President Donald Trump's first overseas visit was "Trumpist" in its ambitions, ambiance, and expanse: the three monotheistic religions, NATO, EU, and G-7 gatherings; a whirlwind of cultural experiences; and "finally Make America Great Again" with commercial and arms sales, investments, and gestures. But the core of the visit was reassurance to two American-led alliance systems under stress: the Middle Eastern and NATO-European.
The largely Sunni Arab world, Israel, and Turkey sought assurance that Trump would reverse President Barack Obama's "pivot" away from the region, and Obama’s admonishment that Saudi Arabia had to "share" the Middle East with Iran. The governments and people of the region also worried that candidate Trump's strident anti-Islamic themes reflected hostility towards them.
By these standards, Trump had partial success. His forceful condemnation of Iran, engagement for Palestinian-Israeli peace, and commitment to savage war against terrorism reassured mainstream sentiment in most of the Middle East, if not Teheran.
His European debut was more mixed. NATO allies sought commitment to the Atlantic Alliance under America's leadership, and readiness to contain, not buddy up to, Russia. Trump’s “stand by you” language to NATO leaders did not cite the NATO treaty's Article V, which commits alliance members to come to the defense of an ally facing attack. That rightly disappointed Europeans, as candidate Trump had questioned it. With EU President Donald Tusk, Trump apparently took a position on Ukraine pleasing to Europeans but differed on Russia as a threat.
His demand that NATO allies live up to the 2% of GDP expenditure for defense to which they are formally committed appeared surprisingly to jar allies who have heard this repeatedly from Trump, Vice President Pence and others. (But the spark might have been Trump's demand that they pay up for missing that target in the past). Finally, his truce with Europe's least Trumpian institutions, the papacy and EU, was probably sufficiently reassuring for European leaders who were fearful of Trump's jingoism and "America First" slogans.
Thus at first blush, the visit affirmed the continuity of American leadership in two of the three world regions where it is most in demand. Given the low expectations of Trump six months ago as an isolationist anti-European fond of Putin and hostile towards Islam, such a return to normalcy was welcome. But the underlying significance was in what Trump did not espouse—a direct appeal from America to populations, rather than governments, as the leitmotif of American foreign policy. This represents a deviation from the core foreign policy legacy of the past two administrations, and a return to the more traditional approach of those of Clinton and Bush 41.
Trump's, at times, excessive embrace of government leaders, however flawed, and of state-to-state relations, rather than populations and advancement of individual rights, brings home the deviance from traditional U.S. foreign policy seen in the past two administrations. Both sought transformational change in response to events that called into question standard American foreign policy, emphasizing global order and an interlocking sets of alliances since the 1940s.
In Bush's case, that event was 9/11; his response, exorcise terror from the Islamic world by embracing Western values, most importantly a democratic revolution in the Middle East. In Obama's case, it was the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan (and to some degree, 1960s leftist themes); his response, manifest in his Cairo speech and approach to the Arab Spring, was appeals to populations over their governments, even when allied with the U.S., like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Both Bush and Obama saw, in Obama's words, "the arc of history" moving inexorably towards an ever deepening liberal global order, and both sought to accelerate it by outreach to populations (and in Obama's case, opponents), while offending traditional allies (mainly in the Middle East, with Obama, and in Europe, with Bush). And both failed. Liberal values and a global law-based collective security order are under greater assault than any time since the mid-1980s, and the alliance system designed to cope with such challenges much diminished.
Trump's visit signaled a reversal of this approach, and possibly a return to traditional American foreign policy last seen with Bill Clinton. While he gave lip service to individual rights and popular outreach, Clinton relied primarily on a realpolitik combination of alliance policies and military power to contain those threatening order in the Balkans, Middle East, and East Asia. But so far, as critics note, Trump's reversal is symbol more than substance, but symbolism is needed, after 16 years of misadventure in American foreign policy and the Trump campaign's condemnation of most American foreign policy.
Success requires substance, and there, doubts about a Trump foreign policy renaissance are ubiquitous. These start with the president. Leaders love symbols and platitudes because they pay off politically, and are easy. Managing foreign policy substance, however, is, as Trump said in another context, "hard," and not usually politically rewarding. Will the president have the intellectual stamina and decisiveness to maintain alliances of many disparate states challenged by Russia, Iran, and Islamic terror (while dealing with a similar range of problems in the Far East)?
In particular, he seems unaware of the contradictions within these alliances that render effective collective action difficult. In Europe, the appetite for increasing defense budgets is largely absent. Most populations there agree with the formulation by former German foreign minister, now President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, "there is no military solution" (...to essentially any problem). Moreover, despite populist challenges, continental Europe, and especially its governments, are in the hands of liberal internationalist elites, for whom everything about Donald Trump is appalling.
That distaste was palpable during the visit, from Merkel's hosting Barack Obama in Berlin on the morning of the NATO summit to the long faces at Trump's less than ringing endorsement of NATO alliance obligations and harping on the 2% commitment. The top European leaders, meanwhile, are even more frustrated at Trump's unwillingness in the G-7 summit to endorse their trade, climate, and immigration agendas. At a minimum, these frictions hinder the mutual appreciation among leaders essential for common positions.
The last is not a problem in the Middle East, where Trump's grandeur and ostentatious consumption resonate among the region's political elites. But these elites' hold on their populations is more tenuous than with the European governing classes. Thus the former's ability to crack down on the sources of Islamic terror in their societies, a key element in their "deal" with Trump, remains in doubt, despite Newt Gingrich's claim in the Washington Post that Trump had scored a transformational breakthrough with Muslim states against Islamic terror. Rather, if the Riyadh communiqués are any guide, the region's leaders will dumb down their commitments against terrorist financing and radical Imams just as in the past.
What is different is that Trump, by agreeing with them on the Iranian danger, responds to their security concerns in a way Obama did not. That could leverage a change for the better, not in kind but degree, in Muslim states’ efforts against Sunni fundamentalist terror. But the Saudis hijacked the initiative by casting Iran's rivalry with most of the region in stark Sunni-versus-Shia terms. Such a religious interpretation of a largely geopolitical challenge is dangerous, inaccurate, and not accepted by states such as Turkey, Israel, and Egypt.
Finally, the cumulative effects of the Russian scandal on the one hand and Administration ineptitude on the other—for instance the mishandling of intelligence by America's two closest security partners, Israel and Britain—could undo the good of what, all in all, was a promising first presidential trip.
