\n<\/p>\n
The sight of the Indian, Russian, and Chinese heads of state holding hands in late August led even Donald Trump to concede that the U.S. had \u201clost\u201d India and Russia to China. But the president suggested that he wasn\u2019t bothered: \u201cMay they have a long and prosperous future together!\u201d he wrote on Truth Social.<\/p>\n
Behind the display of bravado, Trump must surely have sensed that his approach to foreign policy was catching up with him. His signature style, which involves breaking trust with America\u2019s friends while alternately cozying up to and lashing out at its competitors, rests on a notion central to his self-conception: the deal.<\/p>\n
As dealmaker in chief, Trump has turned U.S. trade negotiations into a series of deals, haggled with Nvidia and AMD on China exports so America could get in on the deal, and called an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement the \u201cultimate deal.\u201d He covets the Nobel Peace Prize, ostensibly as a tribute to his dealmaking prowess.<\/p>\n
Yet Trump has little to show for his methods: no end to the war in Ukraine, no new modus vivendi with Russia or China, no progress on Middle East peace, no breakthroughs on trade, and certainly no Nobel Peace Prize. The recent rupture in relations with India follows breaches with Europe and Canada. Mexico may be next.<\/p>\n
Why is Trump\u2019s dealmaking backfiring so spectacularly? The answer may lie in his dismissal of an important bit of American dealmaking folklore: namely, that a deal is a deal.<\/p>\n
Several aspects of Trump\u2019s posture, although ill-suited to the current moment, are not new. He hesitates to make long-term commitments and has a penchant for acting alone\u2014traits he shares with a unilateralist strain in U.S. foreign-policy making that persisted well into the 20th century. He takes pride in driving a hard bargain, as have other tough American negotiators, including Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker.<\/p>\n
But a crucial difference separates these statesmen from Trump\u2019s team: They were credible. They knew that American power and influence depended on the conviction, among both friends and enemies, that if the U.S. reached an agreement, it would keep its word. And they knew that America would cease to be able to reach agreements if it could not be counted on to deliver on its commitments.<\/p>\n
At times the concern with credibility was excessive. It kept the country from cutting its losses as quickly as it needed to, for instance in Vietnam and more recently in Afghanistan. But the underlying idea was that a reputation for keeping commitments would deter enemies and attract friends. Allies who felt confident that America would keep its promises were willing to accede even to disadvantageous requests\u2014such as equipping their militaries with hardware that only the U.S. made, or forswearing nuclear weapons despite living in a nuclear-armed neighborhood, or endorsing Washington\u2019s sanctions or export controls on powers that might otherwise have been friendly to them.<\/p>\n
When America goes back on its word, leaving allies exposed, such countries learn their lesson and start hedging. Having paid a price for relying on America, they draw closer to others they may need to depend on in the future. They are less receptive when America asks them to take costly action to serve American interests, because the payoff of America reciprocating the goodwill is no longer there. America may then try to extract concessions with threats in place of promises, but even this may be ineffective, because a country that can\u2019t be trusted to fulfill a promise also can\u2019t be trusted to rescind a threat.<\/p>\n
James Baker, who came to his posts atop the Treasury and State Departments with next to no diplomatic chops but ample experience cutting deals as a Texas lawyer, echoed that point when asked about the secret to his success. \u201cThe worst thing you can do, in my opinion, in a negotiation is to get caught in a lie,\u201d he said in 2020, reflecting at age 90 on his long career. \u201cThen it\u2019s almost all over, because the other guy thinks to himself, Boy, I can\u2019t trust anything this fellow says<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n That about sums up U.S. foreign policy today: No one trusts what we say.<\/p>\n Trump, like any president, has the right to develop his own foreign policy, and no one should pursue a policy just because a predecessor did so. Yet just as judges appeal to precedent to create stability and predictability in the law, policy makers must be attentive to the risks of casually discarding their nation\u2019s commitments. This is especially true for commitments that touch on what the historians Philip Zelikow and Ernest May called \u201ccapital-P\u201d policies\u2014policies that have a \u201cdeep underpinning\u201d in America\u2019s history and embody \u201cwidely held views regarding national interests\u201d as well as \u201cwidely accepted axioms about how a nation should behave.\u201d<\/p>\n One can argue that Trump was elected to disrupt the old elite nostrums. But Trump is not only disrupting his predecessors\u2019 deals\u2014whether NATO or AUKUS or the World Health Organization or the Paris Agreement. He\u2019s undermining his own diplomacy.<\/p>\n He imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico because he had complaints about the 2020 agreement between America and those two countries\u2014a treaty that he negotiated and championed in his first term. He promised European allies that he would levy sanctions on Russia if Vladimir Putin didn\u2019t agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine\u2014then concluded his summit with Putin in Alaska without any such agreement. He slapped a 50 percent tariff on India months after he\u2019d welcomed Narendra Modi to the Oval Office, toasted him as his \u201cgreat friend,\u201d and committed to doubling trade between the two nations by 2030. South Korea promised to ramp up investment in U.S. manufacturing, only for Trump to follow up a recent meeting with the country\u2019s new president by arresting hundreds of Korean workers in an immigration raid at a Hyundai construction site in Georgia. Even countries that have not experienced Trump\u2019s betrayal directly can read the signs, which aren\u2019t subtle.<\/p>\n China and Russia have long sought to rewire the world for their own purposes and recruit others to their cause. They now have a target-rich environment. And they recognize that even when Trump is mad at them, the threatened consequences\u2014new tariffs, export controls on chips, sanctions, or security guarantees to countries that are countering their ambitions\u2014are either never imposed or quickly rolled back once Trump determines that they may cost him politically.<\/p>\n China has held firm in the face of Trump\u2019s tariffs and been rewarded with the option to purchase U.S.-designed chips that are foundational to global leadership in artificial intelligence. Russia has pocketed the gain in stature from Trump\u2019s diplomatic overtures and conceded nothing in return. Trump inverts the motto popularized by his onetime secretary of defense Jim Mattis: Instead of \u201cno better friend, no worse enemy,\u201d Trump\u2019s America is a fickle friend that leaves the field to its opponents.<\/p>\n In the short term, Trump has scored some legitimate wins: NATO allies have promised to pay more for their own defense, Asian allies have offered more favorable terms of trade, and Ukraine has granted the U.S. expanded access to crucial minerals. But as his relentless pressure on allies becomes the new normal, those allies have every reason to adapt to protect themselves rather than accede to his demands.<\/p>\n Trump has now been the primary actor in both American and global politics for more than a decade. No one can argue that he, or the MAGA movement he leads, is a passing phenomenon. And no country\u2019s leadership is under any illusion about what a deal with Trump is worth.<\/p>\n And so a number of countries are seeking to \u201cde-risk\u201d from America\u2014to diversify supply chains, reduce dependency on American technology, and strengthen partnerships with other countries\u2014in the same way America once pushed them to \u201cde-risk\u201d from China. What was conspicuous at the summit last month was not only the links between Russia and China, who professed a \u201cno limits\u201d partnership several years ago, but the eagerness of countries such as India, Egypt, Turkey, and Vietnam\u2014all of which the U.S. has courted over the better part of several decades\u2014to join this ascendant club.<\/p>\n America continues to have a stronger hand than any other single country in the world, but its power is not unlimited. The rest of the world produces more than two-thirds of all goods and services, and the U.S. lags behind China in both manufacturing capacity and leadership in several important technologies.<\/p>\n Trump may want to restore America\u2019s industrial base, make the U.S. preeminent in the industries of the future, pay less for troop deployments, counter China and Iran, and curb the drug trade, but he cannot make these things happen by himself. And the more he tries, the more the flaws in his strategy are exposed. His promises to end wars\u2014in the case of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, in 24 hours\u2014have gone nowhere. Rather than striking deals, he issues angry missives on Truth Social.<\/p>\n Marco Rubio, Trump\u2019s national security adviser and secretary of state, once suggested that his predecessors in the Biden administration would be \u201cpolite and orderly caretakers of America\u2019s decline.\u201d The irony is that while Trump has taken pride in being neither polite nor orderly, the decline in America\u2019s position has been swifter than nearly anyone imagined. There is no easy way to reverse it\u2014but a president who knows how to strike a deal could make a worthy start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The sight of the Indian, Russian, and Chinese heads of state holding hands in late August led even Donald Trump to concede that the U.S. had \u201clost\u201d India and Russia to China. But the president suggested that he wasn\u2019t bothered: \u201cMay they have a long and prosperous future together!\u201d he wrote on Truth Social. Behind<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[14133,14134,258,328,71,811],"class_list":{"0":"post-23118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-dealmaking","9":"tag-degraded","10":"tag-foreign","11":"tag-policy","12":"tag-trumps","13":"tag-u-s"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}