Other mistakes were more consequential. Trump clearly saw China as a serious economic and military rival, for example, as did the other top U.S. officials, and he understood that the United States needed to counter China’s rising power and growing ambitions. But if so, then abandoning TPP was an enormous misstep that undermined the U.S. position with key Asian allies, gave Beijing inviting opportunities to expand its influence, and brought the United States nothing in return. It was also a mistake on purely economic grounds, as TPP’s remaining members went ahead with the agreement, depriving U.S. exporters of more open access to a large and growing market and giving Washington no say over the health, regulatory, or labor standards embedded within the agreement.124
Similarly, Trump and his advisors correctly understood that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were a serious problem that required close attention, but his bluster, empty threats, and childish tweets were unlikely to persuade North Korea that it had no need for a powerful deterrent. Instead, Trump’s saber rattling merely alarmed U.S. allies in the region unnecessarily. Furthermore, given the importance of maintaining a united front against Pyongyang, it made no sense for Trump to quarrel with South Korea over trade or over who would pay for a missile defense system that Washington had previously agreed to provide. It was equally foolish to renege on the nuclear agreement with Iran (which had never built a nuclear weapon), while at the same time trying to persuade North Korea to agree to give up the nuclear bombs it had already produced.
And, though encouraging America’s Middle East allies to do more to combat extremism or to counter Iran was a reasonable objective, Trump’s handling of this complicated task was inept. In particular, giving the reformist crown prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia unconditional support was a mistake, as the young Saudi leader’s reckless gambits undermined the united front Trump said he wanted to create. To make matters worse, Trump’s tweeted suggestion that he had inspired the Saudi boycott of Qatar in June 2017 jeopardized U.S. access to a critical air base in the emirate and forced Secretaries Mattis and Tillerson to step in to smooth things over.125
For that matter, if Trump genuinely believed that Iran was a looming threat that had to be contained, then his decision to violate the multinational deal that had rolled back its nuclear program was a strategic blunder. In addition to sowing broader concerns about the reliability of American promises, tearing up the nuclear deal (or even chipping away at the spirit of the agreement) would eventually dissolve the coalition of major powers whose pressure on Iran had helped convince its leaders to compromise. Doing so would strengthen hard-line factions within Iran, give Tehran more reason to want its own nuclear deterrent, and ultimately leave Washington with the choice of accepting a nuclear-armed Iran or starting a preventive war. From the purely self-interested “America First” perspective that Trump supposedly championed, his approach made little sense.
Finally, Trump’s controversial decision on Jerusalem (reportedly made to fulfill a pledge to Sheldon Adelson, a passionate Zionist who was also the largest contributor to Trump’s presidential campaign) did nothing to make the United States safer or richer, or to advance U.S. values.126 Previous presidents understood that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the U.S. embassy there was a valuable carrot that might one day be used to clinch a final peace agreement, but Trump gave it up for nothing. All the United States got in return for Trump’s move was nearly universal international criticism, including a UN General Assembly resolution condemning the move, which passed 135–9 even after UN ambassador Haley threatened a reduction in U.S. funding were the resolution to be approved.127
Some observers have seen the reshuffling of Trump’s foreign policy team that began in February 2018 as evidence of a desire to escape the constraints his more mainstream advisors had imposed on him and to return to the more radical approach he had articulated as a candidate.128 This assessment is clearly correct regarding trade policy, but the departures of Tillerson, Cohn, McMaster, etc., and the appointments of Pompeo, Haspel, and Bolton were hardly a rejection of establishment thinking or a radical alteration in U.S. strategy. Each of these individuals occupied respected positions within the mainstream foreign policy community, and their views on key foreign policy issues, while clearly from the hawkish end of the spectrum, were still within the “acceptable” Washington consensus.129 None of them were likely to favor less reliance on military force, greater emphasis on multilateral diplomacy, or a significant reduction in U.S. commitments abroad.
If anything, these appointments were less a triumph of Trumpism in its original form than a return to the confrontational unilateralism of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the neoconservatives. As such, these appointments offer additional evidence to support the claims made in the previous chapter: the United States frequently fails to learn from past errors and tends to forget any lessons it may temporarily absorb. Hardly anyone is held accountable, and officials with abysmal track records often receive new chances to repeat past mistakes.130
THE IMPACT OF INCOMPETENCE
Viewed as a whole, Trump’s efforts to “shake the rust off of U.S. foreign policy” turned out to be a giant step backward. Instead of lessening the burden on America’s overstretched armed forces and reducing the nation’s overseas obligations, he had kept every one of America’s existing commitments, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, accelerated the pace of operations in several distant theaters, and stoked fears of new wars with North Korea and possibly Iran.
Trump’s handling of U.S. foreign economic policy was equally inept. He raised fears of a trade war but brought scant positive results: the “beautiful” trade deals he promised had yet to materialize, and by the end of his first year the trade deficit he had vowed to reverse had reached its highest level since 2012.131 And while Trump was correct in wanting to get tough with China over its predatory trade and investment practices, his approach to the problem was incoherent. As Ely Ratner of the Council on Foreign Relations observed, “Trump is right to be saying enough is enough. But his administration is going about it all wrong.” Instead of relying solely on unilateral U.S. sanctions, it would have made more sense to assemble a coalition of other major world economies to press China and work within the existing WTO system. But Trump had already abandoned TPP (which was designed in part to counter Chinese trade practices) and then alienated potential partners by threatening to impose tariffs and quotas on them too. He also repeatedly criticized the WTO and took steps to weaken it, thereby making it a less powerful tool for challenging China. Trump may have been serious about wanting China to change its behavior, but his bumbling approach to the issue was far less effective than it might have been.132
Trump had long portrayed himself as a hard-nosed negotiator who had mastered the “art of the deal,” but his approach to foreign policy was, in the words of the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, more accurately described as “the art of the giveaway.”133 His decisions on Jerusalem and the TPP withdrawal were obvious examples, as was his impulsive decision to accept Kim Jong-un’s invitation to a summit meeting without first establishing terms for the discussions. Simply by meeting with Kim, Trump had given him a status and legitimacy that North Korea’s leaders had long craved. Trump went even further at the meeting itself, agreeing to cancel annual military exercises with South Korea without first informing Seoul. And what did Trump get in return for these twin concessions? Only a vague promise to “work toward” eventual denuclearization.
Trump and his supporters believe that increased U.S. pressure—in the form of ever-tightening sanctions and threats of military action—have forced Kim to change his behavior. Finally getting tough with North Korea, they think, caused Kim to offer to meet with President Trump, stop testing missiles that can hit the United States, pursue a peace agreement with South Korea, and abandon his nuclear weapons. North Korea has agreed to talks on many occasions in the past, however, and Kim’s willingness to do so in 2018 is more likely t
he result of the progress North Korea has recently made in refining its nuclear warhead designs (including testing a hydrogen bomb) and long-range missile capabilities, which give the regime a more potent nuclear deterrent. In any case, it is hard to imagine Kim ever accepting the United States’ definition of “complete denuclearization,” which means a rapid, irreversible, and fully verified dismantling of North Korea’s entire nuclear infrastructure.
Moreover, even if the two sides reached a more modest interim deal—such as a temporary halt in long-range missile tests—it would still leave America’s allies in Asia vulnerable to a North Korean nuclear attack and raise doubts about the U.S. commitment to their security. North Korea has long insisted that meaningful reductions in its arsenal have to be accompanied by the removal of external threats to the regime, which implies substantial cuts in the U.S. military presence in South Korea and perhaps the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from the peninsula. Even if accompanied by a formal end to the Korean War, an agreement of this sort would undermine the U.S. role in Asia and constitute a major victory for North Korea and its Chinese patron. Trump’s handling of North Korea has definitely succeeded in stirring things up, but the net effect is a further weakening of the U.S. position in Asia.
Worst of all, Trump almost singlehandedly squandered the remaining confidence other states had in America’s judgment. Reasons to doubt U.S. wisdom and competence had increased since the end of the Cold War, as the quest for liberal hegemony foundered and the financial crisis tarnished Wall Street’s reputation for integrity and acumen. Partisan wrangling and political gridlock at home had raised further doubts about America’s ability to address problems at home and challenges abroad, doubts only partially allayed by the Obama administration’s relatively successful management of the postcrisis economic recovery. But Trump raised these nagging concerns to unprecedented heights: suddenly leaders and publics all over the world had reason to question whether the American president had any idea what he was doing. And the contrast with some other countries—especially China—was hard to miss.134
Near the end of Obama’s second term, for example, a survey of thirty-seven countries found that roughly 64 percent of respondents still had confidence in U.S. leadership. After less than six months under Donald Trump, the percentage with “confidence” had fallen to 22 and countries like Japan and South Korea showed especially sharp declines. Even more remarkably, more people around the world believed that Chinese president Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin were “more likely to do the right thing in world affairs” than the current president of the United States.135 The results one year in were no better: a Gallup poll of 134 countries released in January 2018 showed that “global approval of U.S. leadership” had dropped from an average of 48 percent in 2016 to only 30 percent in 2017, a historic low, with some of the biggest declines occurring among longtime U.S. allies.136
As the wobbles and inconsistencies and embarrassing episodes multiplied, other countries started hedging their bets and making deals with each other that excluded the United States. The EU and Japan signed a major trade pact in July 2017, and leaders from Germany to Canada spoke openly about their lack of confidence in the United States and the need to take responsibility for their own fates.137 Meanwhile, China continued to advance its ambitious One Belt, One Road initiative in Central Asia and to negotiate a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) with sixteen Asian countries (but not the United States). RCEP was China’s original response to the U.S.-led TPP, but Trump’s decision to withdraw from the latter gave China “an irresistible opportunity.”138 And the blame for all of these worrisome developments lay squarely with Donald J. Trump.
CONCLUSION
Looking back on Trump’s first year, one could easily imagine Hillary Clinton pursuing many of the same policies if she were in the White House. Clinton almost certainly would have used military force when the Assad regime used chemical weapons, and she undoubtedly would have reaffirmed U.S. support for NATO and for America’s traditional Middle Eastern allies, just as Trump did. Unlike Trump, she would have kept the nuclear deal with Iran in place, but she would have taken a hard line toward Iran in other respects and no doubt would have kept up the military campaign against ISIS and continued America’s far-flung counterterror operations. Clinton would have been highly critical of North Korea’s missile tests but open to negotiations, and there is little reason to think she would have opposed increased defense spending or rejected military requests to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan.139 She would have spoken more openly about the importance of democracy and human rights but looked the other way when close U.S. allies fell short. One suspects that Clinton would have walked back her own opposition to TPP in order to balance more effectively against China, but one can easily see her pushing for minor changes in that agreement, as well as seeking to update NAFTA and reform the WTO.
But it is much harder to imagine Clinton pursuing these goals as ineptly as Trump has. She would never have used Twitter to pick fights with adversaries, allies, the media, and entire agencies of the U.S. government, as he has done repeatedly. She would have staffed her administration with experienced insiders from the beginning and avoided the intense and ceaseless turmoil that characterized the Trump White House from Day One.140 The United States would still have pursued a flawed grand strategy under Clinton and there would have been few successes, but there is no question that she and her colleagues would have done a much better job of implementing that misguided approach.
As this chapter shows, Trump’s rhetoric and outlook were in many ways at odds with with liberal hegemony, but his administration’s actual policies were a continuation of its worst tendencies. The United States continues to embrace a flawed grand strategy, but its implementation is now in the hands of the least competent president in modern memory. The results of this deadly combination of foolish policy and inept statecraft are already apparent: U.S. influence and status is declining, but its global burdens are not. And he may yet provoke a global trade war that would inflict additional harm on the United States and almost every other country in the world.141
Sadly, Trump’s presidency thus far provides a textbook case for how not to fix U.S. foreign policy. It also reminds us that no matter how bad things might be, they can always get worse. In the final chapter, I explain what must be done to turn things around.
7. A BETTER WAY
AMERICA’S RECENT EFFORTS to manage and shape world politics have not made the United States safer or richer, and they have not advanced its core political values. On the contrary, U.S. foreign policy has multiplied enemies and destabilized key regions of the world, wasted thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in failed wars, led to serious human rights abuses abroad, and compromised important civil liberties.
This book has sought to explain why. These failures occurred and persisted because both Democrats and Republicans have pursued a misguided strategy of liberal hegemony. The strategy has repeatedly failed to deliver as promised, yet the foreign policy establishment remains deeply committed to it.
Donald Trump challenged this consensus when he ran for office and tried—however haphazardly—to change course. But he lacked the acumen, discipline, and political support to pull off a judicious revision in U.S. foreign policy, and his inept handling of these issues has undermined U.S. influence without lightening America’s burdens. Trump may have been largely correct when he called U.S. foreign policy “a complete and total disaster,” but he failed to develop a coherent alternative to liberal hegemony, and his errors in judgment, poor personnel choices, and ill-advised decisions only made things worse.
COUNTERARGUMENTS
Even those who recognize that U.S. foreign policy has been less than perfect might object to my indictment of America’s recent efforts and my explanation for these failings. One could argue, for example, that U.S. foreign policy is no worse today than it was in the past. The United States was slow to recognize the dangers
of fascism in the 1940s, and then it overreacted to the threat of communism after World War II. The “best and the brightest” in the old Eastern establishment led the country into a futile war in Indochina and stayed there far too long, simultaneously mismanaging events in the Middle East and backing assorted unsavory dictators solely because they claimed to be anticommunist. From this perspective, U.S. foreign policy is as good (or bad) as it ever was, and its recent missteps have little to do with America’s dominant position or the foreign policy community’s commitment to liberal hegemony.
There is an element of truth in this position, insofar as past U.S. leaders made their own share of blunders. But the overall performance of some previous administrations was still impressive, especially when one considers that they were dealing either with formidable expansionist powers (Germany or Japan in the two world wars) or confronting a continent-size, nuclear-armed superpower whose revolutionary ideology attracted considerable support around the globe. U.S. leaders may have exaggerated the danger that international communism posed, but the threat was hardly imaginary. For more than forty years, both Republicans and Democrats focused laserlike on containing and eliminating the Soviet rival while avoiding all-out war, and they used a combination of economic, military, and diplomatic tools to achieve a peaceful victory. They made their full share of mistakes—of which Vietnam was the worst—but they also got many big things right. For all their failings, the record is better than the parade of missed opportunities and self-inflicted wounds recorded by the four post–Cold War presidents.
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 28