy to get Kim to agree to American demands, which emerges less out an arch realist diplomacy (you deal with the enemies as they are, not as you wish them to be) and more a true affinity for dictators, and the situation becomes even more problematic. In now a long line of instances in which the president indicated that, he believes a dictator over his own security services, Trump defended Kim over the death of American Otto Warmbier.
Moreover, although the goals of easing tensions and the de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula are both positive and significant, the reality is that Trump’s administration is too shallow and lacks the capacity to see such goals through to realization. Trump’s administration lacks the staff and Trump himself lacks the skill to hire the right people to enact these or any significant foreign policy goals.
As of 11 March 2019, the turnover rate of the president’s so-called ‘A Team’, in other words his senior level advisers, was 65%, while the turnover rate for Trump’s cabinet level officials was record-setting (13 cabinet departures to date, with 10 leaving in the second year). As an expert on the matter, Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, observes, ‘excessive turnover portends problems.’
On Balance
This weekend I saw the movie Vice with my sons. Although I think that it exaggerates Dick Cheney’s role in the decision to invade Iraq, the plot bolsters the argument that experienced and trusted politicians can make tragic mistakes and can lead America into war for private gain. Yet, on balance, the negatives of Trump’s foreign policy still outweigh the positives. Largely since we do not know how he will react to a 9/11 type world event and in the meantime he does not have a functioning staff to deal with foreign policy on a day-to-day basis.
Running a government requires skilled people working for the president. Trump’s shallow presidency is unable to retain qualified staff nor recruit them in great numbers, meaning the negatives outweigh the positives.