Our response at such a pivotal moment must be to fortify our position. We should be deepening relationships with allies. We should be fighting forward with our principles. For every step we take backward, adversaries will step forward on the world stage to accomplish their priorities instead of ours. Unfortunately, my experience serving under this president has left me convinced Trump is shifting America into reverse. He’s not positioning us to strengthen our empire of liberty. Instead he’s left the empire’s flank vulnerable to power-hungry competitors.
“More Unpredictable”
Candidate Donald Trump outlined his foreign policy views in detail for the first time on April 27, 2016. He attached a bumper sticker, “America First,” to his plans for international engagement, declaring it would be “the major and overriding theme of my administration.” Whether he intended to or not, Trump borrowed a longtime isolationist motto, which had been used by individuals opposed to US involvement in the Second World War. It was fitting because his America First plan was isolationist in spirit.
His comments became quite revealing later in the speech. “We must as a nation be more unpredictable,” he told the audience. “We tell everything. We’re sending troops. We tell them. We’re sending something else. We have a news conference. We have to be unpredictable. And we have to be unpredictable starting now.” The exhortation turned out to be the best encapsulation of Trump’s foreign policy: unpredictability. It’s a natural carryover of the president’s governing philosophy, which as we’ve discussed is characterized by careless spontaneity. The president likes to keep everyone guessing about his views, sometimes even himself, but the stakes are much higher in foreign policy than they are on talk shows or Twitter.
After the president was sworn in, the national security team took longer than usual to coalesce. Most incoming officials were not on the campaign, did not know Trump, and were in many cases unfamiliar with one another. For secretary of state, he chose Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon, and General Jim Mattis as secretary of defense. The choices were notable because the two men, both with extensive international experience, did not share Trump’s isolationist, what’s-in-it-for-me attitude toward the world. It became evident that he chose Jim and Rex less because he wanted people who would challenge him and more because he thought their résumés would make him look good. He got the head of the world’s biggest company to work for him, and one of America’s most acclaimed generals! That’s how he characterized it to confidants.
The national security advisor is supposed to sit at the center of the team. Not as a co-equal, but as an honest broker. This person must be the central nervous system, connecting the president at the head with the arms and legs, which provide feedback and carry out his orders. President Trump’s first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, didn’t quite fit the bill. He lasted several weeks before he was ousted for making misleading statements about contacts with the Russians. Those who’d spent any time with Flynn knew he had weird views on international issues and didn’t show great judgment, so the change was for the better.
The bumpy beginning—a team that didn’t really know one another and aides getting fired—meant no one was really “in charge.” The president didn’t have a strong national-security crew to bring along with him from the campaign because he didn’t think he needed one. He was his own best advisor. But all of a sudden Trump was responsible for the most powerful nation on earth. What if a real crisis happened? A top Republican on Capitol Hill reached out to express concern. “It looks like there aren’t hands on the wheel of the car yet,” he said to me. “The administration needs to get its act together fast.” I agreed.
Flynn was replaced by General H. R. McMaster, another celebrated military leader, who recognized the disjointedness of the president’s security team. He resolved to bring order. H. R. saw his mandate clearly. He was supposed to bring the players to the table and execute the president’s vision; soon he was hosting weekly conference calls with White House staff and agency heads. The goal was to keep everyone on the same page on foreign policy, but a recurring problem emerged. No one knew what page the president was on. Or if he was even reading from the same book.
All folks knew was that Trump was living up to his word on using “unpredictability” as a guiding principle. One minute, he might try to jettison a longstanding free trade agreement after a bad phone call with the Canadian president, and the next he might propose cutting off a US lifeline to a stalwart ally because he thought it was costing too much. Everyone developed policy whiplash, from advisors a stone’s throw beyond the Oval Office to ambassadors stationed abroad. What was going on inside Trump’s head? We had no idea what he’d do next, and it wasn’t obvious the president did either. Decisions were made by the seat of his pants. Those privy to the content of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders were red-faced with embarrassment. To us, he came off like a complete amateur, using important calls to brag about himself and make awkward comments.
US allies felt the same way. His strange proclamations and irascibility shocked them. Behind the scenes, they begged us—fruitlessly—to get him to stop tweeting. “Please,” one foreign leader implored, “you must get him off of Twitter. It’s hurting the relationship.” His country had been in the crosshairs of a recent Trump missive, and he argued that he couldn’t be seen by his people working with the United States if the president was going to blast them all the time. We agreed, but assured him it was a lost cause. Trump’s social media addiction was unmanageable.
The volume of tweets-turned-crises abroad grew weekly. More than a year into the first term, members of the foreign policy team were huddling on such an issue. Trump’s social-media missives were limiting US response options to an overseas incident, the full details of which will not be released for some years. A new hire on the team was visibly frustrated. “The president needs to stop tweeting!” he said with exasperation, insinuating that we all should have confronted the bad habit sooner. “Wow, we never thought of that before,” a veteran agency head quipped in response. The official was getting a hands-on lesson in what the rest of us already knew by then—that we were captive to the haphazardness.
We found out fast that the president couldn’t articulate how he wanted to prioritize his foreign policy goals. The NSC tried to address his lack of strategic direction by giving him one. As required by law, the president must produce a security “strategy” for America. H. R. hoped he could work with Trump on developing a plan for international engagement, getting him away from reactive decision-making. He had staff put together a paper extolling the importance of US alliances, hailing post-war institutions like NATO, and calling for tougher action against rivals like Russia and North Korea. The presumption was naive. The president didn’t care, and he didn’t read the lengthy public document, which became more of a discarded homework assignment than a guide for US policy.
If the president’s closest advisors cannot anticipate his next move, then everyone else is really in the dark. The agencies the commander in chief relies on to implement his policies are left directionless, and allies are likewise unable to coordinate with us effectively. Sure, uncertainty can keep foreign enemies on their toes, but after a while, they stop taking you seriously, which is what is happening to Trump. He’s the international equivalent of the “boy who cried wolf”: Friends and foes alike are writing him off. The last words you want to hear about your president from a foreign official are, “Yeah, we do our best not to pay attention.” Regrettably, that’s what they’re saying.