A Vision
of Trump at War
Just a few months into the Trump administration,
it still isn’t clear what course the president’s foreign policy will ultimately
take. What is clear, however, is that the
impulsiveness, combativeness, and recklessness that characterized Donald
Trump’s election campaign have survived the transition into the presidency. Since taking
office, Trump has continued to challenge accepted norms, break with diplomatic
traditions, and respond to perceived slights or provocations with insults or
threats of his own.
The core of his foreign policy message is that
the United States will no longer allow itself to be taken advantage of by
friends or foes abroad. After decades of
“losing” to other countries, he says he is going to put “America first” and
start winning again.
It could be that Trump is simply
staking out tough bargaining positions as a tactical matter, the approach to
negotiations he has famously called “the art of the deal.” President Richard Nixon long ago developed the “madman
theory,” the idea that he could frighten his
adversaries into believing he was so volatile he might do something crazy if
they failed to meet his demands—a tactic that Trump, whose reputation
for volatility is firmly established, seems particularly well suited to employ.
The problem, however, is that negotiations
sometimes fail, and adversaries are themselves often brazen and unpredictable. After all, Nixon’s
madman theory—designed to force the North Vietnamese to compromise—did not
work.
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