America deserves Donald Trump. The world doesn’t
The president-elect has no philosophy or policy, and his incoherence about global relations is not feigned
EVERY country gets the government it deserves, it has been said, and America now gets a second administration led by Donald Trump. But the rest of the world did not vote in the US election. Does it deserve what comes next?
And what exactly is that? The planet’s most important relationship is arguably that between the world as a whole and its most powerful nation, even if it is no longer a superpower, hyperpower or “hegemon”. That relationship, much more so than in Trump’s first term, is now in flux, adrift, undefined.
Trump campaigned on a vacuous premise that he will deliver peace through “strength” without ever spelling out the sources or objectives of that strength. When he was president, he has bragged, “We didn’t have countries fighting each other, they wouldn’t have done it without my permission.” What a joke.
Come January, we will find out if Trump’s fellow strongmen ask for permission from his White House as they make their moves in geopolitics.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin, with his KGB-trained mind, has always known how to flatter and manipulate Trump, and that is what worries Ukraine. China’s Xi Jinping has taken note of Trump’s inconsistent statements about Taiwan, and is ready to wage the trade war that Trump promises to launch.
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un already knows Trump from three summits and a brief exchange of “love letters”; as a direct result of that failed flirtation, he went full bore in building nukes and missiles to threaten South Korea, Japan and the US. The mullahs in Iran probably do fear Trump – but they may now follow North Korea’s strategy of self-protection with nuclear weapons.
BT in your inbox
Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.
America’s allies, meanwhile, have no idea what is coming but fear the worst.
Trump has, after all, threatened to pull out of Nato and to abandon partners if they do not buy enough chips or cars or steel from the US. Not least, anybody who cares about international law and the United Nations has reason to despair: Trump does not understand the UN as an institution or an idea, and he disdains what he does not understand.
It has become de rigueur among Washington’s foreign policy “blob” to affix “isms” to Trump’s foreign policy style, like Maga (Make America Great Again) buttons to lapels. He is a nationalist, they say, or an isolationist, mercantilist, realist, unilateralist and so forth. All partially true – and all beside the point.
The person who has best captured the man’s world view is John Bolton, a notorious hawk who did a stint as Trump’s national security adviser. The critical point is that Trump has “neither philosophy nor policies”, Bolton says. Trump’s decisions on national security are entirely transactional, he writes, spread on the map like “an archipelago of dots, unconnected by chords of logic, salience or results”.
The optimistic spin on Trump’s approach is that it is a new and amped version of the “madman theory” that was once attributed to Richard Nixon (although Machiavelli long ago suggested that it can indeed be a “wise thing to simulate madness”). By that logic, America’s foes and friends alike will be docile out of sheer fear: What might this man do, with or without a nuclear button?
But the madman theory – never properly elaborated or tested – assumes a leader who has a compass and a mental map, and feigns occasional derangement tactically to navigate to his strategic destination. Trump has neither compass nor map. If his foreign policy seems incoherent bordering on mad, he may not be feigning. America could actually find itself adrift in his archipelago of dots, also called the world. BLOOMBERG
Share with us your feedback on BT's products and services
