Trump on the Couch

During his failed 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush predicted that, if elected, Donald Trump would become the “chaos president.” Well, more than two hundred days into his four-year term, the general consensus among the mainstream media, various progressive elites, and perhaps even many US allies, is that this jeremiad has indeed come true.

Or has it?

For all the White House chaos and blizzard of rhetorical belligerence, Trump in some ways has managed to defy the doom-and-gloom predictions of his fiercest opponents: the United States has not blundered into either a trade or shooting war; America’s alliances have not been irrevocably sundered (though many EU noses are out of joint) and there has been no Faustian bargain struck with the Tsar in the Kremlin; the immediate North American neighbors, while wary, even bemused, have remained generally on speaking terms, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau managing to walk a diplomatic tightrope with the kind of dextrous adroitness that would shame a trapeze artist.

At least for now.

Of course, the absence of a global cataclysm is not to be regarded as a foreign policy success, at least when judged against the accomplishments of previous American presidents. Then again, Trump is not like previous presidents. On that, few would disagree.

What is particularly astonishing though is that, having weathered a full winter, spring and summer into his presidency, determining what Trump means for America’s place in the world still seems like a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes’ attention. The same questions we asked in January are been asked even as of this writing: Trump talks (and tweets) of radically revising the world order, but does he mean it? Is he actually the “America First” nationalist of his rant-filled, meandering public rallies? Or has he embraced, however grudgingly, the burdens of superpower leadership foisted on him by the generals and “globalists” who now dominate his White House and have so recently ousted the ‘American Firsters’ who’d helped elevate him to power?

In his recent address to the nation on plans for a stepped-up military campaign in Afghanistan, Trump spoke of a “principled realism” as guide to his foreign policy. But this was not Trump unplugged and freewheeling, obviously shackled as he was to a teleprompted script: few really believed that this was a “Trump Doctrine” representing the president’s real views. It is, after all, hardly realistic to threaten North Korea with the “fire and fury” of nuclear annihilation, or to rant and rave on phone calls with close allies such that they question your fitness to govern, not to mention your sanity. We still have no new (or at least coherent) Russia, Mideast policy, or Asia policy to speak of -- and though it’s very obvious that Trump would personally like to shift course on everything from Vladimir Putin (pro) to NATO (against), that doesn’t mean he necessarily will. That’s simply due to the fact that while he would dearly love to govern the United States like a potentate CEO, he’s come to realize that he is no longer in the private sector, that public service plays to different rules. Besides, if there is anything Donald Trump loves more than having his way and riding roughshod over others, it’s “winning.” And there have been precious few substantive wins so far.

So is there a better, more reliable way to "read" Trump and how he sees the world?

Pundits and politicians have offered plenty of insights about the “chaos president” and his evolving (or ever-fungible) approach to the world. Some things really are clearer than before, whether it’s Trump’s insistence on running his own foreign policy show or his predilection for picking up the phone and calling fellow world leaders (with occasionally volatile results, as Australia’s Malcom Turnbull has found out). He may or may not be able to follow through on them, but it’s also very clear that Trump remains firmly attached to some of his most inflammatory foreign policy pronouncements of the 2016 campaign, from his desire to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the Mexican border to his refusal to disavow Putin no matter how incendiary the politics of Russia have become back in Washington.

There is, however a way to take the measure of Trump’s mind. The trick is to realize his very unconventionality (is that even a word?).

1) Unpredictable by Design

From Day One the only thing remotely predictable about Trump's foreign policy is that he essentially said to the world, I'm going to be unpredictable. In the Donald’s mind, America has become entirely too conventional, and like his business career, he relishes to keeping adversaries and competitors alike constantly off balance. There is a certain shrewdness in that approach as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney proved that an occasionally unpredictable America could win wary respect. Their realpolitik strategy of drawing almost every conceivable terrorist movement into Iraq may have cost the US $814 billion since September 2001, thousands of casualties (not to mention the near total ruin of a great culture) but it ensured that forces accustomed to operating in the shadows had to engage US troops openly in as near a conventional war as possible.

In many ways, the current confusion reflects Trump’s own inner zeitgeist -- is he a dealmaker or a wrecking ball, a pragmatist or someone who wants to “kick the sh*t” out of America’s foes? Trump loves making deals but the very means by which he achieved power was through disrupting the political status quo, and the price of that was to bring with him a hard core of Trumptistas who will only grow even more restive as the years go by if he hews to the slow-moving middle course of grinding negotiation. The battle between Steve Bannon, Steven Schmidt on one side, Gary Cohn, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on the other reflects this dichotomy. While it may have been temporarily settled with Bannon’s unceremonious departure, the battle inside Trump’s soul cannot persist forever, and he knows this.

2) The un-Obama.

Any Trump foreign policy pronouncement is accompanied by lamenting the bad hand he was dealt by his predecessor and vows to rectify the issue(s). This by no means makes Trump an exception –- indeed, it’s the clarion call of all newly minted presidents, used and re-used well past shelf lives. Anyone recall Barack Obama still pointing out the 2008 economic crisis he inherited a full two terms in office later? But this particular presidential transition has been unusually vituperative, and it is a fair guess that, given a choice, Trump will continue differentiate from his predecessor by railing at everything from Obamacare to crime stats to the balance of trade deficit with China.

Trump’s cruise-missile strike in Syria, ostensibly in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons on civilians was a calculated contrast to Obama’s less unilateral, and even occasionally feckless policy. Trump clearly felt that U.S. credibility had been undermined by the declaration of a red line, and the refusal to act when that metaphorical line was crossed, even though he himself hadn’t committed to such a course of action. He was also setting a marker for the future: never doubt my threats. In a spectacular break from previous precedent he clearly thought that an overt assertion of raw strength in the face of a clear provocation would be a clear and unambiguous assertion of American prestige, and credibility in a part of the world where violence is the most well-understood diplomatic language.

His recent UN General Assembly speech continued in this vein. It’s a fair bet that the august (if sleepily pretentious) chamber has never heard an American president threaten to wipe another country -- North Korea -- off planet earth. Nor were they ready for the president to apply the disruptive, bellicose, nationalistic persona which propelled him to power in such a verbally muscular way.

As president, Obama’s reputation as a nuts-and-bolts policy wonk rivaled that of Hillary Clinton, or Jimmy Carter. He was as a voracious consumer of written information, the type of smart student determined to be over-prepared for class who’d pore over binder after binder of information his aides accumulated for him, much in the same manner as British ministers plow dutifully through their paper-filled red boxes,

Not so Trump, who by contrast is supremely confident in his ability to wing it, and disregard details (or facts) when he has a presumably qualified cabinet to assist him with occasionally more arcane information? In this sense both men lived up to their types: the technocrat and the CEO.

One thing for sure: Obama’s UN vision of a terrestrial United Federation of Planets is undergoing a slow but sure transition to its Mirror Universe equivalent where diplomacy is usually followed by phrases like “fire and fury.”

3) Middle East Fan Base

The man who is President Not-Obama plays well in the Mideast. There was no subsequent political stability, peace or prosperity in war-torn Iraq even as #44 greatly reduced force levels and certainly did not help American standing in the region. In fact, inadvertently, Obama employed s form of ‘America First’ policy predating Trump’s, by taking care of his troops first before worrying about the shambles the neighbourhood had become.

Enter a new presidential town marshal very likely based in a more bombastic mode of unquiet American likethe flamboyant (or irritating) George w Bush/ LBJ mode: the swaggering loudmouth with missiles strapped to his hips.

Trump fits the loud, ‘strong’ archetype, a guy who will say it as it is, whatever that is, and occasionally even if it makes no sense, as a macho precursor to doing something, anything as opposed to the urbane, effete, erudite Obama, who employed beautiful words but never quite conveyed the sense that they would be followed up with concrete gestures.

Ironically, Trump will doubtlessly see this as a renewed respect for the US in general and him in person.

4) No Tea Parties in Europe

Europe, with its comparatively genteel history, vivid cultures and long tradition of subtlety, love of refinement and strong national egos, was never going to be warming to the nouveax riche from gauche New York.

From the start diplomats, the chorus of intelligentsia, all expressed varying degrees of bewilderment, anxiety, fear and dismay over Trump and what they saw as his in-your-face style.

People were first appalled, and then came dismissive observations about carnival atmospheres and circus sideshows, as if the First Family and the commander-in-chief were amusing entertainment, a kind of monarch who would make bombastic pronouncements whilst other, more cooler heads –- the ‘establishment’ would sweat the details and continue as before. Turns out the joke’s on them. American presidents are traditionally fairly well-informed and when the president of the United States says something, it is something of substance. It should be taken seriously. And certainly, waking up here to a person who has sort of seen something on Fox News, in this particular case, and makes that the subject of the media, public insult, as a matter of fact, to a country, was unprecedented. But his election, as Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron can attest to, was the first wave of the political tsunami that would soon deluge the Ancien Regime.

5) Democracy

Of course they are. This is the self-same Trump who’d spent the first few months of his presidency praising dictators from China’s Xi Jinping (“a good man, a very good man”; “well-respected”) to Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi (“he’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation”) and Turkey’s Recip Tayyip Erdogan, who received a fanfare-laden White House reception. He grinned and laughed through an all-male dance ritual with Saudi Arabia’s famously unisex leaders while promising never to lecture them on the virtues of greater freedoms as his predecessors had. And the(at least initial) praise for Trump – came in for favorable notice (though one hopes the world will be spared photos snapped of a shirtless Trump fishing in the Alaskan wilderness).

Most troubling to most Democrats (and one senses, at least some Republicans) is that Trump’s America Firstism has consistently been rebuked by the more moderate bulk of both parties in an increasingly globalized world where economic integration may well be irresistible, but the GOP’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell remain visibly uncomfortable, even recoiling, at going after a president of their own party, no matter how many times he’d gladly savaged the invasion of Iraq and global war on they helped Messrs Bush and Cheney prosecute.

The simple fact, as we have stated before in previous articles, is that presidential temperament matters, and by extension a president’s words do matter, The world is really a bleak place when the United States of America is not involved in the global discourse. It’s a dark place when the sole hyperpower does not stand up (or does so erratically) for those who just want to have the same basic values that it has. The place once described by Ronald Reagan as “the last best hope for man on earth” should always lead the charge for the right to say what you think and worship as you please and be free from the dreaded knock of the state at night and have the dignity that citizens are entitled to with electing those who are going to govern you. America works best when she leads from power and principle.

6) The Dude

Not long before Trump was inaugurated, his (now former) controversial national security aide Sebastian Gorka offered up a fairly reliable guide to Trumpist foreign policy: the macho theory of the tough guy. To Gorka: “Our foreign policy has been a disaster. We’ve neglected and abandoned our allies. We’ve emboldened our enemies. The message I have—it’s a very simple one. It’s a bumper sticker. The era of the Pajama Boy is over January 20th, and the alpha males are back.”

Oy vey. At the very least “the Alpha Males” sounds like the title of a very cheesy reality show populated by types who’d obtained multiple draft deferments from Vietnam.

So is the Trump Doctrine about recasting America as the type of bully on the world stage who kicks proverbial sand in the face of smaller nations? Or was Gorka’s quip just a rather simian way of espousing a return to the kind of muscular unilateralism that might in effect be more effective in certain scenarios than the “you bad boy”, sanction-loving chidings of the progressives? Or maybe the alpha-male foreign policy is just literally that -- a foreign policy made by and for a team of male valkyries with whom Trump has surrounded himself, men like John Kelly, H.R. Mcmaster or James Mattis.

How about all of the above?

7) Trump is a base player, and not of the musical variety -- which is exactly why he’ll keep blasting not only the media but also the leaders of his own party.

Trump loves seeing himself as the leader of a revolutionary movement, a kind of alt-right ‘Occupy’ at that. This precisely why his seemingly inexplicable politics of are, in reality, actually explicable. Trump won despite, not because, of his party’s establishment -- and he’ll never forget it, or let them forget it Especially because he also happens not to agree with the establishment on key subjects like Russia, international trade, multilateral alliances and the need for a robust projection of American leadership in many of the world’s troubled places.

What the President is slowly coming to understand is that the Great Divide in Washington today is not the traditional one between Republicans and Democrats; it’s between the established elites of the two parties, the neocons, and the outsiders, those who have not had any meaningful influence in government over the last 40 years. And therefore, it was (and is) not merely the act of appointing people who just happen to be Republicans, however nominally: it has to be the right type of Republican, who will treat DC like an occupying force. Donald Trump is a geopolitical non-interventionist. Donald Trump prefers détente to war. Yeah, he’d like to try to negotiate with Putin before we move to the thermonuclear phase. No, he doesn’t think war over Syria, or a no-fly zone there, is a good idea. That’s very antithetical to the two-party orthodoxy, which has run both parties for four decades.

8) He can and will “evolve”

Donald Trump is not a fish which suddenly flops onto a beach and start learning how to walk on his fins. He is 71 and has a worldview already formed.

Trump has, however, shown his willingness, if not to “evolve,” then to try different things, though the two points are exclusive. His actions and comments, however provocative, are designed to impulse people to think other possibilities, alternative opportunities. For, like any other entrepreneur (and it’s important to delineate the difference between this category of business animal from hired guns like career managers) he’s opportunistic, and he’s always working the angles, looking for the main chance that, should the opportunity afford itself, he would like to become the greatest president in modern times.

9) From Russia with Love

Since inauguration day, report after damaging report has come out tying members of Trump’s inner circle, including his own son, to Moscow. Ever since Trump clumsily fired FBI Director James Comey , even many Republicans are getting worried, at least privately. Russia -- and the spiraling investigations of the president and his team --is apparently consuming Trump, and is already causing a huge rift within his party. On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats voted overwhelmingly recently to impose additional sanctions on Russia over his loud objections -- arguably the strongest rebuke of a president on a major foreign policy matter in decades, save a vote of actual outright censure.

So perhaps one surprising result of Trump is his role in triggering a rare act of bipartisanship in a foreign policy ever more devoid of it.

10) So What Does This Tell Us?

Contrary to liberal views Donald Trump is not a child. He’s a septuagenarian New York entrepreneur whose career has instilled in him the occasionally contradictory belief that he can both deal and bully his way through life. He sees no reason to change that hitherto successful approach. But it is certainly shaking up the world more than even he suspected. Almost a year into his first term the America friends and allies around the world have taken for granted for 70 years is no longer something that they can take for granted. The sun no longer rises in the east and sets in the west and there are no more fixed realities.

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