Donald Trump has had a remarkably vocal pre-presidency, particularly on foreign policy. Against the background of a no less astonishing silence from President Joe Biden, Trump has threatened to unleash hell on Hamas unless it cuts a deal with Israel before he is sworn in, mused about seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland, and advocated the annexation of Canada—not to mention that he has promised to end the war in Ukraine and inflict tariffs on friend and foe alike.
That Trump observes none of the foreign-policy decorum that presidents, let alone presidents-elect, are supposed to maintain should come as no surprise. We have long known that he has no filters; that he makes outlandish, boorish, menacing, ridiculous promises and threats.
It does not help, however, when the foreign-policy commentariat responds by shrieking in justifiable but futile outrage. It only gratifies Trump and that portion of his followers, who—like J. K. Rowling’s Crabbe and Goyle, the followers of the malicious Draco Malfoy—derive an oafish satisfaction when their bullying leader upsets the good kids. Why give them the pleasure of getting visibly riled?
But it does make sense to figure out where these statements come from, and, more important, what consequences they may have. They are, on their face, absurd. There is nothing more that the United States can do to Hamas that the Israelis are not already doing—American troops would not help, and plenty of American bombs have been supplied to people who know the targets much better than the U.S. Air Force. Does Trump really plan to expose American soldiers to Latin American guerrillas, and the Panama Canal to almost certain sabotage, in an occupation? Would he really give Europe an opening to align against the United States in defense of what is, after all, a part of Denmark? As for Canada, we have been there before. In 1775, the rebellious colonies launched an invasion, declaring that the inhabitants would be “conquered into liberty,” an infelicitous phrase if ever there was one, and during the War of 1812, we had another go. We got thoroughly whipped twice. Canadians are not as wimpy as we think, nor as peace-loving as they believe.
As Trump’s former national security adviser H. R. McMaster has pointed out, during his first term, he hesitated to use force. So why does he say these belligerent things? For the pleasure of trolling the eminently trollable elites that he despises, no doubt, but there is more to it than that.
Part of Trump’s modus operandi is throwing those around him off balance. He plays his own people off each other, he keeps friends and allies guessing to the end whether he will support them or not, and he wants possible opponents not to know what he will do next. The tactic is not uncommon, nor is it ineffective. It is also a way (in his mind) of setting up negotiations. In his business life as in his political life, Trump has never negotiated in good faith, does not believe in sticking to a deal (as his creditors know), and has always believed that the only defense is an unremitting offense.
That is a bad way to transact the nation’s affairs internationally, because diplomacy relies more than many people realize on good faith and predictability—but then again, Trump does not understand that. He also does not care about the details of the deals he cuts, so long as they look big and beautiful.
Each of Trump’s foreign-policy eruptions also contains a very small kernel of something real, which his whisperers may have shared with him. The United States has not, until now, loudly insisted that Hamas release the hostages, take safe passage for some of their leaders, and surrender. The rest of the world most certainly has not. Although the Biden administration periodically mentions the fact that some of those hostages are Americans, it has not made a big deal of it: Trump intends to.
It is a commonplace that our view of the world tends to form in our 20s. That, for Trump, would have been in the late 1960s, a time closer to the construction of the Panama Canal than to the present. Even during the ’70s, the decision to hand the canal over to Panama met fierce opposition. And although Trump may be interested in getting deals for American shippers, it is reasonable to be anxious about the nature of Chinese infrastructure investments in the Canal Zone, given that the line between Chinese business and the Chinese government is blurry.
As for Greenland, a vast and important territory because of its strategic position and potential mineral wealth, its inhabitants have periodically made noises about independence from Denmark. There are only 57,000 Greenlanders, and the Chinese have been clever and aggressive in penetrating and corrupting the governments of islands with much larger populations than that. The United States tried to buy Greenland in 1867 and again in 1946 and considered it on other occasions as well. It is not a completely insane idea.
And Americans have periodically indulged in dreams of absorbing Canada. In addition to the two botched invasions, the United States and Great Britain came close to blows over American support for Canadian armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838, and the Fenian raids by Americans (including veterans of the Union army) in 1866 and 1870. William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, wanted Canada, and so have many others. The charming fortifications that tourists can enjoy on the Canadian side of the border in Ontario and Quebec were, let us remember, built to defend them from us, and they were still being built five years after the Civil War.
In short, these are all ridiculous proposals, but not 100 percent unhinged from reality. (Although, if today’s Republican Party loathes wokery in all of its forms, why does it believe the United States would benefit from making adherents of the more toxic Canadian variant of wokeness into citizens?)
There are, however, two real dangers in Trump’s foreign-policy blither. The first is that sooner or later, he will need to be taken seriously, particularly because the world is a far more unstable and dangerous place than it was in his first term. It is already clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not take anything he says seriously—and indeed, Putin has had his television channels stick in the knife by showing nude pictures of the once and future first lady. Trump’s lack of credibility could be dangerous.
The other may follow from what a German civil servant in 1934 referred to as “working towards the Führer”—doing not what the leader has ordered, so much as what you believe he would like done. It has become a cliché that Trump’s opponents take him literally but not seriously, and his supporters take him seriously but not literally. There will be those among the compromised individuals he will recruit into government, or MAGA-inspired officials and soldiers already there, who do both. And they may be inclined to do dangerous things.
The way to deal with the foreign-policy bombast is not so much through outrage as by turning it against a leader who is inconstant and leads a movement that is actually deeply divided. The Republican Party now has a more or less isolationist wing now, and it would not hurt to call this promiscuous lack of restraint to its attention. Which is why, one hopes, Senator Rand Paul, among many others, will have to field persistent questions about just how much he supports the program of violent Trumpian foreign-policy twaddle.
The post How to Respond to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Bluster appeared first on The Atlantic.
