Alienating Allies
The president’s attraction to dictators would be less worrisome if it were matched by an equal affinity for our friends. The opposite is true. President Trump frequently alienates America’s most important partners and personally disparages their leaders. His burn-the-house-down exit from the G7 summit in Canada—where he blasted Western friends while en route to meet an Eastern foe—was just one example of his inverted international priorities.
Recall that the president repudiated this type of behavior only months before taking office. “We’ve picked fights with our oldest friends,” he warned, criticizing Obama’s foreign policy. “And now they’re starting to look elsewhere for help. Remember that. Not good.” Allies hoped President Trump would live up to these words, and some did admit to us they felt the Obama administration had given them the cold shoulder. We had an opportunity to win them back.
Hope didn’t last. Right after the inauguration, President Trump made introductory phone calls to foreign heads of state. His conversation with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a close US ally, was a sign of what was to come. The prime minister pressed the president on whether he would follow through with a deal on refugees previously negotiated between the two countries. “This deal will make me look terrible,” he reportedly told Turnbull. “I think it is a horrible deal, a disgusting deal that I would have never made.” Despite the prime minister’s attempt to reason with him, Trump shut down the conversation. “I have had it. I have been making these calls all day, and this is the most unpleasant call all day.” Then he hung up.
Summaries of presidential phone calls with foreign leaders are typically written up afterward and distributed within the White House and to other officials with the appropriate clearances. This is standard practice. The transcripts help a president’s lieutenants to stay in sync with their boss when engaging the same countries. After details leaked from Trump’s early calls, the summaries were put on lockdown. The distribution was limited mostly for security reasons, but also because the content was so routinely and so remarkably embarrassing.
No major US ally has been spared from the president’s indignities. In private, he pillories partner nations and their leaders and is not shy about doing the same in the open, as in the case of his comment about the Canadian prime minister being “very dishonest & weak,” only hours after being hosted by the northern neighbor. He’s done the same with France, mocking President Emmanuel Macron on Twitter for his low approval ratings and high unemployment, and with Germany, criticizing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration for failing to reduce crime and accusing its leaders of being freeloaders that take advantage of US generosity.
The United Kingdom, with which the United States has a “special relationship,” is no exception. After multiple terrorist attacks rocked Britain in 2017, the president scolded the Brits for failing to rein in extremism. “Another attack in London by a loser terrorist,” he tweeted after a train bombing in September 2017. “These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!” Prime Minister Theresa May bristled at the accusation, telling reporters, “I never think it’s helpful for anybody to speculate about what is an ongoing investigation.” In the months to come, her team would become infuriated with our administration, as President Trump criticized May’s handling of Britain’s exit from the European Union.
When confidential internal messages leaked detailing the British ambassador’s critiques of the Trump administration (including the apt observations that the president is “unpredictable” and his White House “dysfunctional”) the president proceeded to validate all of the ambassador’s concerns with an intemperate overreaction. Rather than showing restraint, he punched down, tweeting that the ambassador was “a very stupid guy,” “wacky,” and a “pompous fool.” For no strategic purpose, other than spitefulness, he also took parting shots at May, who was then stepping down as prime minister, calling her policies a disaster. “What a mess she and her representatives have created,” the president said in July 2019, specifically honing in on Brexit. “I have told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way… The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister.”
We have effectively given up on trying to block the president’s criticisms of our friends. It can’t be helped. He wants to say whatever he wants to say, as he does on any other issue. If anything, when he’s told not to say something—to avoid criticizing a leader directly, for instance, or to keep himself from breaking a promise we’ve made— Trump will say it louder. After these outbursts, it’s embarrassing for Trump lieutenants who need to ask the same foreign partners for help on something, whether it is to catch a wanted criminal or to support the United States in an important vote at the United Nations. Imagine someone announced to a crowd that you were a “pompous fool” and then rang you up for a favor. That’s the sort of cool reception American officials receive all the time in foreign meetings.
President Trump does more than humiliate America’s friends. He takes actions or threatens to take actions that will damage them in the long run. For example, Trump has hit Western partners with trade penalties, invoking “national security” provisions of US law to counter what he says are unfair economic practices in places such as Europe. He was on the brink of pulling out of a trade deal with South Korea in the midst of tense discussions on North Korea, putting the US ally in an awkward position. He threatened to scrap a longstanding US defense treaty with Japan, speculating that if America was attacked, the Japanese would not come to our aid but would instead “watch it on a Sony television.” And he regularly threatens to discard existing or pending international agreements with our friends in order to get them to do what he wants, including displaying personal fealty toward him.
You can’t overstate how damaging these presidential whims are to US security. Has it caused us to take a major credibility hit overseas? You bet. We see it all the time. Our closest partners are more guarded toward us than ever before, and it causes dissension within our own team. Every time he back-hands an ally, top officials complain it’s not worth bringing up foreign policy developments anymore with the president, for fear that he’ll kick over the LEGO structures diplomats have patiently built alongside our partners. “There’s no way I’m raising that in the Oval Office with him,” someone might say. “You know it will set him off.” This isn’t helpful either. The president shouldn’t be kept in the dark, yet people worry informing him will cause more harm than good. Others have just decided to resign, unwilling to be party to the dissolution of America’s alliances.
President Trump has repeatedly astounded advisors by saying he wants to exit our biggest alliance of them alclass="underline" the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This would be a huge gift to the Russians, who have long opposed the twenty-nine-nation group. NATO has been the backbone of international security for more than a half century, but the president tells us we are “getting raped” because other countries are spending far less than the United States to be a part of it, adding that the organization is “obsolete.” The president is correct that a number of nations aren’t spending enough on defense and that America has carried the overwhelming military burden. But the United States is also the most powerful nation on earth, and the investments we make in the NATO alliance allow us to project our influence globally to stop danger before it comes our way. Leaving the alliance would not only be foolish but suicidal—an advertisement to foreign enemies that it’s open season against Western countries, each left to fend for themselves.