“Maximum pressure” gave way to warm appeasement. Almost immediately, the president was carried away with the theatrics over the substance. Planning began for a summit in Singapore like it was Trump’s quinceañera. It would be a show to remember, proving he was a real grown-up statesman. Someone on cable news suggested Trump might get a Nobel Prize for making peace with Pyongyang, an idea that excited the president. The great dealmaker wanted to make a deal at almost any price, and Kim Jong Un, that smart cookie, knew it.
It was unclear to observers precisely how the United States would convince North Korea to give up its nuclear bombs when other administrations failed to do the same. The strategy and details didn’t really matter to President Trump, though. He was so confident in his ability to forge a personal connection with Kim that it wasn’t really about the details. It was about the chemistry. Unsurprisingly, the Singapore Summit flopped. It didn’t produce any meaningful results, and aides felt validated in their view that chemistry was no substitute for hard diplomacy.
Trump was undeterred. He measured success differently. “I like him, he likes me,” he said at a rally a few months after meeting Kim. “I guess that’s okay. Am I allowed to say that?” He affectionately described the communications between the two leaders. “We went back and forth, then we fell in love. He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” In my time in public service, I never thought I would witness a grown man in the Oval Office fawn over a thuggish autocrat like an adoring teenage fan. Naive doesn’t begin to describe it. Not a single member of the administration—not Rex Tillerson, not Jim Mattis, not Dan Coats, not Mike Pompeo, not Nikki Haley, not Mike Pence—would have spoken that way. Had anyone but Trump said something like that, they’d have been laughed out of the White House. It certainly seems they are laughing in North Korea.
With little progress being made on disarmament talks, our administration put more pressure on Pyongyang. This set the president off. In late 2018, the Treasury Department publicly sanctioned three regime officials for human rights abuses. Trump was furious. “Who did this?” he raged at advisors. “Kim is my friend!”
I lamented to another official that the president was losing sight of reality. North Korea’s government was brutal, untrustworthy, and unlikely to compromise at the end of the day. She agreed, and soon after, Trump’s intelligence chiefs echoed the warning in public testimony. North Korea was performing the same song and dance it always did to get the West off its back, offering a faux olive branch to relieve the pressure until a new US administration came into power.
As we tried to make sense of Donald Trump’s positions or when one of us tried to argue against them, we first had to ask: Why is the president so attracted to autocrats? After a contentious meeting about the president’s engagement with a foreign dictator, a top national security aide offered me his take. “The president sees in these guys what he wishes he had: total power, no term limits, enforced popularity, and the ability to silence critics for good.” He was spot on. It was the simplest explanation.
For instance, Donald Trump sympathized with Saudi crown prince bin Salman’s violent internal purge in 2017, saying the country’s leaders “know exactly what they are doing” and adding that “some of those they are harshly treating have been ‘milking’ their country for years!” This included long-time US interlocutors who were allegedly held against their will, beaten, imprisoned, or put under house arrest.
He celebrated Chinese president Xi Jinping’s move to permanently install himself in office for life, calling it an “extraordinary elevation,” and telling him privately that he was a “king” for having made the bold move.
He enthused to reporters about Kim Jong Un’s ability to control his population: “He’s the head of a country, and I mean he’s the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
And he commiserated with Putin about the free press in the United States, telling the notorious thug, “You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”
Trump’s affinity for autocrats means we are flying blind through world affairs. The moral compass in the cockpit, the one that has charted America’s course for decades, is broken. The president lacks a cogent agenda for dealing with these rivals because he doesn’t recognize them as long-term threats. He only sees near-term deals. “Russia is a foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically… But that doesn’t mean they are bad,” the president said in one interview. “It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they are competitive. They want to do well, and we want to do well.” To him, adversaries are just trading partners to be haggled with until we get a fair shake, and once we do, it’s a win for everyone.
What he doesn’t see, especially with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, is that their governments are programmed to oppose us. They represent the opposite of our values. No “deal” will change that. Until their political systems shift fundamentally or they lose power, they will stand against the free and open international order America built. Like us, they will try to shape the world in their own image. Unlike us, their leaders don’t care about natural rights and are gearing up for a protracted competition.
China should be our biggest worry. In his first-ever speech on the Senate floor, Mitt Romney compared Beijing to “the cook that kills the frog in a pot of boiling water, smiling and cajoling as it slowly turns up the military and economic heat.” Mitt is right. The United States is taking its eye off the ball with China, and our national response has been ad hoc and indecisive under President Trump. We have no serious plan to safeguard our “empire of liberty” against China’s rise. There is only the ever-changing negotiating positions of a grifter in chief, which will not be enough to win what is fast becoming the next Cold War.
President Trump is myopically focused on trade with China, which is only part of the picture. There are many other areas where aides agree we should be holding the Communist government’s feet to the fire. Yet the foreign policy team can’t really get him to focus on anything but the trade war. Americans should ask: Where is his Chinese human rights policy? Why is he so silent about the most significant pro-democracy demonstrations in the regime in two decades, when folks around him are pushing him to act? Where is his defense policy? Where is his proposal to contest China’s influence region by region? Is there any long-term plan? There are government bureaucrats who care about these questions and have their own designs. We’ve discussed ideas around the table, but it doesn’t matter if it isn’t part of a bigger plan. The president can say he wants to keep his enemies guessing, but we all know those are the words of a man without a plan.
Our enemies and adversaries recognize the president is a simplistic pushover. They are unmoved by his bellicose Twitter threats because they know he can be played. President Trump is easily swayed by their rhetoric. We can all see it. He is visibly moved by flattery. He folds in negotiations, and he is willing to give up the farm for something that merely looks like a good deal, whether it is or not. They believe he is weak, and they take advantage of him. When they cannot, they simply ignore him.