What's the strategic compass for Donald Trump?

Trump is struggling to show he can deliver on promises much more complex than he could have imagined

Henry Kissinger once observed that you need to do the real conceptual thinking before getting to power because, once you are there, events are coming so fast and there are so many things to handle that you don’t always have much time for in-depth thinking. Donald Trump might have been well advised to heed this advice. Elected on riding the mood of popular frustration and thanks to trenchant positions and many outrageous soundbites, the 45th President of the United States is now frenetically struggling to show that he is a leader who can deliver on his promises in a domestic and international environment much more complex and resistant to his whims than he could have imagined. In many ways, he is now paying the price of not having taken beforehand the time to study and think through conceptually the challenges he would have to confront at home and abroad, and the implications of the decisions he might have to make to address them.

President Trump is already assured to figure well in the Guinness book of records: No elected leader in the Western world (and presumably elsewhere) has ever reneged on so many campaign pledges in so short a time: In just 90 days at the White House the US leader has — among many other examples — moved from pledging on the first day in office to denounce China as a currency manipulator” to saying that Beijing is indeed NOT manipulating the yuan; from labelling NATO as “obsolete” to saying that NATO is “a relevant alliance”; from saying that Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairperson, “should be ashamed of herself” to confiding that he “likes her and respect her” and implying that he could re-appoint her; from labelling the US Import-Export Bank as “unnecessary” to now recognising that “it is a very good thing”. The list could continue and would of course also comprise how Mr Trump was praising Russian president Vladimir Putin to now admitting that relations with Russia are “at an all-time low”; or how candidate Trump tacitly admitted that he could not care less if Bashar Al Assad would remain in power in Damascus as the US should only focus on its fight against ISIS, to now qualifying the Syrian leader as a “butcher”.

The same is also true in the domestic political domain where the initial attempt to repel Obamacare and replace it by a new healthcare plan has ended in an embarrassing defeat, which will have an impact on the ability of the new administration to move as fast as it had promised on tax reform. Ditto for the threats — or promises — of 20 per cent tax/tariffs on goods coming from Mexico or China, which are proving not so easy to implement; same for the pledge of a $1-trillion infrastructure programme to be launched very fast after the inauguration of the new administration but which will have to wait until next year for possible first steps of implementation as issues on the financing and management of the programme are just being discovered and the understaffing of relevant government administrations is slowing down the process. 

There are of course some key instances where Mr Trump has already translated his fierce campaign rhetoric into action such as the abrogation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP); or the green light to the Keystone pipeline project to transport Canadian crude oil to US refineries on the Gulf Coast — which had been blocked by the Obama administration out of environment concerns; or the abrogation of the coal-mining regulations also set by the previous administration. And, this to the despair of the many opponents of the President.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

At the same time, many of the “adjustments” to reality made by Mr Trump, such as the recognition that NATO remains “relevant”, have been welcomed by those who were afraid that the new president was taking the US into uncharted waters. It was interesting to see how some of the harshest critics of the new administration have been lavishing praise on the White House for the US bombing of a Syrian air base in retaliation against the chemical attack by Damascus on the town of Khan Sheikhoun held by a rebel group. This was — a long last — a US president acting against a “rogue” regime having crossed a red line! Some commentators even fancied themselves into seeing in this action an indication of a new “Trump doctrine” or an alleviation of their concerns about the new administration’s isolationist bent or its lack of concern for human rights issues. 

Mr Trump may have been genuinely moved by the horrific pictures of victims of the chemical attack. At the same time, he explained his decision to bomb because it is “in the vital national security interest of the US to prevent and deter the spread of chemical weapons”. It would probably be more accurate to see the bombing decision not as an indication of a return to any will or temptation of “regime change” but as a message to Moscow to keep its client regime in Damascus in a tighter leach. The retaliatory strike in Syria or the dropping of “the mother of all bombs” against a base of ISIS fighters in Afghanistan or the sending of an US naval strike group in the Korean peninsula are not signs that Mr Trump is not turning the US into an isolationist country — which, one suspects, has never been this President’s intention. They need to be seen in a context of this administration taking actions on the sole basis — and on the sole rationale — of asserting US national interests as Mr Trump and some key people around him define them. 

The question is whether these national interests will be assessed in an integrated conceptualised approach, organised in the framework of a long-term strategic view and not seen in a kind of sequential way from crisis to crisis. There is no indication of such integrated conceptual approach being defined at the moment in Washington. One reason for that might be the very slow pace in filling key positions in the foreign policy, defence, national security apparatus in Washington. Another reason is probably Mr Trump himself: A person of impulses, inclined to think that you can just go from one “deal” to the next. 

There is much to be concerned about this approach as national security challenges continue to pile up in the US-China relationship despite the “good atmosphere” summit with President Xi Jinping, in the need to tame with Pyongyang rogue regime without generating dangerous “unintended consequences”, in the enduring challenge of dealing with a Mr Putin bent on restoring Russia as a key global power, or in the re-calibrating of the relationship with a Europe more than ever anxious about its future and its role in the world.  
 

The writer is President of Smadja & Smadja, a strategic advisory firm

@ClaudeSmadja