Just for a moment, let’s try to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt.
Foreign policy is one of the few places in deeply polarised Washington where there is something approaching a working consensus. Democrats and Republicans disagree on many things, but in the foreign policy world these are frequently matters more of style than substance. On the really big stuff — Nato, nuclear proliferation, the Middle East, China — there is broad bipartisan agreement about what the US should and should not be doing.
Over the course of the last century this approach has demonstrated its usefulness many times. In a dangerous world it has offered continuity across repeated changes of party in the White House and Congress. It has helped a succession of newly-elected presidents with little or no foreign policy experience (Obama, Bush the younger, Clinton, Reagan, Carter and the unelected President Ford) adapt smoothly to their new responsibilities. It has created one of the few areas where American policy intellectuals of the left and right know one another and interact with some regularity.
The system is far from perfect. In particular, it has an unsettling tendency to produce conventional wisdom about the ‘need’ to use American military power that is much too easily and widely accepted (see: Iraq, Libya, Vietnam). As Barack Obama noted in an interview last year it often presumes that America’s credibility can only be preserved by intervening in one foreign crisis after another, even when no American interests are obviously at stake.
So the foreign policy establishment is valuable, but like most entrenched institutions it could benefit from some thoughtful questioning of its underlying assumptions.
There is, however, a difference between asking: ‘Why, exactly, is that important?’ and simply taking a wrecking ball to all that has gone before. Put another way, the problem is not that Donald Trump espouses ignorant and ill-thought-through opinions (the system can contain and moderate that sort of thing). It is that he often seems to value trouble for its own sake.
After less than a month in office Trump has punched rhetorical holes in Nato, declared that a critical pillar of China policy is nothing but a bargaining chip (and then seemingly reversed himself in his first phone call with Xi Jinping), given Pakistan the (probably mistaken) impression that he is tilting away from India, sent mixed signals about nuclear proliferation in Asia and about American support for the United Nations, torn up a trade deal and given a lot of people the impression that he hopes the European Union will fall apart.
All of this is a long way from asking whether long-held policies need rethinking. Indeed, when watching Trump and the people around him it has been hard to avoid the sense that they enjoy the alarm they are causing both at home and abroad.
Nato offers an instructive example. Trump repeatedly called it “obsolete”, but then told a succession of European leaders and the alliance’s secretary-general that he strongly supports it. He doesn’t seem to understand why anyone would have a problem with this.
There are legitimate questions to be asked about the alliance’s structure and its long-term role. America has long been annoyed that only a handful of Nato’s 28 members honour their obligation to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence.
But it is one thing to remind people of that and another to question whether the alliance needs to exist. Asking whether Nato is doing (or planning to do) the right things is useful. Musing aloud that you might not honour treaty commitments to allies unless they have “paid their bills” is not.
The idea has settled in that Trump may see the alliance as a bargaining chip to be used in some grand negotiation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That might or might not be true (with Trump, one never knows) but letting it sit out there is dangerous at a moment when Moscow’s threat to western countries is greater than it has been at any time since the end of the Cold War.
Even if one accepts Trump’s description of himself as a savvy dealmaker who makes outrageous opening gambits, keeps opponents guessing and, by doing so, invariably “wins”, that is a dangerous and self-defeating strategy. From Nato to the Middle East, and from the South China Sea to North America itself the currency of diplomacy is reliability. Right now Trump is not acting like a negotiating partner in whom any ally or adversary can have confidence.
Do Trump and the people around him understand that there is a difference between disruption and breaking stuff? It has been less than a month, so, perhaps, they still deserve the benefit of the doubt. But time is running out.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.
