Trump's Foreign Policy Isn't Going to Surprise Us

His foreign policy is going to be the same mix of corruption, incompetence, recklessness, cruelty, and hardline posturing that we saw last time.

Curt Mills tries to make Trump’s first term foreign policy into a success story:

In Mr. Trump’s first term, his results in foreign affairs have generally been underrated. For a “madman,” there were real accomplishments: no new foreign wars, the Abraham Accords between Israel and a handful of Sunni states that many experts on the subject thought were impossible, a focus on China that is now bipartisan, putting allies on notice that they had to more than vaguely contribute to their own defense.

The list of Trump’s “accomplishments” is not very impressive, especially when we set it against the much longer list of destructive failures. The defining feature of Trump’s presidency was his heavy reliance on economic warfare to try to strongarm other states into yielding to U.S. demands. The “maximum pressure” campaigns against North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela that he initiated were complete failures that exacerbated the problems that they were supposed to address. In addition to causing significant harm to tens of millions of people in these countries, Trump’s economic wars yielded only worse results as each of the targeted governments increased the activities that the U.S. opposed. In the case of Venezuela, Trump brought into Marco Rubio’s preferred policy of regime change that ended in embarrassing failure. In every case, Trump put the preferences of ideologues and exiles ahead of the national interest, and in every case he left things worse than he found them.

Trump’s Iran policy stands out as being purely destructive with nothing to show for it at the end except for a couple war scares. When he took office, the U.S. was party to a successful nonproliferation agreement that had verifiably limited Iran’s nuclear program. U.S.-Iranian relations were also on a better footing as a result of the diplomatic breakthrough. It took Trump a little over a year to begin wrecking all of that. First he withdrew the U.S. from an agreement that Iran was complying with, and then he reimposed sanctions. From that point on, Trump kept ratcheting up the economic pressure on Iran in a stupid effort to force Iran to make sweeping concessions that no government would ever make. Pompeo’s list of demands were tantamount to a call for regime change.

One consequence of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran was that U.S. troops started coming under attack in Iraq and Syria from local militias aligned with Iran. Tensions continued rising until the U.S. and Iran came dangerously close to war following the reckless and illegal assassination of Soleimani. It was mostly a matter of luck that no Americans died in the Iranian reprisal that followed. As for Iran’s nuclear program, it started to expand again in response to the pointless U.S. sanctions that Trump kept piling on. By the time Trump left office, the nuclear deal was in tatters just as he wanted it, and the problem that the nuclear deal had successfully contained was worse.

The U.S. came closer to direct conflict with North Korea at the beginning of Trump’s presidency than it had been in decades, but in this case conflict could have escalated to the use of nuclear weapons. That crisis happened in large part because of Trump’s reckless threats, and it was defused only by the efforts of the South Korean government. The brief attempt at negotiating with North Korea that followed was doomed from the start by Trump’s own personnel choices and his preference for maximalist demands. Concluding any agreement with North Korea would have been difficult, but it was never going to happen when the president was being advised by John Bolton, the man responsible for blowing up the Agreed Framework. Because Trump surrounded himself with hardliners like Pompeo and Bolton and because he agreed with them that North Korea should have to give up everything before they saw any sanctions relief, Trump was incapable of reaching a compromise at Hanoi. Burned by the experience with Trump’s unserious outreach, Kim Jong-un has busied himself with building up North Korea’s arsenal and has become even more distrustful of the U.S. There was an opportunity for making significant diplomatic progress in 2018-2019, but Trump and his advisers squandered it.

The “accomplishments” themselves don’t amount to much, either. The normalization agreements between Israel and a few authoritarian Arab states involved the U.S. offering favors and gifts to the latter to get them to formalize the relationships with Israel that they already had behind the scenes. It’s true that Trump’s policy in this area received broad bipartisan applause in Washington, and that should always be a red flag that the policy is likely unwise and not in America’s best interest.

Crediting Trump with not starting any new wars is a good way to distract from the fact that the U.S. was still at war for his entire presidency and Trump didn’t get the U.S. out of any of those conflicts. He escalated every war he inherited, and he came close to getting the U.S. into at least two new ones. He was given an easy way out of involvement in the war on Yemen when Congress passed their war powers resolution to end it, but Trump vetoed the measure. Trump was the most enthusiastically pro-Saudi president we had up until that point. He didn’t just continue the horrible Yemen policy he inherited, but he made a point of increasing U.S. support for the war for years and he opposed all efforts to cut off weapons to the Saudis and their allies.

I am going over all this again because there should be no illusions that Trump is interested in or capable of delivering peace. He is not going to “go to Tehran” or to any other foreign capital as part of some grand bargain, and he is more likely to send troops into Mexico than he is likely to withdraw them from anywhere else. Trump is a militarist, he hates compromise in negotiations, and he habitually surrounds himself with hardliners. I don’t know for sure who would end up serving in a second Trump administration, but I am confident that he would end up choosing incompetents and ideologues just like he did last time. Those are the kinds of people willing to serve him, and that is mostly what the modern Republican Party has to offer these days.

Trump has a good chance of being elected president again, so we need to understand that his foreign policy is going to be the same mix of corruption, incompetence, recklessness, cruelty, and hardline posturing that we saw last time. Peace and wise statecraft aren’t on the menu. If Trump’s second term is anything like the second terms of most other presidents, it will probably be rife with corruption and scandal as the president and his allies take advantage of their last chance at abusing their positions. Contrary to what some of his supporters hoped might happen, Trump never grew into the office, and he isn’t going to govern any better than he did before.