Trump Touts Diplomacy After Pushing Alliances to Breaking Point
Trump Touts Diplomacy After Pushing Alliances to Breaking Point
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump is keeping up a steady pace of events tied to his foreign-policy agenda with less than three months to go before the presidential election. His critics say the efforts have a distinctly second-tier feel.
Trump scored an important victory with last week’s historic agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel. Now, the president’s team is trumpeting a Thursday visit by Iraq’s prime minister, a move to shift American troops from Germany to Poland and peace talks between Serbia and Kosovo. There’s even talk he’ll deliver a speech in person at the annual UN General Assembly in September, though other world leaders are staying home and participating online.
What the White House isn’t talking much about are some of the more ambitious initiatives the president championed earlier in his term -- the long-stalled nuclear talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the strategy to restore democracy in Venezuela and Trump’s promise that Mexico would pay for his signature border wall.
The 2020 contest between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden is focused heavily so far on domestic issues, led by debate over the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the faltering economy. But visits by foreign leaders have a way of burnishing presidents’ credentials, and that’s what analysts believe Trump hopes to accomplish before election day.
Trump “wants to have a bunch of things happening simultaneously at different stages because he thinks they show him as a successful negotiator fighting for America’s interests,” said Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “I’m not sure that people would vote on it but if he’s able to have a few of them maybe they think it would stop the bleeding a little bit.”
Trump repeatedly sought a pre-election meeting in the U.S. with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a prospect that White House aides ruled out over the weekend. It would be a politically risky encounter considering that U.S. intelligence agencies have found that Russia is again trying to influence the election outcome to favor Trump.
Trump’s supporters argue that he’s fulfilled key promises -- exiting the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord -- and what hasn’t happened also counts: no new wars, no major terrorist attacks. Islamic State has lost its swath of territory in the Mideast. And Trump is bringing troops home from Afghanistan, reflecting the president’s vow to get the U.S. out of “endless wars.”
“This is something I’m proud of President Trump on -- he’s not starting new wars, he’s bringing our troops home while still signing peace accords,” said Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence who’s now a special envoy to the Serbia-Kosovo peace talks.
The recent flurry of foreign policy events has an added benefit: It can help draw attention away from the president’s struggles on domestic issues. Since Trump dismissed the Covid-19 pandemic as a “flu” that will just “go away” in February, the virus has killed about 170,000 Americans and cratered more than a decade of consistent economic growth.
The president hasn’t been shy about saying he sees the political benefits of some of his foreign policy moves, even when they’ve aggravated alliances the U.S. counts on. During remarks Monday in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Trump said the U.S. moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem “for the Evangelicals.’
“You know it is amazing with that,” he said. “The Evangelicals are more excited about that than Jewish people.”
Courting Poland
So, too, with successful U.S. efforts to court Poland, whose president emerged as an important Trump ally in Eastern Europe. In November, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department added Poland to a list of countries whose citizens aren’t required to get visas to travel to the U.S.
It’s a move that would appeal to Polish-Americans who have a large presence in battleground states including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
That echoes accusations former National Security Adviser John Bolton made in his book “The Room Where it Happened,” when he alleged that Trump sought Chinese President Xi Jinping’s help with a trade deal solely to boost his re-election chances.
“I am hard pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” Bolton wrote. Trump has criticized his former adviser as “wacko” and “grossly incompetent.”
Critics also say the president’s “America First” philosophy has largely been about tearing up deals, not putting in the hard work needed to build new ones.
The administration’s efforts to get the United Nations Security Council to extend an expiring arms embargo on Iran, for instance, was dealt a historic rebuke last week, with 11 nations abstaining and just one, the Dominican Republic, supporting the U.S. in the face of “no” votes from Russia and China. That’s left the administration saying it will seek to “snap back” sanctions on Iran starting Thursday, a move that has left it isolated on the world stage, even by allies who distrust Tehran.
“Aside from Afghanistan, it’s hard for me to think of any examples where people have been slogging away working with allies and partners,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “His fundamental promise was ‘America First’ and arguably he’s done that. But arguably also it’s had costs because while our adversaries find him unpredictable, our allies find him unpredictable as well.”
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