This selective approach was clearly in evidence in December 2017, when antigovernment demonstrations broke out in Iran. Suddenly an administration that had paid scant attention to these issues rediscovered them with a vengeance. Trump launched his usual blizzard of tweets, saying the “great Iranian people had been oppressed for years” and denouncing the government’s “numerous violations of human rights.”87 The State Department issued an official statement condemning the arrest of “peaceful protestors” and included in it congressional testimony by Secretary Tillerson declaring his support for “those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of government.”88 Other administration officials, most notably the CIA director Mike Pompeo (who later succeeded Tillerson as Secretary of State) also favored continued efforts to foster regime change in Iran.
Regime change and democracy promotion remained the ultimate U.S. objective in Syria as well. In a public address at Stanford University in January 2018, Secretary of State Tillerson announced that U.S. troops would remain in Syria for an indefinite period following the final defeat of ISIS, noting that “a stable, unified and independent Syria ultimately requires post-Assad leadership in order to be successful.”89
Moreover, Trump’s personal indifference to human rights or democracy did not stop other arms of the government from continuing to promote them.90 The State Department suspended nearly $200 million worth of economic and military aid to Egypt in August 2017, citing human rights concerns, and its annual report on religious freedom offered blunt criticisms of China, Bahrain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and several other countries. Members of Congress and U.S. diplomats openly criticized the ongoing assault on press and academic freedoms in Hungary, and the White House itself issued a statement condemning rising political repression in Cambodia, despite Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen’s blatant attempt to curry favor with Trump at the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in November 2017.91
Democracy promotion and human rights had been downgraded, but these goals had not vanished entirely from the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Neither had regime change, at least when dealing with acknowledged adversaries such as Iran or the Assad regime in Syria. The administration’s public stance was clearly at odds with the idealistic rhetoric of Bill Clinton’s commitment to democratic “enlargement” or George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda,” but it was also a reasonably accurate description of what the United States had done in the past. In fact, earlier administrations had often been embarrassingly inconsistent in defending these principles, and one could argue that Trump’s appointees were merely stating openly what their predecessors had tried to obscure.
Perhaps the most dramatic sign of Trump’s capture by the status quo was his decision to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan in August 2017. Despite his repeated insistence that the United States needed to “get out of the nation-building business,” a reluctant Trump bowed to military pressure and agreed to increase U.S. force levels in Afghanistan to more than fifteen thousand troops. In his speech announcing the decision, Trump insisted that U.S. forces would focus on counterterrorism rather than on nation-building, and he justified the increased troop presence as necessary to prevent a vacuum that terrorists “would instantly fill.”92 Preventing Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for terrorists was the same rationale Barack Obama had invoked to justify his own “surge” there back in 2009.
Trump claimed that U.S. military commanders had a “new strategy” for the seventeen-year-old conflict, one that would be guided by conditions in the field rather than by arbitrary deadlines. There was no new strategy, however, and no way to deny terrorists a “safe haven” in the absence of an effective and legitimate Afghan government. As Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution observed after Trump’s speech, “It’s fine to oppose ‘nation-building,’ but you can’t have it both ways … There’s no way to ‘defeat’ the Taliban without much-improved governance.” In any case, the United States was still committed to providing several billion dollars in annual aid to the Afghan military and central government, much of it devoted to “capacity building.”93 Under Trump, therefore, the United States was still trying to use military power, economic aid, and political advice to create a workable democracy in Afghanistan. However reluctant Trump was to admit it, “nation-building” was still occurring on his watch.
WHY TRUMP FAILED
In several key respects, therefore, Trump’s intended revolution in U.S. foreign policy was stillborn. Although his conduct as president defied convention and raised eyebrows at home and abroad, his impact on the substance of policy was more limited. Unfortunately, to the extent that Trump did initiate real change, he weakened the U.S. position instead of strengthening it.
What had gone wrong? To be fair, Trump faced an inescapable dilemma from the moment he won the election. His strident criticisms of liberal hegemony had alienated most of the foreign policy community, leaving him with few powerful or experienced allies inside or outside government. If he had tried to staff his administration solely with people who shared his worldview, dozens of jobs would have been left unfilled and the people he did appoint would undoubtedly make lots of rookie mistakes. But if he turned to more experienced foreign policy experts who knew how to make the machinery of government work, they would still be committed to most aspects of liberal hegemony, and the foreign policy revolution Trump had promised would never get off the ground.
And that is in fact what happened: once Trump’s more extreme foreign policy appointees had flamed out and been replaced, the people around him worked overtime to tame his worst instincts. As Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution observed as Trump’s first year in office neared its end, “It’s the first time, maybe in history, key advisors have gone into the administration to stop the president, not to enable him.”94
Nor was Trump able to win over skeptics or play “divide and rule” within the foreign policy community. This failure was not surprising, as he did not hesitate to malign key elements of the foreign policy and national security bureaucracy—including the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—whenever it suited him. Not surprisingly, this approach kept much of the inside-the-Beltway “Blob” united against him.
For example, Trump repeatedly disparaged the intelligence community’s nearly unanimous conclusion that Russia had tried to influence the 2016 election by promoting false news stories and releasing a trove of embarrassing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s computers. Trump believed that these reports tarnished his victory over Clinton, cast doubt on his legitimacy as president, and were fueling the growing suspicions of collusion between his campaign and Russia. Angered by the persistent rumors, Trump told reporters before his inauguration that “it was disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information [out] that turned out to be so false and fake. That’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did.” Needless to say, his suggestion that the CIA or other intelligence agencies were acting like Nazis provoked a furious response, with former CIA director John Brennan denouncing Trump’s remarks as “outrageous.”95
Trump’s visit to CIA headquarters the day after his inauguration made a bad situation worse. Speaking in front of the memorial wall honoring CIA personnel who had died in service, Trump offered a brief statement of support for the agency and its mission but devoted much of his speech to a rambling attack on the media and a defense of his claim that the crowd attending his inauguration was larger than that of Obama. A senior intelligence official later described it as “one of the most disconcerting speeches I’ve ever seen.”96
Trump’s handling of the State Department didn’t help either. Proposals for steep budget cuts and Tillerson’s decision to launch a protracted, top-to-bottom reorganization led to a wave of resignations, and morale within the department quickly hit rock bottom. A bipartisan chorus of critics began lambasting Trump for gutting a critical department, and form
er State Department counselor (and prominent Trump critic) Eliot A. Cohen judged Tillerson to be “the worst Secretary of State in living memory.”97 The president seemed unconcerned, however; when asked by reporters in November about the raft of diplomatic positions still waiting to be filled, Trump replied, “Let me tell you: the one that matters is me. I’m the only one that matters.”98
Yet Trump’s failure to fully staff the State Department with like-minded disciples may have crippled his efforts to shake up U.S. foreign policy, for it left key policy areas in the hands of interim officials from the career civil service rather than being guided by outsiders who shared Trump’s views. Ironically, Trump and Tillerson had managed to weaken a critical instrument of U.S. foreign policy while failing to convert it to Trump’s own worldview. Nor was Tillerson’s replacement by CIA director Mike Pompeo, a hawkish former congressman, likely to restore the department’s fortunes, given Pompeo’s own fondness for military responses and apparent disregard for traditional diplomacy.
Not surprisingly, well-placed neoconservative and liberal internationalists lost no time in bemoaning the waning of U.S. global leadership, and media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post offered consistently critical views of Trump’s foreign policy initiatives.99 By the summer of 2017, even the more sympathetic Wall Street Journal was publishing hard-hitting articles and commentaries questioning Trump’s handling of foreign policy and his overall leadership style.100 Trump’s approval rating fell steadily throughout his first year despite decent economic growth and a sky-high stock market, at one point hitting the lowest levels recorded by any first-year president since the advent of modern polling.101
HIS OWN WORST ENEMY
Orchestrating a major shift in U.S. grand strategy would have challenged the political gifts of a Roosevelt or a Lincoln, and Trump was a far cry from these canny, subtle, and farsighted leaders. He had come to high office late in life, after an up-and-down business career roiled by lawsuits and bankruptcies, with a long list of disgruntled clients and former partners and what might charitably be described as a flexible attitude toward truth.102 These traits were all on full view once he became president, and a management style that may have worked tolerably well in a family-run real estate business proved to be poorly suited to the Oval Office. More than anything else, Trump turned out to be his own worst enemy.
For starters, he was a poor judge of talent. He had repeatedly promised that he would hire “the best people,” but no previous president had to fire his first choice as national security advisor after twenty-four days, replace his handpicked White House communications director after less than two weeks on the job, or remove his “chief political strategist” after less than eight months. Five months into his first term, Trump had earned a reputation as the “worst boss in Washington,” and numerous insider accounts described him as uninformed, capricious, disinterested in detailed policy discussions, acutely sensitive to criticism, and having an inexhaustible need for adulation.103 His own secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, reportedly referred to Trump as a “moron” during a meeting with senior national security officials, and Tillerson refused to explicitly deny the story.104 One senior Republican insider described the White House as a “snake pit,” and an unnamed White House staffer called it “the most toxic work environment on the planet.” By the end of Trump’s first year, turnover among senior aides was a remarkable 34 percent, an all-time record.105
The turmoil continued into Trump’s second year: Tillerson was fired by tweet in March; National Economic Council chair Gary Cohn was replaced by Lawrence Kudlow, a conservative TV pundit with a checkered past and minimal policy experience; and national security advisor McMaster was eventually removed in favor of former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, a hard-line senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Trump defended the revolving door of departures and new appointments by saying “there will always be change. I think you want to see change.” Having described his initial team as “one of the finest groups of people ever assembled as a Cabinet,” Trump now claimed the various dismissals meant he was “close to having the Cabinet he wanted” after more than a year on the job.106
Moreover, Trump was embroiled in potential scandals even before he took the presidential oath, some involving conflicts of interest with his business holdings and others revolving around the possibility that Trump, his sons, or members of his campaign staff had colluded with Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. Whatever the merits of the accusations, Trump’s defensive responses made things worse. In particular, his decision to fire FBI director James Comey in May 2017—after Comey refused to halt an FBI investigation of former national security advisor Michael Flynn—led Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel, former FBI chief Robert Mueller, to investigate possible connections between Russia and the Trump campaign.107 Trump’s political opponents may have rushed to judgment on this tangled set of issues, but the president and some of his closest associates had stoked the accusations by consistently behaving as if they had something to hide.108 The end result was a persistent distraction that further undercut Trump’s ability to govern effectively.109
Furthermore, while Trump’s compulsive, boastful, insulting, juvenile, and frequently inaccurate tweets may have helped him retain support among his political base, they reinforced concerns about his judgment and lent credence to continuing concerns about his fitness for office.110 So did his penchant for lying; by one estimate, Trump made six times as many false statements in his first ten months in office as Barack Obama had in eight years.111 Making matters worse, Trump later boasted openly about having lied to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, an admission not likely to encourage other politicians to trust him.112 No one expects politicians to tell the whole truth all of the time, but how could foreign leaders have any confidence in assurances given by a man who lied with such facility and frequency?113
Trump’s unguarded comments sometimes undercut other U.S. officials, as when he tweeted in October that Secretary of State Tillerson was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with North Korea.114 At other times, they simply sowed doubt, as no one could tell when Trump’s tweets were genuine statements of U.S. policy or when he was just blowing off steam. Over time, these unpresidential antics had a decidedly negative effect on U.S. credibility. As Pierre Vimont, former French ambassador to the United States and former aide to the EU commissioner for foreign affairs, put it in January 2018, Trump’s tweets made it harder to grasp “the real policy line from Washington … we have difficulty understanding where U.S. leadership is, what they are really looking for.”115
Compounding these problems was Trump’s reflexively combative personality. As he had with his domestic opponents, Trump did not hesitate to insult or demean foreign leaders who disagreed with him. For example, what were intended as friendly “get-acquainted” phone calls with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull quickly degenerated into testy arguments over trade and immigration policy, with Trump telling Turnbull that their conversation “was the most unpleasant call all day … This is ridiculous.”116 An early meeting with British prime minister Theresa May went smoothly, but Trump lashed out after May said he had been wrong to retweet a set of inflammatory anti-Muslim videos, telling May to “focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom!”117 Britons were equally incensed when Trump misrepresented a statement by London mayor Sadiq Khan following a terrorist attack there and used it to falsely accuse Khan of being complacent about terrorism.118
Trump’s petulant disregard for allied leaders reached new heights at the G-7 meeting in June 2018, where he reportedly tossed candy on the table in front of German chancellor Angela Merkel and told her, “Don’t say I never give you anything.” He left the meeting early, removed his signature from the official communiqué, and called Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “very dishonest” afte
r Trudeau expressed disappointment with the new U.S. tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel. 119
Finally, although Trump may have instinctively grasped the worst flaws of liberal hegemony, he did not have a well-thought-out alternative to offer in its stead. He saw world politics as a purely zero-sum contest in which there are only winners and losers, but he seemed to have no clear sense of (1) what America’s core strategic interests are, (2) what regions matter most (and why), or (3) why a world of sovereign states still needs effective rules to manage key areas of joint activity. And some of his deepest convictions about international affairs—such as his neo-mercantilist views on international trade or his denial of climate change—were simply wrong.
By contrast, the foreign policy community (aka “the Blob”) that Trump had disparaged during the 2016 campaign did have a worldview: liberal hegemony. It also had the capacity to defend it. As Patrick Porter notes, “The Blob enjoys a number of advantages. As well as influence within the security bureaucracy, it can attack the legitimacy of measures that offend tradition. It can act through the courts and the quiet resistance of civil servants, and articulate alternatives through well-funded think-tanks. It has strong institutional platforms in Congress, links to a powerful business community, and a network of Nongovernmental Organizations.” The “Blob” could not prevent Trump from altering policy in certain areas—sometimes significantly—but it was a constant brake on his worst instincts.120
Together with Trump’s limitations as a manager and leader, these features produced a parade of blunders large and small. Some of the mistakes were minor ones, such as getting names and titles of foreign leaders wrong in official communiqués or releasing official statements with elementary spelling mistakes, factual errors, or displays of ignorance.121 In July 2017, for example, a White House press release at the G20 summit mistakenly identified Chinese president Xi Jinping as the leader of Taiwan and erroneously referred to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan as “president.”122 Trump also made some embarrassing slips of his own, such as his unwitting disclosure of sensitive classified information in a May 2017 meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.123
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 27
