Donald Trump is many things, but most of all he is a doer. He builds buildings, he starts businesses, he does deals. As he put it in his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, “One thing I’ve learned about the construction business — and life in general — is that while what you do is obviously important, the most important thing is just to do something.”
This may sound like good business advice, and it may even be good life advice, but it is precisely the wrong attitude for a president of the United States. In fact, knowing how and when to do nothing — or, to put it less absolutely, knowing when to show patience, to tolerate delay and to restrain the urge to act — may be the most critical element of presidential leadership. US interests depend on having a commander-in-chief who not only can handle the proverbial 3am phone call, but also understands that sometimes it’s best to go back to sleep. Such self-control is necessary for maintaining alliances and defusing confrontations with enemies. On at least one occasion, it probably prevented nuclear war.
So what happens if America has a president who is incapable of inaction, preternaturally irascible and fixated on payback? (As Trump’s wife, Melania, put it, “When you attack him, he will punch back 10 times harder.”) Nuclear scenarios are obviously the scariest — which is why critics from Hillary Clinton to New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz to former US defence secretary Bob Gates have warned that Trump shouldn’t get the launch codes. But the codes are really a metonym for foreign policy more broadly. The risk is less that a President Trump may launch a nuclear strike out of pique and more that his judgement on national security issues will be thoroughly compromised by what resembles an almost pathological anger.
In crises, there is enormous pressure to act — a “plunge towards action”, as historians Richard Neustadt and Ernest Mayhave written. Yet, smart leadership demands self-control. Presidential history is replete with examples of judicious inaction.
It is not an exaggeration to say that former US president John F. Kennedy may have saved civilisation by rejecting an invasion of Cuba in favour of a naval blockade after learning that the Soviets were building nuclear missile sites there. Even after a Soviet surface-to-air missile shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane days later, Kennedy refused to order air strikes. He didn’t know it at the time, but the Soviets had already deployed tactical nuclear weapons on the island, and if US forces had invaded, the Soviet field commander might well have used them, potentially triggering a nuclear exchange that would have killed tens of millions of people.
The entire Cold War, governed as it was by the doctrine of containment, was an exercise in strategic patience — George Kennan’s original idea being that Communism will eventually collapse under its own weight. That collapse, when it finally manifested in the frenzied destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, called for diplomatic restraint as well. “I’m not going to dance on the wall,” former US president George H.W. Bush said, refusing to gloat. More zealous Cold Warriors criticised that reluctance, but his discipline paid off, enabling Washington to manage the dissolution of the Soviet Union, including the disposition of its nuclear weapons in former republics Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Restraint remains critically important in the post-Cold War world. Dealing with North Korea, for example, requires endless reserves of patience. The peninsula is on a constant state of alert in anticipation of Pyongyang’s next nuclear test, missile firing or unprovoked assault. Just last summer, the North and South exchanged artillery fire after two South Korean troops were wounded by a North Korean land mine secretly placed on the southern side of the Demilitarised Zone. As a close ally of South Korea, with 28,500 troops stationed in the country, the US has had to repeatedly walk a fine line between threatening force to keep Pyongyang in check and trying to avoid a war that could destroy the South, destabilise the region and embroil the US in another costly conflict. It’s a balancing act that has taxed even the country’s finest diplomats — and that does not lend itself to presidential bombast or impetuosity.
The presidency may be a bully pulpit, but that makes it all the more imperative that its occupant knows how to keep his mouth shut and his powder dry. Trump rarely has shown such discipline — in his campaign statements or his business ventures.
During his presidential run, he has lurched from one angry outburst to the next, attacking anyone who dares criticise him, childishly belittling his opponents and excommunicating news organisations (including the Washington Post) that don’t sufficiently flatter him. He is so reflexively combative that, according to Fox News’s Howard Kurtz, his staff has stopped presenting him with interview requests to reduce the “risk of the candidate making mistakes or fanning minor controversies”.
Trump has been as thin-skinned and vindictive in business as he has been in politics. Fortune magazine noted that he has a reputation as someone who “sues first, asks questions later”, litigating against entities as varied as unions, writers and the National Football League. As Trump told journalist William Cohan: “When people don’t tell the truth, I go after them... even if I’m not going to win. I do it because at least you can inflict pain that way on somebody, in terms of legal fees and other things.”
Trump can be diplomatic, but such efforts are rare and fragile. As the New York Times reported, Trump once cultivated a relationship with a group of Hong Kong businessmen who rescued him from near-bankruptcy, financed a massive residential complex he had planned to build near Lincoln Centre and gave him a lucrative stake in the project. But when the businessmen sold, Trump felt slighted. Instead of taking his share of the profits, he sued them for $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion) — and lost. It was a reactive move that, according to the Times, “showcased his unflagging confidence in his ability to turn a bad financial situation around ... [and] underscored his willingness to destroy a fruitful relationship with aggressive litigation”.
To understand why Trump would act against his own interests that way, it helps to understand something about anger. Like other emotions, anger triggers cognitive judgements that influence our perception of events. According to psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Larissa Tiedens, anger’s “appraisal tendency” is marked by high certainty, which lowers sensitivity to risk, and by a high sense of control, which increases optimism about the ability to influence outcomes. Anger also leads people to see others, not situations, as the source of their rage.
Angry individuals have been shown to rely on stereotypes, to assume hostile intent in others, to demonstrate increased bias against outgroups and to base judgements on fewer diagnostic cues. Perhaps most important, anger spurs action to address the perceived affront. All of this means that angry people tend to have great confidence that confrontation can “fix” the cause of their anger with little risk to themselves.
What happens when you combine a president who likes to “punch back 10 times harder” with the sort of provocations the US has recently faced from Russia (whose fighter jets keep harassing US Air Force planes and Navy vessels), China (whose warships trail America’s through international waters) and Iran (which has temporarily taken American sailors prisoner)? Minor provocations could escalate into major crises. After a Russian Su-27 performed a barrel roll over a US spy plane in April, Trump said the US president should first call Russian President Vladimir Putin, but then, “if that doesn’t work out, I don’t know, you know, at a certain point, when that sucker comes by you, you gotta shoot”. And then what?
Crises often require creativity to find solutions, as Kennedy did, that enable both sides to escape with their interests (and pride) intact. Unfortunately, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews has pointed out, Trump’s worldview is singularly zero-sum — an approach that is unsurprising in someone driven by anger. It’s an attitude that makes diplomacy nearly impossible. Even George W. Bush, one of America’s most Manichaean presidents, was able to set aside zero-sum thinking when diplomacy demanded it, as in 2001, when a US EP-3 spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter, killing its pilot, and was forced to land on Hainan Island. To secure the release of the American crew, the US issued a statement of regret that it allowed the Chinese to interpret as an apology. A man like Trump — who believes that every encounter is a battle to be won or lost — would have a great deal of trouble coping with such ambiguity.
Worse than the spectre of such hypotheticals has been Trump’s predictably rash response to the threat from terrorism. Prisoners? Torture them. Terrorists? Kill their families. Muslims? Expel them. In the handful of concrete policy proposals he’s offered, Trump has managed to trample on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution.
Other presidents have been able to sublimate their anger in critical moments. Kennedy was furious that the Soviets put missiles in Cuba, because they had explicitly promised him they would do no such thing, but he nevertheless responded judiciously. Former US president Ronald Reagan was livid in September 1983 when a Soviet fighter shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing 62 Americans, including a sitting US Congressman, but within months he had adopted a conciliatory approach towards negotiating with the “evil empire”.
In his memoir, George W. Bush recalls his reaction to the 9/11 attacks: “My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their [expletive].” At the same time, he decided that the US would respond to the attacks at a “time of our choosing”. Strikes against the Taliban did not begin for nearly four weeks, following a diplomatic request for the extradition of Osama Bin Laden and the expulsion of Al Qaida from Afghanistan. Among other things, the delay allowed the US to enlist Pakistan’s support.
To be sure, discipline is no guarantee of good policy. Regard for his self-control is why US President Barack Obama is “very proud” of reversing his pledge to bomb Syria after the Assad regime used chemical weapons against civilians in 2013. As he told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg: “The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake... And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made — and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”
Alas, the US did lose credibility, the Syrian war rages on with unfathomable cost and, in a historic move, 51 US diplomats have formally protested the administration’s policy.
Discipline, in other words, can be fetishised, but anger is the greater pathology. “Don’t do stupid [expletive],” as the Obama White House puts it, may not be an inspiring slogan, but it is a far better default than a compulsive urge to action. To know when to act and when not to is the essence of leadership. Unfortunately, Trump appears to have but one setting. He is constantly propelled to do. Presumably, you cannot “make America great again” — whatever that means — by doing nothing. But sometimes that is the way you keep it safe.
— Washington Post
J. Peter Scoblic is a fellow with the International Security Programme at New America and the author of US vs Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror.
