“Think’st
thou that duty shall have dread to speak, when power to flattery bows? To plainness
honour’s bound when majesty falls to folly”.
King
Lear, William Shakespeare
Cosmos Club, Washington
DC. 8 April. What does Trumpworld look like? Five days in and my visit to
Washington is drawing to a close. It has been a fascinating visit which has
cast a light for me on the febrile state of this most political of towns. The
Trump administration is in transition…again. And yet, my sense is that this
most enigmatic of presidents, and this most enigmatic of White Houses, is
finally beginning to settle on a world view that this week’s events both
solidified and represented. Put simply, America First, which for so long has
been defined by hard core Trump supporters as ignoring the world, is being
re-defined to mean America Leads, albeit quixotically.
President Trump has
arrived in the White House just at the moment when the kind of hard-edged,
loose alliance, vaguely anarchical world of big business meets a new strategic
reality in which power again defines influence, not legalism. The twenty-first
century is fast becoming an ultra-Realist epoch in which power and might define
strength. President Trump clearly understands that, but in dealing with the
world the problem the President will face may well be his own ill-discipline.
Yes, at one level keeping
adversaries off-balance can be seen as part of a clever stratagem. However, the
President is still too adept at keeping his allies, Washington, his own team,
and even himself at times off-balance. If that continues the enunciation of
anything approaching a Trump foreign and security doctrine will be hard to
realise. This matters because such a failure would in turn make it hard for
allies to coalesce around American leadership. The purpose of doctrine is to
establish principles and consistency and, as yet, both are lacking, even though
it is early days yet,
Perhaps President Trump’s
greatest strength is that he is a product of the fractured, uneasy,
transactional world that he now surveys. As a political and business bruiser
who has clambered his way to power President Trump shares a lot of the same
attributes as China’s President Xi and Russia’s President Putin. That is
intended as a back-handed compliment in a way, because President Trump is
well-equipped to do business with the world’s illiberal Great Powers.
It is the European allies
who are going to find it hard to deal with the Trump world-view. Like many Europeans
history has led me to have a penchant for legally-based international institutions
precisely because they prevent the kind of extreme state behaviour which has
rent destruction upon Europe twice in a century. Equally, I know that institutions
without power are meaningless. And, it is precisely the cult of meaningless and
powerless institutions that have turned Europeans into victims of global
change.
The recent visit of
German Chancellor Merkel to the White House was the diplomatic equivalent of “The
Silence of the Lambs”, with Merkel cast as Jodie Foster. Now, it would be easy
to say that the all-too-apparent tension was some kind of personality thing.
After all, Chancellor Merkel and President Trump come from different political
planets. It is deeper than that. Germany is emerging after some 150 years of
struggle to be Europe’s proto-dominant power. And yet it is a Germany that
rejects much of the American world-view, let alone the Trump world-view.
Germany will not become a
peer competitor to the US in the style of China and Russia, but will no longer
accept American leadership of the West as a given. Germany is clearly now also
willing to act against US interests. There is some evidence Berlin is quietly
orchestrating a campaign to damage the UK by implicitly encouraging Scottish
independence, for daring to step out of the EU, and thus Germany’s sphere of
influence. It is not in the US interest to see the UK broken up and terminally
weakened, and at some point Washington will need to back the UK and face Berlin
down.
The future? The shape of
the Trump world-view will depend on the outcome of a power struggle underway within
the White House between America First radicals,
such as Steve Bannon, and America Leads
‘traditionalists’, such Secretary-of Defense Mattis and National Security
Advisor McMaster. Today, the pendulum appears to be swinging towards the America
Leaders, possibly because the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner seems to be
an advocate.
However, as I learnt
during my visit this week to the White House, and my old friend and Presidential
Deputy Assistant Sebastian Gorka, the situation within the Administration is
far more nuanced that much of the Press would have you believe. My sense is
that the President will aim to forge a more tightly-knit foreign and security policy
team around hi, with much of policy led by the so-called Principals Committee
of the National Security Council. The true test of a re-empowered NSC will be
their collective willingness, and that of the National Security Advisor, H.R.
McMaster, to speak truth unto power…and the President’s willingness and
capacity to listen.
Allies? They will all need
to heed that old Washington adage that if a state wants to influence the
Administration it is not about what you did last week for America, let alone what
you did decades ago, but what you do now and tomorrow.
After all, America First means America Leads.
Julian Lindley-French
