The U. S.’s relationship with Russia isn’t great, the trade war with China is very much on, and North Korea still has nukes.<\/b>
\nThe past four days has seen three foreign policy promises made by President Donald Trump deflate like a dropped souffl\u00e9, and in pretty public fashion, no less.
The president spent most of 2018 engaging in some measure of tough-talk against Russia, China, and North Korea. As of now, the promises of having the best relationship with Russia, of wiping out America\u2019s massive trade deficit with China, and of getting rid of North Korea\u2019s nuclear and long-range ballistic missiles all seem pretty far out of reach.
Let\u2019s take a look at the latest developments on three of President Trump\u2019s favorite tough-talking foreign policy issues:
This is the most complicated of the three cases, largely owing to the extent to which President Trump seems thirsty for acceptance from Russian elite, certainly including President Vladimir Putin.
This capitulation peaked during the July summit in Helsinki, which ended with Trump giving a joint press conference with Putin. Before international media, he let Putin walk all over him, never pushing back against the country\u2019s meddling in the 2016 elections that put Trump in office (as pretty much every U. S. intelligence agency has concluded to be the case).
The \u201c extraordinary relationship \u201d President Trump predicted has, thus far, not materialized with Putin, with Russia on Monday canceling Putin\u2019s visit to Washington.
Putin\u2019s spokesperson\u00a0 told Russian media that the two leaders are currently in an \u201cuntenable pause\u201d after President Trump canceled a planned bilateral meeting with Putin at the G20 Summit in Argentina over the weekend.
Trump said he called the meeting off after Russia seized Ukranian ships and their crewmembers last week. This is viewed as a act of aggression as the Ukrainian ships had every right to be in the shared waters.
Of course, it\u2019s hard to ignore that all of this is unfolding just as the investigation into ties between President Trump and Russia in the lead up to the 2016 elections is heating up \u2014 and that the optics of a friendly Trump-Putin meeting are far from optimal for the White House.
While Putin has held steady on how he views the U. S., Trump has veered all over the place on Russia, a country where he was apparently still trying to do business (Okay, okay, \u201c lightly looking at doing a building somewhere in Russia \u201c). He has gone back and forth on claiming that he doesn\u2019t know Putin \u00a0and\u00a0 claiming that he knows him \u201cvery well.\u201d
While his Nuclear Posture Review classifies Russia as a military challenge and the president himself has blasted Germany for relying on Russian natural gas for power rather than shelling out for the more expensive American option, Trump has also lavished praise on President Putin and has not pursued available sanctions against companies building the Russian pipeline to Europe.
While the premise of President Trump\u2019s trade war with China are sound (China has engaged in intellectual property theft and other practices that give it a huge advantage over the U. S. in trade), his methods have been largely criticized and have thus far hurt U. S. businesses.
After months of making American farmers and manufacturers deal with the consequences of Chinese tariffs, slapped on U. S. goods in direct response to tariffs imposed on Chinese imports, President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a highly anticipated meeting at the G20 summit \u2014 which resulted in a big, fat nothingburger.
Here\u2019s what was agreed upon: Three months of waiting, with the idea being that China will, by then, somehow agree to change\u00a0to some of its more objectionable practices, such as forced technology transfers (basically, forcing American businesses to surrender technology know-how in order to do business in China).
Experts say there\u2019s little to no chance of this happening, which is why there are no details coming from the meeting from either side (and certainly no joint statement) other than the fact that the U. S. has agreed to wait 90 days before slapping fresh tariffs on Chinese goods.
Still, President Trump started his day on Tuesday with a series of \u2014 what else? \u2014 tweets on the meeting, casting them in a rather rosy light before giving himself a new nickname: Tariff Man.
His tweets seems to do little to reassure investors: The U. S. stock market plummeted (the Dow by 800 points, S&P by 500) on Tuesday after hopes were dashed that the trade war would end any time soon.
Who can even remember the last time the President said anything definitive about his administration\u2019s attempts to negotiate denuclearizing North Korea?
He\u2019s made some claims about talking about North Korea with China and criticized \u00a0a New York Times piece on undeclared missile bases, but has not appeared to make any progress on the effort.
On his way back from the G20 Summit over the weekend, Trump told reporters that\u00a0 he and Kim are\u00a0\u201cgetting along very well,\u201d and that they have \u201ca good relationship,\u201d which is a bit of a mystery, given that Pyongyang has been openly furious about the U. S.\u2019s negotiating tactics, which included cancelling a meeting at the last minute in August.
But on Tuesday, National Security Adviser John Bolton admitted that North Korea wasn\u2019t doing what Trump had assumed. Bolton\u00a0 told reporters that Trump would have to hold another summit with Kim because North Korea had not \u201clived up to the commitments so far.\u201d
The next meeting, he said, might be in January or February of the new year, adding that, \u201cIf the North Koreans follow through on their commitments they made in Singapore, President Trump will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.\u201d
But the nature of those commitments is vague, as the remarkably brief two-page agreement released right after the Singapore meeting essentially repeated an earlier agreement between North and South Korea, which was also light on details .
Indeed, the road to success on this one has always been a little murky.
President Trump thought things would go smoothly after the very odd summit he held with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June. He tweeted that Pyongyang no longer posed a threat and seemed very confident that he could tick that box on his foreign policy promises.
But in the months that passed, several reports indicated that North Korea has, in fact, continued to build and strengthen its nuclear capabilities, and simply saying that this isn\u2019t the case, as the president has, will not make those reports go away.<\/p>\n