by David Frum
“You have to think about it this way: We are in a trade war. We have been for decades.” So said Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, on CNBC on March 31, 2017.23 Secretary Ross did not specify America’s enemies in that war, but his frequent coauthor Peter Navarro—appointed by President Trump to head a newly created “National Trade Council”—identified Germany as one of them. “Germany is one of the most difficult trade deficits that we’re going to have to deal with but we’re thinking long and hard about that,” said Navarro in a March 6, 2017, speech.24
Trump’s diplomacy reserved its smiles for nondemocracies that offered commercial opportunities, not only in the Persian Gulf and the Philippines, but even in the case of as bad an actor as Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey, also home to a major Trump-branded project in Istanbul. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey on July 15, 2017, the one-year anniversary of an attempted coup that the Erdoğan regime had used as an excuse for mass roundups of political opponents, and especially journalists. In April 2017, a fraud-stained referendum had approved constitutional amendments that would empower Erdoğan to rule for life. Yet Tillerson had this to say at Erdoğan’s self-honoring anniversary ceremony:
We’re all here in Istanbul at a momentous time. Nearly a year ago, the Turkish people—brave men and women—stood up against coup plotters and defended their democracy.25
New friendships sought among dictatorships; old friendships burned among democracies. That was the product of “thinking long and hard.”
The key element of this long and hard thought: a new refusal by the Trump administration to respect the European Union’s 2007 treaty agreement to adopt a common external trade policy. In consequence, EU member nations no longer field their own trade negotiators—a fact that President Trump steadfastly refused to acknowledge. “The negotiators for Germany have done a far better job than the negotiators for the United States,” Trump said at a March 18, 2017, joint press conference in Washington. “But hopefully we can even it out.”26 Merkel reminded him at that same press conference: “The European Union is negotiating those agreements for all of the member states.”27
Trump often revealed ignorance of basic facts about the international order, but something more than ignorance was at work here. In his March speech, Navarro had explicitly cited Germany’s EU treaty commitments as a flimsy excuse the United States would ignore under President Trump. “I think that it would be useful to have candid discussions with Germany about ways that we could possibly get that deficit reduced outside the boundaries and restrictions that they claim that they are under” (my italics).
President Trump returned to the theme on Twitter on May 30, 2017, writing, “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change.”28 By then, though, something else had changed too. At a major speech in Munich on May 28, 2017, ten days after her first bilateral meeting with Trump, Merkel had brought down the curtain on an epoch in US-Germany relations. Speaking in her characteristically careful style, the chancellor delivered a warning to Germans and Americans alike:
The times when we could completely rely on others are, to an extent, over. I experienced that in the last few days, and therefore I can only say that we Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands, of course in friendship with the United States and in friendship with Great Britain and as good neighbors wherever it is possible, also with Russia and also with all the other countries. But we need to know that we have to fight for our own future and destiny as Europeans.29
This is precisely what Trump rejected. Past American presidents heralded a more united Europe as a counterweight to the Soviet Union and then Russia. A united Europe would be a superpower in its own right, with a population more than triple that of Russia and an economy more than twelve times as large. Trump resented European unity because it also enhanced European power as against the United States. Trump interpreted international affairs as he interpreted everything: as a struggle for dominance, never cooperation among equals.
In his February 2017 CPAC address, Trump expressed plainly his vision of a world economy in which America domineered over a subservient planet. “We are going to make trade deals, but we’re going to do one-on-one, one-on-one. And if they misbehave, we terminate the deal. And then they’ll come back and we’ll make a better deal. None of these big quagmire deals that are a disaster.”30
The beauty of one-on-one deals, from Trump’s point of view, is that in such deals the United States for the foreseeable future will almost always overawe its counterparty. It can impose one-sided terms, act as judge and jury in its own cause, demand endless revisions in its own favor.
The Americans and friends of America who built the post-1945 world order foresaw the temptation to abuse American dominance. They had fought a terrible war against would-be global empires. They repudiated constructing one of their own. They keenly appreciated America’s unique power and unrivaled wealth. They understood that these advantages would diminish over time. They deliberately built a world system that accorded large and small states more equality of respect than ever before in world history. They designed trade and treaty systems governed by rules, rules to which the United States would submit like any other country. Indeed, they intended exactly the things that Donald Trump now complains about: that the United States would have to make concessions to smaller partners, that it would not act as judge in its own cases, that it would subordinate its parochial and immediate national interests to the larger and more enduring collective interest. America would find its own security by working for the security of others.
Americans accepted a new world order that constrained their own power in part because they were accustomed to such constraints at home. The US Constitution likewise overweights smaller states and rural minorities against urban majorities. But they had also learned from the catastrophes of world history. It is dangerous for any state, no matter how strong, to attempt to subordinate all others. Selfish hegemons from the Habsburg emperor Charles V to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin summoned up coalitions to topple them—and no single state could ever prevail against so many adversaries. In the world as at home, systems that serve the interests of all endure better than systems that oppress many to serve a few.
Upholding that system has become even more challenging since the end of the Cold War. American allies feel less frightened of Russia, more attracted by the opportunities of a rising China, and less accepting of American actions they dislike, from the Iraq War to electronic surveillance. (Germans acclaim Obama now, but after the Snowden revelations of 2014 the German government expelled the CIA station chief in Berlin, a shocking action by a NATO partner.31) Whoever became president in 2016 would need extraordinary vision and tact to manage a more refractory world system, one in which year by year the United States and its core allies counted for less, and China, India, and other emerging economies counted for more. Instead, the United States stumbled into a presidency determined to smash that system. Trump hoped that an unconstrained America could grab more power for itself (and thereby for him). He never understood that America’s power arose not only from its own wealth and its own military force, but from its centrality to a network of friends and allies.
During the election cycle, external observers of American politics often wondered—and sharply pressed anyone they regarded as a DC insider—whether there might be some method to Trump’s madness. Did his outbursts and tirades, disconcerting as they were, perhaps follow some shrewd strategy? After Election Day, the hunt for Trump’s logic naturally intensified.
It did not take long for that search to be abandoned as futile. Receiving Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, in the Oval Office in mid-May, Trump blurted a crucial counterterrorism secret entrusted to the United States by a regional ally. Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe reported for the Washington Post on May 15, 2017:
In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about hi
s inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.
Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.32
From that point, speculation about Trump’s secret strategy almost entirely ceased. “More and more, he looks like a complete moron,” a veteran of Trump’s presidential campaign groused to the Daily Beast.33
Moron or no, Trump remained the president and still wielded the vast power of that office—or anyway could do so on days he bothered to show up, pay attention, and make decisions. This fact could not be ignored or elided. If a Donald Trump presidency could happen, anything could happen. American words could no longer be trusted, American reactions no longer predicted. If, as seemed increasingly possible, Trump had been helped into the presidency by a Russian intelligence operation, then the ultimate guarantor of the whole world order had revealed a system-shaking vulnerability—as if the Red Cross could not manage a blood bank, as if the Federal Reserve had run out of dollars. Every international actor, benign or malign, had to take the new information into account. America’s friends might hope that the Trump presidency would prove short, its activities limited and ineffectual. They could count the months and minutes until a return to something more like normal. But things could never wholly return to normal again, could they?
Long after Donald Trump retires to the great golf club in the sky, prudent allies will remember what the Trump presidency revealed about the American political system, and not just the single man who held that office.
In a 2014 speech, Trump’s future political adviser Steve Bannon proposed Vladimir Putin as the true leader of a new kind of global conservative movement. Bannon is a vague and discursive talker who habitually attributes his own thoughts to unnamed others, so it’s necessary to quote him at some length.
At least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism—and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism for their country. They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union or they don’t believe in the centralized government in the United States. They’d rather see more of a states-based entity that the founders originally set up where freedoms were controlled at the local level.
We the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s [Putin] talking about as far as traditionalism goes—particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism—and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.
You know, Putin’s been quite an interesting character. He’s also very, very, very intelligent. I can see this in the United States where he’s playing very strongly to social conservatives about his message about more traditional values.34
The conservative journalist Chris Caldwell articulated a more lucid explication of Bannon’s 2014 message at Hillsdale College in February 2017:
So why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he has become a symbol of national self-determination. Populist conservatives see him the way progressives once saw Fidel Castro, as the one person who says he won’t submit to the world that surrounds him. You didn’t have to be a Communist to appreciate the way Castro, whatever his excesses, was carving out a space of autonomy for his country.
In the same way, Putin’s conduct is bound to win sympathy even from some of Russia’s enemies, the ones who feel the international system is not delivering for them. Generally, if you like that system, you will consider Vladimir Putin a menace. If you don’t like it, you will have some sympathy for him. Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism. That turns out to be the big battle of our times.35
In that battle—if a battle is the right metaphor—Donald Trump has aligned with Putin against almost all of America’s most important allies, and the US national security apparatus has demonstrated an incapacity to constrain or moderate him. Vivian Salama of the Associated Press reported in mid-July 2017:
Deep divisions are increasingly apparent within the administration on the best way to approach Moscow in the midst of U.S. investigations into Russian meddling in the American presidential election. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that the Russian government sought to tip the election in his favor and has dismissed investigations into the possibility of collusion between his campaign and Moscow as a “witch hunt.”
Meanwhile, he has pushed for cooperation between Moscow and Washington on various matters including the raging conflict in Syria.
But some top aides, including National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, have been warning that Putin is not to be trusted. . . .
[One US official said] diplomats and intelligence officials were “dumbfounded” by the president’s approach.36
The dumbfounding only accelerated from there.
Days previous to that AP report, Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous broke the news in the Washington Post that the Trump administration had terminated aid to CIA-backed anti-Assad forces inside Syria.37 The Trump administration had signaled this decision in late March 2017, when it announced that it would no longer demand the ouster of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad—a reversal not only of Obama administration policy, but of a long-standing Republican congressional demand.38
Assad must go, insisted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at a press conference in April 2017. “I don’t see how there can possibly be any settlement in Syria that includes Bashar al Assad. I just can’t imagine after all the butchering of his own people that he’s been doing now for four or five years that there could be any successful conclusion to this chaos with him still there.”39
“Assad must go,” read the headline on an April 2017 press release from Ed Royce, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “With more than 480,000 people killed by the regime, and 14 million driven from their homes, it is clear there is no hope for real peace in Syria until Assad is held accountable.”40
Assad must go, had declared a group of Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Florida’s Marco Rubio, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Oklahoma’s James Lankford, and Tennessee’s Bob Corker, the committee’s chairman.41 Assad must go, agreed two Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee: John McCain and Tom Cotton.42
“Assad’s crimes against humanity cannot go unanswered,” declared House Speaker Paul Ryan in a May 2017 statement.43 “The United States of America should be prepared to use military force to strike military targets of the Assad regime,” intoned Mike Pence in the October 2016 vice presidential debate.44
Against this overwhelming party consensus, Trump imposed a policy about-face. “This is a momentous decision. Putin won in Syria,” said one of the Washington Post’s sources on the policy reversal.
The regulars lost on staffing too.
The former national security adviser Michael Flynn had chosen as his deputy K. T. McFarland, a Fox News host who had last served in government in the 1980s as a speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Bloomberg reported in early April that Flynn’s replacement, H. R. McMaster, had forced McFarland out, banishing her 9,700 miles and eight time zones away to the ambassadorship to Singapore.45 Three months
later, McFarland was still in Washington, still coming to work at the NSC.
Trump appointed as a counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart blogger who pleaded guilty in August 2016 to attempting to board a flight at Reagan Airport with a gun in his carry-on bag.46 It took almost nine months for H. R. McMaster and Chief of Staff John Kelly to dispense with Gorka’s services to the United States.
The most disturbing personality in the Trump national security system, however, was always Trump himself. Enraged by information that law enforcement agencies had surveilled his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, President Trump emitted a bizarre sequence of tweets on March 4, 2017. Trump alleged that former president Obama had ordered listening devices installed to monitor Trump himself. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate stuff. Bad or sick guy!”47 In an effort to substantiate Trump’s wild and false claims, press secretary Sean Spicer repeated at the White House briefing podium an assertion by a Fox News personality that Britain’s signal agency GCHQ had carried out the “tapping” at Obama’s behest. That assertion was in turn based on rumors circulated on Russian television and pro-Moscow websites. An obviously embarrassed Spicer raced through a mumbled reading of the allegation. However miserably Spicer felt about it, he dutifully hurled the false and alliance-damaging accusation from behind the Great Seal of the United States.48 In a September 1, 2017, court filing the Trump Department of Justice would formally acknowledge that the president’s accusation of “tapps” had been baseless from the start. “Both FBI and NSD [the National Security Division within the FBI] confirm that they have no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017, tweets.”49 But if Trump was not “tapped,” his future campaign chair Paul Manafort apparently had been surveilled, for reasons most likely arising from Manafort’s work for the pro-Russian regime in Ukraine overthrown in 2014. That surveillance may have swept up conversations with candidate Trump.