Bhinneka News Online: The Signature Failure in Trump’s Foreign Policies

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

January 22, 2020

The Signature Failure in Trump's Foreign Policies

Many have wondered about President Trump's foreign policy legacy, but The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl sums it up concisely: the hallmark failure of "maximum pressure." Trump has tried it with North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela—and it has not yielded results.

"Maximum pressure" has failed for reasons that are "not hard to discern," in Diehl's view: Trump sets "wildly unrealistic goals" (like Pyongyang's complete nuclear disarmament "at a stroke"), falsely assumes the US can discard allies and get results unilaterally, and relies too heavily on economic pressure as a tool.

To that criticism, former Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Brett McGurk (who assumed that role under President Obama but resigned under Trump) adds more: Trump's foreign policies are incoherent and poorly thought out, coupling hyper-ambitious plans with the removal of resources to achieve them, he writes in Foreign Affairs. "Foreign leaders see Washington as pursuing maximalist policies under a minimalist president with no clear, let alone achievable, aims," McGurk writes, pointing to (among other examples) Trump's incompatible goals of leaving the Middle East and overthrowing Iran's regime. Workable strategic priorities are missing from "national security decisions made poolside at Mar-a-Lago, with no expert staff," McGurk writes.

One Reason to Be Skeptical About China

An erstwhile predictor of Chinese dominance, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times writes that he's grown skeptical. Despite China's myriad advantages—a big economy, success in developing tech—Rachman sees trouble in the "cult of personality" that now surrounds Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the 1980s, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping brushed aside the personality cult of Mao, deviating from his Little Red Book and ushering in economic reforms that unlocked China's success—evidence, along with other examples, that personality cults impede progress. ("[I]t is hard to think of many places—from Ceausescu's Romania to Stalin's Russia—where that has worked out well," Rachman writes.)

Xi has resurrected personality-cultism, and Rachman predicts it could impair national decision-making and steer China off course; Xi may already be surrounded by yes-men who are afraid to contradict him, offer bad advice, and buy the state's own propaganda, he writes. As Rachman sees it, repression in Xinjiang and overreach in Hong Kong are disastrous policies that reveal blind spots and could foreshadow similar missteps to come.

The New Climate Left

We're witnessing a new movement in global politics, Adam Tooze writes in a Foreign Policy essay, as the urgency of global warming has energized the left, while converging with income inequality to boost a hybridized leftism that seeks to address global warming by remaking society's economic structures, with policies like the Green New Deal. "A left-wing critique of capitalism and urgent climate activism are linked as never before," he writes, pointing both to European movements like Germany's Greens and to US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Emissions have intersected with economic distribution via fossil-fuel profits and the consumption habits of the super-rich, Tooze writes, while the poor are expected to be hit hardest by global warming's effects—hence, the blended political response. To succeed, the new climate left will have to acknowledge that global warming won't be stopped without solutions China and the rest of developing Asia can support (China already "emits more carbon dioxide than the United States and Europe combined," and a Chinese turn to coal-fueled economic growth would doom the planet, Tooze writes). That means the left will need to accept the West's "junior position" in solving the problem.

That said, Tooze argues, "[n]one of the West's major political ideologies—conservatism, liberalism, or socialism, shaped as they are by the history of the 19th century—are particularly suited to such a future," meaning climate leftism could be the best answer.

The Numbers Say Don't Fear Terrorism

Deaths from terrorism in Western Europe have been falling steadily for decades, Robert Skidelsky writes in a Project Syndicate op-ed—and yet, fear of it only seems to be growing. "According to the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), there were 996 deaths from terrorism in Western Europe between 2000 and 2017, compared to 1,833 deaths in the 17-year period from 1987-2004, and 4,351 between 1970 (when the GTD dataset begins) and 1987," he writes; numbers look different in the US, but Skidelsky writes that they're skewed by the deadly attacks of 9/11 and argues that some US incidents of terrorism can be attributed to a preponderance of guns.

Despite terrorism's gradual decline, alarm builds on itself, Skidelsky argues, and "once your attention is drawn to something, you begin to see it all the time." The problem, he writes, is that outsized concern bestows on "governments a justification for introducing more security measures" and supports an "unprecedented intrusion into our private lives."