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For All His Fire And Fury, Trump Hasn’t Changed Much

Ten things we've learned about Trump's unpredictable, anti-Obama, alpha-male, strongman-loving foreign policy.

By SUSAN B. GLASSER

Two hundred and twenty days in, Donald Trump truly is the “chaos president” that his defeated primary rival Jeb Bush warned about.

Or is he?

For all the White House tumult and rhetorical belligerence, Trump in some ways has defied the doom-and-gloom predictions of his fiercest opponents: The United States has not embarked on a new war, whether trade or shooting; America’s alliances have not sundered apart and there has been no grand bargain forged with the strongman in the Kremlin; the neighbors, while wary, have remained on speaking terms with us.

At least for now.

Of course, the absence of a global cataclysm has not often been seen as a sign of robust foreign policy success, at least when judging previous American presidents. Then again, Trump is not like previous presidents. On that, we can all agree.

But what I’m struck by is the extent to which, even a full winter, spring and summer into his presidency, figuring out what Trump means for America’s place in the world still seems like guesswork. We’re asking the same questions today we asked in January: 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 public rallies? Or has he embraced, however grudgingly, the burdens of superpower leadership foisted on him by the generals and “globalists” who now command his White House?

In his recent address to the nation on plans for a stepped-up military campaign in Afghanistan, Trump talked of “principled realism” as a guide to his foreign policy. But few really see a TelePrompter speech as 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. We still have no new Russia policy, or 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 will.

So is there a better, more reliable key to Trump and the world?

Last winter, we launched The Global POLITICO, our weekly podcast on world affairs, with that question in mind and since then we’ve had three former secretaries of state, two current prime ministers, assorted senators and members of Congress from both parties, and numerous experts on global hot spots – and on the volatile new president – to help us make sense of the disruption.

The’ve offered plenty of reliable insights about the “chaos president” and his evolving 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. 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 last year’s 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.

Here are 10 more things we’ve learned about President Trump’s foreign policy on The Global POLITICO, 220 days in to something none of us have ever seen before:

1) Trump is unpredictable by design.

“The only thing maybe predictable about his foreign policy is that he says to the world, I'm going to be unpredictable,” Michael Anton, director of strategic communications for Trump’s National Security Council, said on the podcast this spring. “He’s said many times— he said he thinks that America has been too predictable, and I think he relishes that, to keep adversaries, competitors alike, sort of off balance.”

In many ways, the confusion reflects Trump’s own conflict – is he a dealmaker or a “wrecking ball,” as Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put it in our second episode; a pragmatist or someone who wants to blow it all up? “The challenge is going to be—I’m being honest—so you want to do deals, deals, deals. Or you want to disrupt this and this and this,” Corker said. “You’ve got to decide towards what end.”

2) He wants to be the un-Obama.

Look at any Trump foreign policy pronouncement and you will find one consistent line: the one where he laments the bad hand he was dealt by his predecessor and vows to be different. This by no means makes Trump an exception – remember Obama, still pointing out the 2008 economic crisis he inherited a full two terms in office later? But this presidential transition is unusually hostile, and it is a fair guess that, given a choice, Trump will seek maximum differentiation from his predecessor.

An early example was Trump’s cruise-missile strike in Syria, in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons on civilians. As Anton, his NSC spokesman, noted: “Well, look, the president did deliberately contrast his actions with President Obama, which I think is fair. I think that’s one of the reasons why he took the action he did. I think he felt that U.S. credibility had been undermined by the stating of a red line, and the refusal to act when that red line was crossed, even though he himself hadn’t stated a similar red line. I think he thought that an assertion of American strength in the face of a clear provocation would be valuable to the restoration of American prestige, and American credibility and resolve in the war.”

For their part, Obama’s former advisers are also eager to draw the contrast on substance and style between their careful, deliberate constitutional law professor former boss and the almost flagrantly unprepared, defiantly fact-free president who has followed him.

As Lisa Monaco, Obama’s chief homeland security adviser, described working for him: “He was a voracious consumer of written information,” a brilliant and consummately well prepared student who’d stay up late to read the inches-thick binder his aides would prepare for him. “I likened it to appearing before a tough judge every day.”

Which is just about the most un-Trump description ever.

3) They like him in the Middle East.

When we met early in Trump’s tenure, Qubad Talabani, deputy prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, offered a sharp and quick primer on why President Not-Obama plays so well in the Mideast. “President Obama, when he came into office, his mandate was to get out of Iraq, which you could say is an America First strategy. It is, you know—so, but we saw that getting out of Iraq didn’t help Iraq. It didn’t help the United States in the Middle East. It didn’t help peace and prosperity here.”

But Trump’s appeal there – if few other places in the world – might be about more than just policy. Isa Mohamed, an aspiring novelist from Baghdad at the American University of Sulaymaniyah, summed this up perfectly when we spoke with him in Iraq last winter: “President Trump is an ideal concept for Middle Easterners in general, and Iraqis in particular, because he fits the loud, ‘strong’—and I put strong into quotations here—the loudmouth, ‘the one who will say it as it is,’ and I put that into quotations, as well. So, to them, they can see Trump is doing something, instead of what they saw with Obama, especially with some of Obama’s administration. …We don’t care about articulation in the words; we care about somebody who is saying it out loud, and making all these gestures, because that’s what our presidents, all of them, were doing.”

4) They don’t like him in Europe.

In the spring, I met with former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt in Berlin, on the sidelines of a conference with a number of high-ranking European officials, all of whom expressed varying degrees of bewilderment, anxiety, fear and dismay over Trump. We talked about how Trump had even tweeted a fake-news story about Sweden, an important U.S. ally, and his comments capture much of what I’ve heard in Europe, before and since, on the subject of this president:

“Well, people were appalled and then there was an element of sort of entertainment. They thought the man had gone bananas, the one way or the other. They couldn’t begin to understand it,” Bildt said. “But it was a somewhat unsettling thing to see the president of the United States without any factual basis whatsoever lunge out against a small country in the way that he did. … [W]e are used to the president of the United States being a person who is 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. That is unsettling, to put it mildly. … Donald Trump is probably one of the least popular American presidents on this side of the Atlantic for a very long time.”

5) Democracy promoters – in both parties -- are despairing.

Of course they are. This is Trump, the president who spent the first few months of his presidency praising dictators from China’s Xi Jinping (“a good man, a very good man”) 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 party with Saudi Arabia’s leaders while promising never to lecture them as his predecessors had. And then, of course, there’s his famous affinity for Putin, whose “strength,” toughness, leadership — and praise for Trump — have all come in for favorable notice.

“You can just tell that he has a clear preference for, admiration for strongmen and dictators,” said Tom Malinowski, who spent the last few years as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for human rights (a job still unfilled, as virtually all other assistant secretary posts are at Trump’s State Department). “My goodness, he even has explicitly praised the president of the Philippines campaign of murdering drug users and drug dealers in the thousands. This is, I have to say, just obscene and a complete departure from decades of American tradition.”

Perhaps the most painfully revealing conversation on the new politics of human rights and democracy under Trump I’ve had on The Global Politico was with Condeeleezza Rice, the former Bush secretary of state who had just come out with a book called “Democracy.” Written well before the Trump presidency, it was now being interpreted as a rebuke of Trump’s America Firstism, but Rice, an establishment Republican if ever there was one, remained visibly uncomfortable going after a president of her own party, no matter how many times he’d gladly savaged the invasion of Iraq and global war on terror she and Bush oversaw.

After circling around the Trump issue, we came back to it at the end of the interview, when Rice said: “But yes, words do matter and I follow every day what we’re saying. I hope that we will say even more. That the world is really a dark place when the United States of America is not involved. It’s a dark place when we don’t stand up for those who just want to have the same basic values that we have. The right to say what you think and worship as you please and be free from the knock of the secret police at night and have the dignity that comes with electing those who are going to govern you. Because it’s really served us best when America leads from power and principle and I’m hoping to hear even more of that.”

6) He loves playing the Alpha Male.

Not long before Trump was inaugurated, his controversial national security aide Sebastian Gorka offered up what I thought at the time was, and has since proved to be, a fairly reliable guide to Trumpist foreign policy: the macho theory of the case. Gorka – who seems to have finally been booted out of the White House last week after the ouster of his protector and ideological ally Steve Bannon – told a TV interviewer: “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.”

We discussed this on one of my favorite episodes of The Global Politico, with some very alpha ladies of American foreign policy. “I hope we are not in the world of the alpha males, because they have made an awful lot of mistakes,” former secretary of state Madeleine Albright told me. “And they prod each other onto more alphaness.”

So is the Trump Doctrine about recasting America as a bully on the world stage? Was Gorka’s quip just a crude way of talking about the sort of muscular unilateralism that does in fact often seems to be Trump’s preference? Or maybe the alpha-male foreign policy is just literally that—a foreign policy made by and for a team of almost exclusively men with whom Trump has surrounded himself. How about all of the above?

7) He loves playing to his base – which is why he’ll keep bashing not only the media but also the leaders of his own party.

In many ways, this is why the seemingly inexplicable politics of Trump are actually explicable. Trump won despite, not because, of his party’s establishment – and he’ll never forget it. Especially because he also happens not to agree with them 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.

Many of Trump’s most ardent fans are particularly furious about the ascendance of generals like national security adviser H.R. McMaster along with “globalists” like National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn – a war that’s gone increasingly public as Bannon and other nationalists like Gorka have been pushed out of the White House.

Consider this revealing rant from GOP strategist Roger Stone, a friend of Trump’s for decades who appeared this month on The Global Politico as the war within was escalating:

“Perhaps the president thought that once nominated and elected, the Republicans would fall in line around him. I think what he doesn’t understand is the division in Washington today is not between Republicans and Democrats; it’s between the established elites of the two parties, who are neocons, and the outsiders, those who have not had any influence in government over the last 40 years. And therefore, it was not safe to appoint people who just happen to be Republicans. Why the Trump administration would appoint anyone who was a veteran of the George W. Bush administration is a mystery to me. They have a different philosophy than we do. Donald Trump is a 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 the last 40 years.”

8) Nonetheless, hopes springs eternal among the Washington swamp dwellers Trump so loves to hate, who persist in believing he can and will “evolve.”

Here’s Paul Wolfowitz, the former Bush administration official often called “the architect of the Iraq war” and a neocon of the first order, after Trump’s Syria missile strike. “Look, I think the main thing here has to be getting people to think of the possibilities, to think of the opportunities. I don’t think anyone would deny that he’s opportunistic, and I don’t think anyone would deny that he would like to be the greatest president in modern times, or huge or—you pick your adjective.”

And here’s Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations chairman who’s been critical of Trump – while never ruling out the chance the president just might change gears and produce a policy he could agree with. “What I see happening is an evolution. OK? Where you have someone who was, you know, on a campaign trail. His focus group was these rallies that were taking place. He heard himself say things, and he could see the crowd respond. And in many cases there was again, that nugget that is a root of something that’s real. But over time it can be refined and evolved into something that actually creates a good policy.”

9) Trump evolve? Are you kidding? Three words: Russia, Russia, Russia.

From the first few weeks of his presidency, this is what Rep. Adam Schiff and other Democrats had to say about Trump: He’s in the tank for Putin.

As Schiff put it in an early podcast episode: “This president has a pathological unwillingness to criticize anything the Kremlin does. Now, it may be as simple as the fact that Putin says nice things about him, that the Russians effectively helped him get elected president, and he has a worldview where you’re either for him or against him, and the Kremlin was for him. It may be as simple as that, or there may be more to it.”

But that was months ago, and since then, report after damaging report has come out tying members of Trump’s inner circle, including his own son, to Moscow. Ever since Trump fired FBI director James Comey and said he did so with the Russia probe on his mind, even many Republicans are buying Schiff’s argument, 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 to impose additional sanctions on Russia over his loud objections – arguably the biggest rebuke of a president on a major foreign policy matter in decades.

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) As a result of numbers 1-9, America is now “the epicenter of instability in the world.”

I’ll save the last word for Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, former deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, and as close to a Washington wise man as there is left these days:

“I don’t want to characterize or cartoonize the president of the United States as a child. He’s a septuagenarian who thinks he can both deal and bully his way through life. It’s worked for him in a number of ways before his political career, his extraordinary political career. And he seems to think that it still works. But it is certainly shaking up the world more than I suspect—I hope he doesn’t realize how much it has shaken up the world. I had a very high placed Asian official from a major ally in Asia not long ago, where you’re sitting, who shook his head with sorrow, and said, “Washington, D.C. is now the epicenter of instability in the world.” Which doesn’t mean that there’s violence going on here. What it means is something that our friends and allies around the world have taken for granted for 70 years is no longer something that they can take for granted.”