Chapter 8
“America First doesn’t mean America alone.” Gary Cohn and H. R. McMaster, President Trump’s highest-ranking economic and national security aides, offered that assurance in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal at the end of May 2017.1 They were too sanguine. Month by month through the Trump presidency, the United States found itself more isolated from its former friends and allies.
Through the spring and summer of 2017, President Trump escalated his rhetoric against North Korea. The escalation culminated in a bloodcurdling interview with Reuters on April 27. “There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.”2 “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” he told television cameras in the Cabinet Room on August 9.3 “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on September 19.4
Yet even as he pushed toward conflict, Trump himself was gratuitously threatening and insulting the single country whose cooperation would seem most obviously necessary to any tough policy on North Korea: South Korea. It would be South Korea that would do most of the fighting, most of the dying, most of the suffering, and most of the paying in the “major, major conflict” Trump spoke of so lightly. And yet in the very same Reuters interview in which Trump menaced North Korea, he embarked on an angry rampage against the South.
He announced intentions to cancel the US–South Korea Free Trade Agreement. “It’s unacceptable. It’s a horrible deal made by Hillary. It’s a horrible deal. And we’re going to renegotiate that deal, or terminate it.” He demanded an additional $1 billion payment from South Korea for a missile defense deployment already negotiated, reneging on a deal stipulating that the United States would provide the weapon system if South Korea provided the land.
I said, “Why are we paying? Why are we paying a billion dollars? We’re protecting. Why are we paying a billion dollars?” So I informed South Korea it would be appropriate if they paid. Nobody’s going to do that. Why are we paying a billion dollars? It’s a billion-dollar system. It’s phenomenal. It’s the most incredible equipment you’ve ever seen—shoots missiles right out of the sky. And it protects them and I want to protect them. We’re going to protect them. But they should pay for that, and they understand that.
It should surprise nobody that neither of these complaints had much truth to it. South Korea is threatened less by North Korean missiles than by the thousands of North Korean artillery tubes aimed at Seoul. Military experts believe the North could reduce the South’s capital to rubble within twenty-four hours. The Terminal High-Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) system over which Trump haggled in public with South Korea is positioned south of Seoul, primarily to protect US bases in the Korean Peninsula. Hillary Clinton had little to do with the US–South Korea Free Trade Agreement. A framework inherited from the George W. Bush administration was revised in 2009 and 2010 by President Obama’s trade negotiators to provide more protection for the US automobile industry against Korean imports.
What happened next should also surprise nobody: the South Korean presidential election ten days after the Reuters interview was decisively won by the more US-skeptical candidate—who promptly suspended deployment of the THAAD system for which Trump had tried to shake his country down.
Only two weeks before, the Trump administration had stumbled into a farcical embarrassment. Interviewed on Fox Business on April 12, 2017, Trump had announced that he was sending “an armada, very powerful” into Korean waters to warn the North against making trouble. Six days later, the US Navy posted online a photograph of the fleet in question—the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and four other warships—3,500 miles away and heading in the opposite direction: southwestward through the Sunda Strait into the Indian Ocean. The most conservative and America friendly of the three Korean presidential candidates, Hong Joon-pyo, ventilated the fiercest anger against his false-tongued ally: “What Mr. Trump said was very important for the national security of South Korea. If that was a lie, then during Trump’s term, South Korea will not trust whatever Trump says.”5 Trump had already irritated Koreans by credulously repeating to the Wall Street Journal the chauvinist claim by China’s president that “Korea actually used to be a part of China.”6 For reasons nobody in Korea could discern—and nobody in the United States either—President Trump seemed intent on belittling, deceiving, and making public fools of them. But if they could not guess his motives, they could still resent his treatment. At the end of President Obama’s term, according to the Pew survey, 88 percent of South Koreans expressed confidence that the US president would do the right thing in world affairs. In June 2017, only 17 percent of South Koreans expressed such confidence in President Trump.7
South Korea reacted more angrily than many other allied countries, but not radically so. Among citizens of other Asia-Pacific allies, 78 percent of Japanese had expressed confidence in Obama; only 24 percent in Trump. Eighty-four percent of Australians trusted Obama; only 29 percent Trump. (That latter number might have been even worse for Trump if the poll had been conducted after the August 3, 2017, leak of a January telephone transcript in which Trump told Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that he found it more “pleasant” to talk to Vladimir Putin than to the leader of America’s truest and most militarily capable Asia-Pacific ally.8)
Only in the Philippines did a majority, 69 percent, trust Trump—and even there, a higher percentage (94 percent) had trusted Obama.
America’s southern neighbors have long mistrusted the power of the United States. “Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States,” goes the saying usually attributed to the Mexican ruler Porfirio Díaz. In 2013, 38 percent of adult Mexicans described US power as a potential threat to their country; in the first year of the Trump presidency, that number vaulted to 61 percent.9
The European numbers looked even more dismal. In a span of months, trust in the US president to do the right thing dropped by forty-three points in Italy, fifty-seven points in the United Kingdom, seventy points in France, and seventy-five points in Germany.
The Trump-Germany relationship started bad, and got worse. November 9 is the most portentous date in the German calendar: the day the kaiser abdicated in 1918, of Kristallnacht in 1938, and of the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989. On that morning in 2016, the German government awoke to the news that its American partners and protectors had elected to the presidency an authoritarian nationalist of an all-too-familiar stamp. German chancellor Angela Merkel released as faint and hedged a message of congratulation to President-Elect Donald Trump as one ally has perhaps ever offered another:
Germany and America are bound by common values—democracy, freedom, as well as respect for the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. It is based on these values that I wish to offer close cooperation, both with me personally and between our countries’ governments.10
Note two things about this message: its offer of cooperation is conditional, and Germany will be the judge of whether the conditions have been met.
America’s allies around the world always have preferences in US elections. In 2004, Germany’s Gerhard Schröder and France’s Jacques Chirac did not conceal their hope that George W. Bush would lose to John F. Kerry. In 2012, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu visibly yearned to see the back of Barack Obama. Still, once it’s all over, allies disappointed in the result swallow their chagrin and get down to business.
The year 2016 was different.
Donald Trump made clear from the very start that there was no doing business with the vaunted dealmaker. He demanded everything; he offered nothing. “Trump was upset at the notion that allies’ interests should be taken into account.”11 So Tracy Wilkinson and Brian Bennett reported in the Los Angeles Times in July 2017 about Trump’s review of the Iran nuclear deal. The phrase could be applied to almost any foreign policy matter. Foreign leaders quickly perceived that Trump could easily be manipulated, but never reasoned with.
On June 5, 2017, four American Arab allies—Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—abruptly cut diplomatic ties with a fifth, Qatar. The Saudi bloc accused Qatar of support for terrorism. They suspended Qatar’s overflight rights and restricted trade and travel. Iranian president Hassan Rouhani seized the opportunity to wedge apart the pro-American Gulf states, saying, “Iran’s airspace, sea, and ground transport links will always be open to Qatar, our brotherly and neighbor country.”12 Qatar’s regional ally Turkey reinforced its troop presence in the peninsular emirate.
US intelligence services soon confirmed that Qatar had been the victim of a disinformation campaign by the United Arab Emirates. Karen DeYoung and Ellen Nakashima reported in the Washington Post on July 16, 2017:
The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation. The officials said it remains unclear whether the UAE carried out the hacks itself or contracted to have them done.13
Given Qatar’s importance to Western regional strategy—it houses the largest American base in the Gulf, from which the Pentagon flies anti-ISIS air strikes—the Qatar matter called for utmost delicacy. Only . . . his head turned by Saudi flattery and gifts, President Trump had already taken a vehement public stand against Qatar.
“During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar—look!” he tweeted at 8:06 a.m. on June 6, 2017. At 9:36 Trump posted, “So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding . . .” adding at 9:44, “. . . extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!”
As Marc Champion and Marek Strzelecki together reported for Bloomberg News on July 19:
United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash confirmed this week that Trump’s “very, very successful” trip to the Gulf in May had helped trigger the decision by his country—together with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Bahrain—to launch a political and economic assault on Qatar.14
President Trump may well not have known Qatar’s importance to America’s regional military strategy. He surely did know that Qatar’s national airline had once been a tenant in New York’s Trump Tower, and that it had let the lease lapse in 2014. Worse, Qatar had unwisely held its December 6, 2016, national day celebration in Washington in the National Portrait Gallery. By contrast, Qatar’s rival Bahrain had correctly sited its December 7, 2016, national day celebration in Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel. Lobbyists for Saudi Arabia had spent $270,000 in the hotel between October 2016 and March 2017.15 Whatever the motive, the result badly damaged the US strategic position—and intensified the world’s distrust of America’s undisciplined and self-dealing president.
The increasingly authoritarian leaders of Poland likewise exploited Trump’s inattention and indifference. In chapter 7, I described Trump’s strange indulgence of that government’s crackdown on press freedoms during his visit to Warsaw. After Trump departed, the governing party seems to have interpreted his praise for Poland as “safe, strong, and free,” as permission for another outrage, this time against Poland’s courts.16 The government crammed through two houses of parliament a bill summarily retiring the entire Polish Supreme Court and empowering the governing party’s justice minister to name all their successors. Only by mobilizing demonstrations larger than anything since the end of communist rule in 1989 did the liberal opposition compel Poland’s president to veto his own party’s legislation.
The Trump presidency empowered dictators worldwide, by dimming American ideals and by hobbling American power. In the first six months of 2017, the government of Vietnam arrested fifteen people for antistate activities, more than in any year since 2011. Matthew Tostevin reported for Reuters:
Every activist and analyst that Reuters interviewed mentioned a perceived shift in U.S. priorities under Trump as a new factor in reducing pressure on Vietnam’s government.
Not only was Washington paying less attention to the region or to human rights, but Trump gave Vietnam less reason to show willingness to address human rights issues when he dropped the [Trans Pacific Partnership] trade deal, in the name of an “America First” policy.17
No foreign leader manipulated Trump more adeptly than Vladimir Putin. “Why should I tell Putin what to do?” Trump had demanded at a July 27, 2016, press conference.18 Yet it often seemed that Putin had found a way to tell Trump what to do.
Trump’s deference to Putin reverberated through the western alliance. Countries that relied on the United States to protect them from Russia worried that they could rely on America no longer. The leaders of the European allies knew early about Donald Trump’s long and disreputable financial connections to Russia. The British had direct access to the US collection of Russians cackling and chortling over their successful penetration of the American election system. The French and Germans and Poles had sources of their own. All could recognize in Donald Trump something much graver than a merely difficult partner. Trump seemed intent on a diplomatic revolution. At the core of this revolution: a presidentially led assault on the cohesion of the European Union.
George W. Bush observed in 2003, “Since the end of World War II, the United States has strongly supported European unity as the best path to European peace and prosperity.”19 That was a precisely accurate statement. From Truman through Obama, America’s European policy has been strikingly consistent: the United States has supported a democratic and united Europe joined to Canada and the United States by NATO.
“We recognize we will benefit more from a strong and equal partner than from a weak one.”20 Those words happen to have been pronounced by Bill Clinton. They could as easily have appeared in a speech by any of his predecessors or successors. Until Trump. Trump has more than once dismissed NATO as “obsolete.” In an interview at the time of the Republican convention, he repeatedly and forcefully expressed uncertainty about whether, as president, he would honor America’s NATO obligations to small countries threatened by Russia.21 He cheered Britain’s exit from the European Union. Trump and his chief campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, made common cause with populist nationalists working to end the European Union outright. President-Elect Trump received Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, before he met British Prime Minister Theresa May. Before Bannon joined the Trump campaign, he promoted the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen on his Breitbart.com website. Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, claimed to have been granted a call with President-Elect Trump in November before the president of France.
As president, Trump sharpened his hostility to the European allies. Reuters reported in February on an encounter with Steve Bannon that persuaded Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, to prepare for a policy of “hostility towards the EU.”22 Ambassador Wittig proved prescient.
“You have to think about it this way: We are in a trade war. We have been for decades.” So said Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, on CNBC on March 31, 2017.23 Secretary Ross did not specify America’s enemies in that war, but his frequent coauthor Peter Navarro—appointed by President Trump to head a newly created “National Trade Council”—identified Germany as one of them. “Germany is one of the most difficult trade deficits that we’re going to have to deal with but we’re thinking long and hard about that,” said Navarro in a March 6, 2017, speech.24
Trump’s diplomacy reserved its smiles for nondemocracies that offered commercial opportunities, not only in the Persian Gulf and the Philippines, but even in the case of as bad an actor as Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey, also home to a major Trump-branded project in Istanbul. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey on July 15, 2017, the one-year anniversary of an attempted coup that the Erdoğan regime had used as an excuse for mass roundups of political opponents, and especially journalists. In April 2017, a fraud-stained referendum had approved constitutional amendments that would empower Erdoğan to rule for life. Yet Tillerson had this to say at Erdoğan’s self-honoring anniversary ceremony:
We’re all here in Istanbul at a momentous time. Nearly a year ago, the Turkish people—brave men and women—stood up against coup plotters and defended their democracy.25
New friendships sought among dictatorships; old friendships burned among democracies. That was the product of “thinking long and hard.”
The key element of this long and hard thought: a new refusal by the Trump administration to respect the European Union’s 2007 treaty agreement to adopt a common external trade policy. In consequence, EU member nations no longer field their own trade negotiators—a fact that President Trump steadfastly refused to acknowledge. “The negotiators for Germany have done a far better job than the negotiators for the United States,” Trump said at a March 18, 2017, joint press conference in Washington. “But hopefully we can even it out.”26 Merkel reminded him at that same press conference: “The European Union is negotiating those agreements for all of the member states.”27
Trump often revealed ignorance of basic facts about the international order, but something more than ignorance was at work here. In his March speech, Navarro had explicitly cited Germany’s EU treaty commitments as a flimsy excuse the United States would ignore under President Trump. “I think that it would be useful to have candid discussions with Germany about ways that we could possibly get that deficit reduced outside the boundaries and restrictions that they claim that they are under” (my italics).
President Trump returned to the theme on Twitter on May 30, 2017, writing, “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change.”28 By then, though, something else had changed too. At a major speech in Munich on May 28, 2017, ten days after her first bilateral meeting with Trump, Merkel had brought down the curtain on an epoch in US-Germany relations. Speaking in her characteristically careful style, the chancellor delivered a warning to Germans and Americans alike:
The times when we could completely rely on others are, to an extent, over. I experienced that in the last few days, and therefore I can only say that we Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands, of course in friendship with the United States and in friendship with Great Britain and as good neighbors wherever it is possible, also with Russia and also with all the other countries. But we need to know that we have to fight for our own future and destiny as Europeans.29
This is precisely what Trump rejected. Past American presidents heralded a more united Europe as a counterweight to the Soviet Union and then Russia. A united Europe would be a superpower in its own right, with a population more than triple that of Russia and an economy more than twelve times as large. Trump resented European unity because it also enhanced European power as against the United States. Trump interpreted international affairs as he interpreted everything: as a struggle for dominance, never cooperation among equals.
In his February 2017 CPAC address, Trump expressed plainly his vision of a world economy in which America domineered over a subservient planet. “We are going to make trade deals, but we’re going to do one-on-one, one-on-one. And if they misbehave, we terminate the deal. And then they’ll come back and we’ll make a better deal. None of these big quagmire deals that are a disaster.”30
The beauty of one-on-one deals, from Trump’s point of view, is that in such deals the United States for the foreseeable future will almost always overawe its counterparty. It can impose one-sided terms, act as judge and jury in its own cause, demand endless revisions in its own favor.
The Americans and friends of America who built the post-1945 world order foresaw the temptation to abuse American dominance. They had fought a terrible war against would-be global empires. They repudiated constructing one of their own. They keenly appreciated America’s unique power and unrivaled wealth. They understood that these advantages would diminish over time. They deliberately built a world system that accorded large and small states more equality of respect than ever before in world history. They designed trade and treaty systems governed by rules, rules to which the United States would submit like any other country. Indeed, they intended exactly the things that Donald Trump now complains about: that the United States would have to make concessions to smaller partners, that it would not act as judge in its own cases, that it would subordinate its parochial and immediate national interests to the larger and more enduring collective interest. America would find its own security by working for the security of others.
Americans accepted a new world order that constrained their own power in part because they were accustomed to such constraints at home. The US Constitution likewise overweights smaller states and rural minorities against urban majorities. But they had also learned from the catastrophes of world history. It is dangerous for any state, no matter how strong, to attempt to subordinate all others. Selfish hegemons from the Habsburg emperor Charles V to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin summoned up coalitions to topple them—and no single state could ever prevail against so many adversaries. In the world as at home, systems that serve the interests of all endure better than systems that oppress many to serve a few.
Upholding that system has become even more challenging since the end of the Cold War. American allies feel less frightened of Russia, more attracted by the opportunities of a rising China, and less accepting of American actions they dislike, from the Iraq War to electronic surveillance. (Germans acclaim Obama now, but after the Snowden revelations of 2014 the German government expelled the CIA station chief in Berlin, a shocking action by a NATO partner.31) Whoever became president in 2016 would need extraordinary vision and tact to manage a more refractory world system, one in which year by year the United States and its core allies counted for less, and China, India, and other emerging economies counted for more. Instead, the United States stumbled into a presidency determined to smash that system. Trump hoped that an unconstrained America could grab more power for itself (and thereby for him). He never understood that America’s power arose not only from its own wealth and its own military force, but from its centrality to a network of friends and allies.
During the election cycle, external observers of American politics often wondered—and sharply pressed anyone they regarded as a DC insider—whether there might be some method to Trump’s madness. Did his outbursts and tirades, disconcerting as they were, perhaps follow some shrewd strategy? After Election Day, the hunt for Trump’s logic naturally intensified.
It did not take long for that search to be abandoned as futile. Receiving Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, in the Oval Office in mid-May, Trump blurted a crucial counterterrorism secret entrusted to the United States by a regional ally. Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe reported for the Washington Post on May 15, 2017:
In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.
Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.32
From that point, speculation about Trump’s secret strategy almost entirely ceased. “More and more, he looks like a complete moron,” a veteran of Trump’s presidential campaign groused to the Daily Beast.33
Moron or no, Trump remained the president and still wielded the vast power of that office—or anyway could do so on days he bothered to show up, pay attention, and make decisions. This fact could not be ignored or elided. If a Donald Trump presidency could happen, anything could happen. American words could no longer be trusted, American reactions no longer predicted. If, as seemed increasingly possible, Trump had been helped into the presidency by a Russian intelligence operation, then the ultimate guarantor of the whole world order had revealed a system-shaking vulnerability—as if the Red Cross could not manage a blood bank, as if the Federal Reserve had run out of dollars. Every international actor, benign or malign, had to take the new information into account. America’s friends might hope that the Trump presidency would prove short, its activities limited and ineffectual. They could count the months and minutes until a return to something more like normal. But things could never wholly return to normal again, could they?
Long after Donald Trump retires to the great golf club in the sky, prudent allies will remember what the Trump presidency revealed about the American political system, and not just the single man who held that office.
In a 2014 speech, Trump’s future political adviser Steve Bannon proposed Vladimir Putin as the true leader of a new kind of global conservative movement. Bannon is a vague and discursive talker who habitually attributes his own thoughts to unnamed others, so it’s necessary to quote him at some length.
At least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism—and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism for their country. They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union or they don’t believe in the centralized government in the United States. They’d rather see more of a states-based entity that the founders originally set up where freedoms were controlled at the local level.
We the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s [Putin] talking about as far as traditionalism goes—particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism—and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.
You know, Putin’s been quite an interesting character. He’s also very, very, very intelligent. I can see this in the United States where he’s playing very strongly to social conservatives about his message about more traditional values.34
The conservative journalist Chris Caldwell articulated a more lucid explication of Bannon’s 2014 message at Hillsdale College in February 2017:
So why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he has become a symbol of national self-determination. Populist conservatives see him the way progressives once saw Fidel Castro, as the one person who says he won’t submit to the world that surrounds him. You didn’t have to be a Communist to appreciate the way Castro, whatever his excesses, was carving out a space of autonomy for his country.
In the same way, Putin’s conduct is bound to win sympathy even from some of Russia’s enemies, the ones who feel the international system is not delivering for them. Generally, if you like that system, you will consider Vladimir Putin a menace. If you don’t like it, you will have some sympathy for him. Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism. That turns out to be the big battle of our times.35
In that battle—if a battle is the right metaphor—Donald Trump has aligned with Putin against almost all of America’s most important allies, and the US national security apparatus has demonstrated an incapacity to constrain or moderate him. Vivian Salama of the Associated Press reported in mid-July 2017:
Deep divisions are increasingly apparent within the administration on the best way to approach Moscow in the midst of U.S. investigations into Russian meddling in the American presidential election. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that the Russian government sought to tip the election in his favor and has dismissed investigations into the possibility of collusion between his campaign and Moscow as a “witch hunt.”
Meanwhile, he has pushed for cooperation between Moscow and Washington on various matters including the raging conflict in Syria.
But some top aides, including National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, have been warning that Putin is not to be trusted. . . .
[One US official said] diplomats and intelligence officials were “dumbfounded” by the president’s approach.36
The dumbfounding only accelerated from there.
Days previous to that AP report, Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous broke the news in the Washington Post that the Trump administration had terminated aid to CIA-backed anti-Assad forces inside Syria.37 The Trump administration had signaled this decision in late March 2017, when it announced that it would no longer demand the ouster of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad—a reversal not only of Obama administration policy, but of a long-standing Republican congressional demand.38
Assad must go, insisted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at a press conference in April 2017. “I don’t see how there can possibly be any settlement in Syria that includes Bashar al Assad. I just can’t imagine after all the butchering of his own people that he’s been doing now for four or five years that there could be any successful conclusion to this chaos with him still there.”39
“Assad must go,” read the headline on an April 2017 press release from Ed Royce, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “With more than 480,000 people killed by the regime, and 14 million driven from their homes, it is clear there is no hope for real peace in Syria until Assad is held accountable.”40
Assad must go, had declared a group of Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Florida’s Marco Rubio, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Oklahoma’s James Lankford, and Tennessee’s Bob Corker, the committee’s chairman.41 Assad must go, agreed two Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee: John McCain and Tom Cotton.42
“Assad’s crimes against humanity cannot go unanswered,” declared House Speaker Paul Ryan in a May 2017 statement.43 “The United States of America should be prepared to use military force to strike military targets of the Assad regime,” intoned Mike Pence in the October 2016 vice presidential debate.44
Against this overwhelming party consensus, Trump imposed a policy about-face. “This is a momentous decision. Putin won in Syria,” said one of the Washington Post’s sources on the policy reversal.
The regulars lost on staffing too.
The former national security adviser Michael Flynn had chosen as his deputy K. T. McFarland, a Fox News host who had last served in government in the 1980s as a speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Bloomberg reported in early April that Flynn’s replacement, H. R. McMaster, had forced McFarland out, banishing her 9,700 miles and eight time zones away to the ambassadorship to Singapore.45 Three months later, McFarland was still in Washington, still coming to work at the NSC.
Trump appointed as a counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart blogger who pleaded guilty in August 2016 to attempting to board a flight at Reagan Airport with a gun in his carry-on bag.46 It took almost nine months for H. R. McMaster and Chief of Staff John Kelly to dispense with Gorka’s services to the United States.
The most disturbing personality in the Trump national security system, however, was always Trump himself. Enraged by information that law enforcement agencies had surveilled his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, President Trump emitted a bizarre sequence of tweets on March 4, 2017. Trump alleged that former president Obama had ordered listening devices installed to monitor Trump himself. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate stuff. Bad or sick guy!”47 In an effort to substantiate Trump’s wild and false claims, press secretary Sean Spicer repeated at the White House briefing podium an assertion by a Fox News personality that Britain’s signal agency GCHQ had carried out the “tapping” at Obama’s behest. That assertion was in turn based on rumors circulated on Russian television and pro-Moscow websites. An obviously embarrassed Spicer raced through a mumbled reading of the allegation. However miserably Spicer felt about it, he dutifully hurled the false and alliance-damaging accusation from behind the Great Seal of the United States.48 In a September 1, 2017, court filing the Trump Department of Justice would formally acknowledge that the president’s accusation of “tapps” had been baseless from the start. “Both FBI and NSD [the National Security Division within the FBI] confirm that they have no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017, tweets.”49 But if Trump was not “tapped,” his future campaign chair Paul Manafort apparently had been surveilled, for reasons most likely arising from Manafort’s work for the pro-Russian regime in Ukraine overthrown in 2014. That surveillance may have swept up conversations with candidate Trump.
How were allies to interpret all this? A president caught in surveillance because he had accepted pro bono campaign services from the same operative who had previously served Putin’s many in Kyiv? Something had obviously gone terribly wrong inside the American national security apparatus. That apparatus abruptly seemed largely powerless to protect itself, much less friends and allies. What choice did those allies and friends have except to make their own new arrangements for a world in which the United States could no longer be trusted? In which the president of the United States seemed at best a destructive incompetent; at worst, an outright Russian intelligence asset?
The wrongness sank deeper than national strategy, deeper than military affairs, deeper than staff and secrets. The wrongness seemed to have darkened and distorted the very idea of America to the rest of the world.
Early in 1990, in the joyous months after the collapse of the communist regimes of central Europe, Czechoslovakia’s president, Václav Havel, addressed a joint session of Congress. To explain the past and future of his own country, the great writer interwove a long meditation on what the United States had meant to Europe and the world.
Wasn’t it the best minds of your country, people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your bill of human rights, and your Constitution and who, above all, took upon themselves practical responsibility for putting them into practice? . . . Those great documents . . . inspire us all; they inspire us despite the fact that they are over 200 years old. They inspire us to be citizens.50
Which democratic ally would address the United States Congress in such terms in the Trump era? The government of the United States seems to have made common cause with the planet’s thugs, crooks, and dictators against its own ideals—and in fact to have imported the spirit of thuggery, crookedness, and dictatorship into the very core of the American state, into the most solemn symbolic oval center of its law and liberty. The man inside that oval center did not act alone. He held his power with the connivance of others. They executed his orders and empowered his whims for crass and cowardly reasons of their own: partisanship, ambition, greed for gain, eagerness for attention, ideological zeal, careerist conformity, or—in the worst cases—malicious glee in the wreck of things they could never have built themselves. They claim the symbols of the republic as they subvert its institutions. They pin the flag to their lapels before commencing the day’s work of lying, obstructing, and corrupting. They speak for America to a world that remembers a different and better America. But that memory is already fading into a question of whether it was not perhaps always an illusion, whether this new regime of deceit and brutishness will not only form the future—but whether it also retrospectively discredits the American past.