Flex Throw downs against China , Mexico, NATO, Russia, Hamas, Canada, Panama and were else?
Foreign Policy magazine looks at what seems to be Donald J. Trump’s march into Foreign Policy 2.0….
In some instances during his first term, Trump intentionally cultivated a reputation as a madman. This was most evidently on display in his approaches to North and South Korea. For much of 2017, Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric toward North Korea, telling reporters that August, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. … They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” In his U.N. General Assembly speech one month later, Trump nicknamed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man” and promised that the United States could “totally destroy North Korea.”
Trump’s madman approach extended to South Korea. In 2017, his administration sought to renegotiate the terms of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Jonathan Swan reported in Axios that Trump explicitly ordered chief trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer to tell his South Korean counterparts that Trump was a madman: “You tell them, ‘This guy’s so crazy he could pull out any minute.’ … You tell them if they don’t give the concessions now, this crazy guy will pull out of the deal.” Swan further noted, “Plenty of world leaders think the president is crazy—and he seems to view that madman reputation as an asset.”
Trump stopped taunting Kim in return for three meetings that generated little beyond some glossy photo-ops. The free trade agreement was successfully renegotiated, though the changes to the deal were minor. Still, acolytes of the former and future president could argue that Trump did well for the United States. For all his rantings and ravings, Trump secured modest trade concessions from South Korea and a brief pause in missile tests from North Korea—all without having to carry out his seemingly crazy threats. In other words, he was sounding irrational for entirely rational reasons.
This was different from Trump’s staffers and subordinates telling reporters that he was acting like a madman. That trope was prevalent enough for CNN’s Jim Sciutto to write a book about Trump’s foreign policy titled The Madman Theory. According to Bob Woodward’s Fear, White House staff secretary Rob Porter spent a third of his time talking Trump down from his impulsive ideas. Woodward himself concluded that the United States “was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader.”
Yet the idea that by acting like a madman, a leader could profit in world politics has a longer pedigree than Nixon. In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli suggested that “at times it is a very wise thing to simulate madness.” In the early years of the Cold War, strategists Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas Schelling thought about the possible virtues of cultivating a reputation for madness in coercive bargaining situations. Schelling wrote in The Strategy of Conflict that “it is not a universal advantage in situations of conflict to be inalienably and manifestly rational.” If others believe a madman could do just about anything if he does not get his way, the threat of escalation becomes more credible—making it logical to concede more to de-escalate….
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There are many reasons to doubt that Trump will be able to effectively play the madman in his second term, however. The most obvious is that Trump’s first-term efforts at coercive bargaining went largely for naught. His administration’s track record on economic coercion was less than stellar. Trump’s greatest foreign-policy success—the Abraham Accords—was due to proffering inducements rather than crazily threatening sticks.
Trump’s madman schtick worked better with U.S. allies than adversaries. The former group of countries, rattled by his threats to withdraw from long-standing alliances and trade treaties, at least made some public displays of fealty. Trump, however, was too busy trying to ingratiate himself with the autocratic rulers of China and Russia to act crazy in front of them. His efforts to employ the madman strategy with Iran proved mixed. He approved the drone strike that killed Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force—but only after he backed down at the last minute from retaliating against Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia. In a recent interview, Trump even suggested that he was the calm, rational one compared with National Security Advisor John Bolton.
This highlights another problem: Most foreign leaders are now intimately familiar with Trump’s playbook…
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Trump’s attempt to reprise his madman approach to international relations is unlikely to work during his second term, but he will likely try it anyway. Trump is a man of few moves, and this is one of them. His political allies noted during his first term that Trump is rarely playing three-dimensional chess: “More often than not he’s just eating the pieces.”…
Update on Canada and Trump…
President-elect Trump said Tuesday he was not considering using military force to make Canada part of the United States after repeatedly musing about the idea of the country becoming the 51st state.
Instead, Trump said he intended to use “economic force” against the neighbor to the north…
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