President Trump doesn’t have a coherent foreign policy that allows him to address North Korea, Syria, and Russia. Instead he uses foreign policy as a way to satisfy his emotional needs.
For more than two years now, pundits and policy wonks have been trying to ascertain the principles of Donald Trump’s foreign policy – a task that’s proven roughly analogous to trying to derive the ethical convictions of an empty bag of Doritos from the way it moves in the wind.
The president has argued that NATO is obsolete, and then reiterated America’s commitment to defending its NATO allies. He’s derided diplomacy with North Korea as pointless, then agreed to an unprecedented, face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong-Un; decried America’s war in Afghanistan as a total waste, then sent more troops to fight it; insisted that Bashar al-Assad’s talent for killing terrorists was more important than his crimes against humanity, then ordered a missile strike to punish the Syrian ruler for using chemical weapons; likened China’s trade policies to “rape,” then showered praise on Xi Jinping; and condemned the architects of the Iraq War as a band of idiotic globalists, before making John Bolton his national security adviser.
But in a series of tweets Wednesday morning, Trump took the incoherence of his foreign policy to new heights. In recent days, the president has called for removing all U. S. troops from Syria, and touted the supreme importance of maintaining good relations with Russia. Throughout his campaign and presidency, Trump has argued that the worst thing a commander-in-chief can do is telegraph his intentions to an adversary. And yet, shortly after waking Wednesday, the president informed Russia that he would soon launch a missile strike against the “Gas Killing Animal” in Damascus whether they liked it or not.
Within an hour, Trump was once again arguing that maintain warm relations with Moscow should be a top priority of U. S. foreign policy – and blaming American law enforcement for jeopardizing that goal.
By Thursday morning, the president was insisting that he’d never told Russia to prepare for incoming missiles, at all.
Given the dizzying dissonance of Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements, one might reasonably conclude that there is no such thing as the “Trump Doctrine”: The president’s foreign policy isn’t derived from principles, but rather, from a complex series of interactions between the Fox News channel’s programming decisions, the national security state’s institutional inertia, and Trump’s fickle moods.
And yet, one could also argue that the president’s subordination of consistency to self-indulgence on matters of foreign policy is, itself, a kind of principle.
