Andreas Kluth: The problem with US foreign policy is the overshooting

The test of intelligent analysis of American foreign policy under President Donald Trump is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The first idea is that Trump, on the whole, is a disaster for America’s long-term stature in the international system, making the world less orderly and more chaotic. The second is that Trump, like a broken clock that’s right twice a day, occasionally has the right instinct.

One such moment occurred last week during his visit to the Middle East. Addressing an audience in Riyadh that included Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump came out with a devastatingly perceptive critique of his predecessors, and in particular the previous Republican president, George W. Bush.

The “gleaming marvels” of Arabia, Trump told his hosts, did “not come from Western interventionists … giving you lectures on how to live.” Those “so-called ‘nation-builders,’ ‘neo-cons,’ or ‘liberal non-profits,’” instead “wrecked far more nations than they built.” They were, Trump said with what sounded like intellectual humility, “intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

Amen. In a few words, Trump deconstructed the messianic hubris of Bush the neo-con and nation-builder, who promised a “humble” foreign policy but was transformed by 9/11 into a “crusading” zealot.

Here’s Bush during his second inaugural address in 2005: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” With one swipe, he was equating national with global interests and setting up democracy as the universal standard. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” Bush went on, denying the inherent tension between realism and idealism. He then warned despots everywhere that America, “with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” will “persistently clarify the choice before every ruler” between “oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.”

And so the U.S. launched a catastrophically misguided war in Iraq and what would turn into a two-decade quagmire in Afghanistan. The hegemon and global cop was not just overreacting but running amok.

The blowback played a large part in defining America’s current political spectrum. At one extreme is the neo-isolationist MAGA wing of the Grand Old Party as embodied by Vice President JD Vance, who in the name of staying out of new “forever wars” would gladly walk away from all foreign commitments if given half a chance.

In the more cerebral middle are centrist Democrats such as Jim Himes, who in 2008 ran against a supporter of Bush’s Iraq war and has been in Congress ever since, nowadays as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’m an internationalist,” he told me just before Trump’s visit to the Middle East, “but the strategic mistakes the United States has made in this generation have been poorly thought-out foreign involvements. So I appreciate Trump's natural allergy to armed conflict, and in particular in the Middle East.”

What then, is the problem with Trump’s foreign policy? The short answer is that for all its acuity, the passage in his speech that I highlighted does not reflect his statecraft.

Trump was not visiting the region to end, say, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which he seems to have given up on (just as he now seems to be walking away from mediating his long-promised peace deal between Russia and Ukraine). Nor was he preparing an extrication of American troops and treasure from the region in the long term, as any strategy consistent with America First would imply.

Instead, he dropped in to feed his monarchical fantasies and to collect disconnected favors and deals — a Qatari order of American Boeings here and a luxury jet for Trump there, scads of money for American microchips here and more scads for Trump’s family businesses there. This is problem number one: Trump thinks in real-estate rather than geopolitical terms, confusing transactions with relationships, institutions and norms.

Relationships are fluid and can be bilateral or multilateral. But they should clearly distinguish between allies, friends, partners, competitors, rivals, adversaries and even (in war time) enemies. Trump gets lost in this differentiation.

He consistently bullies America’s closest allies, such as Canada and Denmark, while rhetorically elevating its adversaries, above all Russia. In his speech in Riyadh, he implied that he, unlike Bush, wouldn’t meddle in the domestic politics of other countries, and he does have remarkably little to say about, say, human rights in China. But he and Vance do pry in the politics of, say, Germany (where they talk up a far-right party shunned by the German mainstream) or South Africa (where they implausibly allege a “genocide” against white Afrikaners).

This is morally as well as strategically suspect. Germany and South Africa are democracies that overcame dark pasts (the Third Reich and Apartheid). The first is anchored in the West and has long relied on the U.S. for its nuclear and geopolitical protection, but is now contemplating other options. The second is among the leaders of the Global South, floating between the U.S. and China and hoping for a world that is more multipolar, meaning less dominated by America.

That brings us to problem number two: Whereas Bush was wrong (and hypocritical) to pretend that America’s interests and ideals were indivisible, Trump errs in pretending that values don’t matter. For example, U.S. intelligence services concluded that bin Salman, his host in Riyadh, “approved” the gruesome killing and dismemberment of a Saudi journalist in Istanbul in 2018. Does that mean that the U.S. should not deal with him? Of course not. Does it mean that the U.S. should treat the Saudi regime — or the strongmen in Moscow and Beijing — as cordially as it has traditionally cooperated with its democratic allies within NATO? Certainly not.

The subtle interplay of interests and values shows up not only in America’s diplomatic relationships but also in its treatment of norms and institutions. They include international law (which the U.S. variously supports and ignores), as well as the many looser “rules” that govern international relations. They also encompass multilateral bodies such as the United Nations, NATO or the World Trade Organization, all of which the U.S. once midwifed because it wanted a more peaceful and prosperous world, but which Trump now derogates and undermines.

This points to problem number three: Trump claims to act solely in America’s national interests and then defines those interests myopically. Selling more American AI chips to the Emiratis is fantastic in theory, but it may do nothing for global stability. Deterring aggression through NATO or keeping the peace through the UN really can stabilize the world. But the U.S. must factor that into its own interests and take the lead.

Trump, Vance and others in the administration have fallen for the false dichotomy that a Republican foreign policy based on “strength” must either hew to Bush’s otherworldly idealism and zealotry or to a crude isolationism that in practice deteriorates into cynical deal-making. If those are the bookends of U.S. thinking on national security today, good policy is instead to be found in the middle of the shelf. Here’s hoping, against the odds, that Trump starts browsing in that section.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.