WHAT TRUMP DID
Trump’s early appointments suggested that he fully intended to shake up the status quo. Although he briefly considered such familiar figures as retired army general and former CIA director David Petraeus and the 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney for top foreign policy posts, many of his early appointments went to outsiders. Ignoring an explicit warning from President Obama, Trump chose a controversial retired general, Michael Flynn, as his first national security advisor.9 Trump made Michael Anton, a far-right critic of the liberal world order, director of communications for the National Security Council, and his White House staff included several assistants with minimal experience and dubious qualifications—such as former Breitbart commentator and self-styled terrorism expert Sebastian Gorka.10
For his cabinet, Trump picked Exxon president Rex Tillerson for the post of secretary of state, despite Tillerson’s lack of governmental or diplomatic experience. Trump also proposed a 30 percent cut in the State Department budget and was slow to submit nominees for top policy jobs there, telling Fox News in April, “I don’t want to fill many of these appointments … they’re unnecessary.”11 He was true to his word: after a year in office many top foreign policy positions were still vacant or being handled by interim officials.12
Instead of placing a civilian atop the Pentagon, as every president since Truman had done, Trump asked retired Marine Corps general James Mattis to serve as his secretary of defense. He chose another retired general, John Kelly, to head the Department of Homeland Security, and gave his thirty-six-year-old son-in-law, the real estate heir Jared Kushner, several high-profile administrative diplomatic assignments despite Kushner’s lack of political experience or foreign policy credentials.
In another departure from past practice, Trump at first excluded the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the National Security Council’s “principals committee” and put his chief political strategist, former Breitbart News head Stephen Bannon, on the committee instead. The economist Peter Navarro (author of the China-bashing tract Death by China) brought a protectionist outlook to Trump’s new National Trade Council, the hard-line trade lawyer Robert Lighthizer became U.S. trade representative, and former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley became ambassador to the United Nations despite her own limited background in foreign affairs.
Yet a number of these unorthodox arrangements turned out to be remarkably short-lived, and Trump’s foreign policy team soon took on a more normal character. Flynn resigned as national security advisor after only twenty-four days in the job, having lied about earlier meetings with Russian officials; and his deputy, former Fox News commentator K. T. McFarland, followed suit a few days later. Flynn’s replacement was army lieutenant general H. R. McMaster, whose foreign policy views lay firmly within the establishment consensus. McMaster soon brought in Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution, the author of a highly critical biography of Vladimir Putin, to handle Russian affairs at the NSC, a move that signaled a more conventional approach toward this critical relationship. In April the White House announced that the political strategist Stephen Bannon would no longer attend NSC “principals committee” meetings and that the director of national intelligence Dan Coats and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford would resume their usual roles on this body.13
The major shake-up that repopulated Trump’s White House staff in the summer of 2017 represented a further step toward Beltway orthodoxy. The beleaguered White House press secretary Sean Spicer resigned in July, and Trump installed former hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci as his new White House director of communications, only to fire him ten days later.14 The homeland security secretary Kelly replaced Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff, and he and McMaster proceeded to clean house at the NSC, dismissing a number of Trump’s initial appointees and bringing in experienced mainstream experts.15 Increasingly isolated, Bannon departed the White House shortly thereafter, removing the administration’s most prominent proponent for a radical shift in grand strategy.
Not surprisingly, these personnel shifts helped attenuate many of Trump’s more radical inclinations. Although his behavior and rhetoric continued to defy traditional norms and expectations, the substance of U.S. policy was increasingly familiar. A new round of personnel changes occurred in early 2018—NEC director Cohn resigned and Tillerson and McMaster were dismissed and replaced by CIA director Mike Pompeo and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton respectively—but even this latest upheaval did not alter the broad direction of U.S. foreign policy, save in the area of trade policy and Iran. And as discussed below, even these shifts were not a 180-degree turn in the broad outlines of U.S. policy.
NATO ISN’T “OBSOLETE” AFTER ALL
Trump had described NATO as “obsolete” and “outdated” during the election campaign, but he reversed himself in April 2017 and said this was no longer the case “because they had changed.”16 Moreover, Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Tillerson, and Secretary of Defense Mattis all journeyed to Europe during the first half of 2017 in a coordinated effort to reassure U.S. allies. Trump prompted new concerns at the NATO summit in May, refusing to endorse the mutual defense clause (Article 5) of the NATO Treaty and berating the other heads of state attendees for failing to pull their weight, but he reversed course again the following month, telling reporters, “I’m committing the U.S. to Article 5 … absolutely.” Driving the point home, he repeated this pledge on visits to Germany and Poland in June.17 Efforts to bolster NATO’s defenses against Russia—including the European Reassurance Initiative (ERI) and the joint military exercise Operation Atlantic Resolve—continued through 2017, and the administration’s FY2018 budget called for a $1.4 billion increase in U.S. funding for ERI, a rise of roughly 40 percent. After a rocky start, the U.S. commitment to defend Europe was intact, if on increasingly thin ice.18
Moreover, Trump’s main complaint about NATO—that its European members were not contributing their fair share—was nothing new. Disputes about burden-sharing are as old as the alliance itself, and many previous presidents, secretaries of defense, and congressional leaders had raised this issue, often in language as blunt as Trump’s. In 2011, for example, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates predicted in his farewell speech at NATO headquarters that the alliance would face a “dim if not dismal future” if its European members did not increase spending, warning that “there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or … be serious and capable partners in their own defense.” Barack Obama issued a similar rebuke during a visit to Poland in June 2014 and repeated it at the Warsaw Summit in July 2016.19 National Security Advisor McMaster described Trump’s approach to NATO as a form of “tough love,” and Trump was quick to claim that his hard-nosed approach was working.20 In terms of substance, therefore, Trump’s approach to NATO was not very different from that of his predecessors.
CONFRONTING RUSSIA AND CHINA
Although Trump had stated that he wanted the United States to have positive relations with Russia and China, U.S. policy toward both states remained as wary and competitive as it had been under Obama and Bush. The White House’s 2017 National Security Strategy placed Russia and China front and center among the long-term challenges facing the United States, declaring that the two countries “challenge American power, influence and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”21 Trump was unable to prevent the Republican-controlled Congress from imposing new economic sanctions on Russia in August 2017, which led Russian president Vladimir Putin to order the closing of two American facilities in Russia, and Trump subsequently approved a State Department recommendation to close three additional Russian diplomatic facilities (including its consulate in San Francisco). And in December, with former NATO ambassador Kurt Volker in
place as special envoy to Ukraine and A. Wess Mitchell, former CEO of the hard-line Center for European Policy Analysis, serving as assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs, Trump authorized a $41.5 million sale of lethal arms—including Javelin antitank missiles—to Ukraine, earning kudos from former Obama officials and an angry condemnation from Moscow.22
The rift between Moscow and Washington widened in 2018, after a clash between Russian mercenaries and U.S.-backed militias in Syria and revelations that Russian agents had used chemical weapons in an attempt to murder a former Russian spy now living in Great Britain. The White House released a joint statement with Britain, France, and Germany condemning the attack, while the Treasury Department imposed new sanctions to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 election.23 Although Trump and Putin sought to mend fences at a summit meeting in July 2018, U.S. policy toward Russia during Trump’s first eighteen months in office was if anything more confrontational than it had been under Obama.
Like his predecessors (and especially the Obama administration) Trump also saw China as a major long-term rival. Trump met with Chinese president Xi Jinping on two occasions in 2017 and claimed to have established a “good relationship” with him, and the two leaders authorized annual “strategic dialogues” on critical bilateral issues just as previous U.S. administrations had done.24 But Trump was disappointed by Xi’s refusal to put more pressure on North Korea and remained troubled by the unbalanced Sino-American trade relationship. Xi’s confident and proudly nationalist speech at the 19th Party Congress in October 2017 left little doubt about Beijing’s growing ambitions, and both the White House National Security Strategy and the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy labeled China a “strategic competitor,” criticized its efforts to expand its influence and “undermine regional stability,” and declared that a “geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order is taking place in the Indo-Pacific region.” The National Security Strategy also stressed the importance of U.S. allies (including Taiwan) and said that the United States “would redouble our commitment to established alliances and partnerships.”25
The Defense Department continued to see China as its principal long-term military rival, just as it had under Bush and Obama.26 The U.S. Navy increased the pace of “freedom of navigation” patrols in the South China Sea during 2017, making it clear that the United States still rejected China’s territorial claims in this important international waterway and echoing a point Secretary of State Tillerson had made in his own confirmation hearings.27 The perception of China as a serious long-term competitor also drove Trump’s March 2018 decision to impose targeted tariffs and investment restrictions in retaliation for China’s violations of WTO trade rules and theft of U.S. intellectual property.28 His tactics were different, but the effort to confront a rising China began long before Trump.
NORTH KOREA: THE ONCE AND FUTURE ENEMY
North Korea had been a vexing problem for Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and it remained a headache for Trump as well. The United States had worried about Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program since the early 1990s, and U.S. leaders had seriously considered preventive military action on more than one occasion. Yet North Korea’s nuclear and long-range missile capabilities continued to grow, leading Barack Obama to warn President-elect Trump that North Korea would be the “most urgent problem” he would face as president.29
On the eve of his first meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Trump threw down the gauntlet by declaring, “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will!”30 Trump then engaged in a provocative war of words with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un throughout his first year in office, labeling Kim “Little Rocket Man” and warning that if North Korea continued to threaten the United States, it would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” In December 2017, after Kim boasted that “the whole territory of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear strike and a nuclear button is always on the desk of my office,” Trump took to Twitter to respond, saying, “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”31
Yet bluster and saber rattling aside, Trump eventually chose to rely on sanctions and diplomacy, just as his predecessors had.32 Trump had initially declared that additional North Korean missile tests “would not happen,” but the administration responded to the new round of tests not by taking military action, but by sponsoring a unanimous UN Security Council resolution that imposed a new round of sanctions on Pyongyang.33 U.S. officials continued to warn that “time is running out,” hinting that the United States did have feasible military options, but Trump still declined to roll the iron dice of war.34
The problem for Trump, as for other presidents, was that there was no way to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear arsenal or destroy its missile test facilities without risking an all-out war that might kill hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea, trigger open conflict with China, and cast doubt throughout Asia about the value of U.S. protection.35 As a result, by the end of 2017 Trump had agreed to delay joint military exercises with South Korea until after Seoul had hosted the Winter Olympics and endorsed a South Korean initiative for face-to-face talks with its counterparts from the North. As Trump told reporters in January 2018, “I’d like to see [North Korea] getting involved in the Olympics and maybe things go from there.”36
Where they went was wholly unexpected: in March, a summit meeting between Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in led to an invitation from Kim to Trump for a summit meeting to address the nuclear issue and the other points of contention between the two states. Trump promptly accepted the offer, despite widespread doubts about the wisdom of such a meeting and the lack of any preparations for it.37 The president’s impulsive response was typical, perhaps, but it also underscored his own reluctant recognition that differences with North Korea were best handled via diplomacy.
The two leaders held a brief meeting in Singapore in June and signed a vague agreement to “work toward denuclearization.” Trump subsequently claimed the threat from North Korea was over, but Pyongyang’s actual capabilities had not changed and the meeting was largely a triumph of style over substance.
Nonetheless, the priority Trump now placed on addressing the danger from North Korea differed sharply from the stance he had taken during the 2016 campaign. Before becoming president, Trump had suggested that it might be better for South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons rather than continuing to rely on U.S. guarantees.38 Trump now recognized the United States should take the lead in finding a solution.
ON COURSE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Trump’s approach to the Middle East did not contain major departures either.39 Trump met with the leaders of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia shortly after taking office and reaffirmed U.S. support for each of these long-standing allies. Beginning his first foreign trip in Saudi Arabia in May 2017, he abandoned his harsh attacks on Islam and his earlier criticisms of the kingdom and called instead for a unified Arab front against radicalism, terrorism, and Iran. Trump embraced the ambitious reform campaign of the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman with particular enthusiasm while turning a blind eye toward the prince’s reckless and unsuccessful attempts to counter Iranian influence in Yemen, Lebanon, and Qatar.40 But this was not a new policy either: Obama had done little to rein in Saudi adventurism either, and any U.S. president would have welcomed efforts to relax religious restrictions and diversify the Saudi economy.
Trump’s forceful response to the renewed use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in April was also a revealing reversion to the familiar Beltway playbook. Trump had previously said that the United States should not get involved in Syria—even with airpower alone—but he surprised everyone by ordering cruise missile strikes on the airfield from which the chemical attacks had been conducted.41 This embrace of Beltway orthodoxy had no impact on the war itself—indeed, Assad’s position continued to imp
rove throughout the year—but it won Trump enthusiastic plaudits from Republicans, Democrats, and prominent media pundits. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria put it, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States [last night].”42
Similarly, Trump’s policy toward Iran fits comfortably within the broad and deep anti-Iran consensus that has guided U.S. policy since the fall of the shah in 1979. The president’s opposition to and withdrawal from the 2015 multilateral agreement that blocked Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is an obvious departure from Obama’s approach, but it is not a radical position within the U.S. foreign policy community, despite the extensive criticism it has received from the other parties to the agreement and from many Democrats.43
It is important to remember that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was extremely controversial from the start, and the Obama administration had to wage an uphill fight to win grudging acceptance from Congress. A number of well-funded groups and influential individuals inside the Beltway had worked relentlessly to overturn it, and even many supporters of the deal viewed Iran as an especially dangerous adversary that the United States had to work harder to contain.44 Nor should we forget that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama had all imposed sanctions on Iran, backed its regional opponents, authorized covert actions against it, and either flirted with or openly embraced the goal of “regime change” in Tehran.45 Trump’s decision to unilaterally abandon the deal may have been foolish, but it is hardly a radical break with prior U.S. policy. In fact, it was the JCPOA that was the real exception, and Trump’s decision to jettison it was simply a return to the policy of confrontation aimed at regime change that has long defined U.S. policy toward Iran.46
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 25
