The King of Chaos
By Scott Ritter
Donald Trump heads to Europe next week, where he will meet
with NATO leaders in Brussels before heading to Helsinki for a much-anticipated
summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The NATO meeting comes on the heels of Trump’s
bull-in-a-china shop presence at last month’s G-7 gathering in Canada, where
the president alienated and angered longtime European allies (and his Canadian
host, Justin Trudeau) with his “America first” approach to trade and tariffs.
That resulted in a three-front trade war with Canada, Europe and China that
benefits American steel manufacturers and few others.
At the NATO conference, Trump is expected to continue to
bang the drum over the issue of defense spending, lambasting his European
partners who have failed to meet an agreed-upon contribution target of 2
percent gross domestic product per year while decrying what he believes is the
exorbitant burden placed on the U.S. for securing the defense of the trans-Atlantic
alliance.
“We’re paying on
anywhere between 70 and 90 percent to protect Europe and that’s fine,” Trump
told a crowd of supporters in Montana this week. “Of course,” he added, “they
kill us on trade.”
This Jekyll and Hyde approach toward Europe has heads
spinning on both sides of the Atlantic.
The trade tariffs Trump is imposing on his European and Canadian allies
are derived from executive authority, which allow him to act in the interest of
American national security. In short, in Trump’s world, America’s NATO allies
represent a threat worthy of sanctions.
At the same time, Trump has pressured NATO into increasing its spending
by $33 billion to bolster its defensive capabilities in the face of a resurgent
Russia, whose actions in the Ukraine have Poland and the Baltic nations fearing
for their security.
And now Trump is going to head to Helsinki, where he seeks
to cement a burgeoning friendship with Putin. In Finland, Russia is seeking an
easing of sanctions, which would require Trump to turn a blind eye to Russia’s
annexation of Crimea. For its part, the U.S. hopes to get Russian cooperation
on nuclear proliferation issues, including North Korea and Iran, security
assurances regarding both Syria and the Ukraine (sans Crimea), and some progress
on bringing a halt to what Trump has called “an arms race” between Moscow and
Washington.
If you’re Angela Merkel, Trump’s words and actions must have
you scratching your head. He told the crowd in Montana this about the German
chancellor: “We’re protecting you and it means a lot more to you than
protecting us, because I don’t know how much protection we get by protecting
you.” She could only wish to have the kind of substantive discussions Trump is
preparing for with his Russian counterpart.
The timing of the Helsinki Trump-Putin summit is odd on two
grounds. The first is the competing meeting with NATO. At best, the meetings in
Brussels and Helsinki will cancel each other out. At worst, Helsinki will trump
Brussels, with all that portends for the future of a NATO alliance already
reeling from Trump’s criticism and talk of a trade war.
Perhaps even more stunning is Trump’s utter disregard for
the hostile domestic political environment in Washington that under normal
circumstances would seem to have made it impossible for him to move forward
with plans to meet with Putin. Just this past week, the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence accused the Russian leader of trying to tip the scale in favor
of Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
It is the legal and political realities bearing down on
Trump at home, however, that may have provided the catalyst for this summit to
take place at this time. He is under tremendous political pressure because of
special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion
between members of the Trump campaign and Russian government officials in the
2016 U.S. election.
Trump’s legal team has implied Mueller’s probe harms U.S.
national security by interfering with the president’s ability to conduct
foreign policy. The Helsinki summit will lend credibility to this argument, and
in doing so increase the pressure on Mueller to bring his investigation to an
end. The Trump team can claim that with U.S.-Russia relations back on track, the
Mueller probe is little more than politically motivated interference in
legitimate affairs of state. Midterm elections are looming in November, and
Trump’s relationship with Russia will certainly be an issue. Even if little of substance emerges from it,
the Helsinki summit could very well help turn the Russia problem to Trump’s
advantage.
The Helsinki summit is but the latest iteration of the
wrecking ball for what passes as American diplomacy under Trump. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the
U.S. has confirmed its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council
(UNHRC), “a cesspool of political bias,” according to the U.S. envoy to the
U.N., Nikki Haley, employing language more vitriolic than even that which
accompanied Washington’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal a few weeks earlier.
The U.S. has hardly been alone in its criticism of the
UNHRC, and there is certainly a separate debate to be had about the council’s
effectiveness. But the more important dimension to the decision to leave the
UNHRC, flagged last year when Haley announced the U.S. would be reviewing its
membership, is that it marks another step in America’s disengagement under
Trump from multilateral organizations and agreements that his administration
thinks do nothing to advance U.S. interests.
These are not auspicious times for multilateral
organizations, or for multilateralism more generally. The story of the seven
decades since the end of the Second World War is, from a Western perspective,
the story of the establishment of a rules-based international order and an
array of multilateral international bodies, such as the U.N. and the World
Trade Organization, aimed at enforcing those rules and peacefully resolving
disputes and crises, and alliances such as NATO, to deter aggression from the
Soviet Union and Russia. The U.S. has played the leading role in that system,
but that leadership has been taken for granted by America’s allies, according
to Trump, hence his aggressively revisionist approach to virtually every aspect
of trade and foreign policy.
Caught in the crossfire of Trump’s trade policy is the World
Trade Organization (WTO), which the U.S. seems not only to be ignoring, in its
pursuit of trade sanctions and tariffs that fall outside the organization’s
framework of rules and regulations, but also undermining by blocking the
appointment of replacement members of the seven-member panel that oversees
resolution of trade disputes. Trump seems hellbent on destroying the WTO’s core
function, the means by which the rules and principles laid out when the
organization was established in 1994 can be enforced. This provides a level of
certainty in international trade relations from which the global economy has
broadly benefited. That certainty has now been destroyed, with the U.S.
simultaneously embarking on a policy of imposing unilateral trade sanctions
under the guise of obscure U.S. trade law, thereby providing a pretext for the
imposition of protectionist tariffs in contravention of WTO principles.
The actions of the Trump administration in this regard have
potentially huge consequences. If the
WTO, its rules and its dispute resolution mechanism become meaningless, there
really is nothing to prevent an all-out trade war between the U.S. and China,
with all that would portend for the global economy. Nor, in this eventuality,
would recourse to the WTO be an option for the European Union to blunt the
impact of any extraterritorial sanctions the U.S. imposes in connection with
its anticipated withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
Whether through his simultaneous critique of NATO and
embrace of Russia, or the policy of withdrawal and disruption that governs
America’s multilateral relationships in the U.N. and WTO, Trump seems to relish his role as the “King
of Chaos,” challenging the established world order by simply tearing it
apart. This “my way or the highway”
approach plays exceptionally well to Trump’s domestic political base and seems
timed in part to influence the upcoming midterm elections.
The Helsinki summit is but the latest manifestation of what
has become a trend in unilateralist, protectionist “America First” policies. In
the short term, these policies seem to be playing to Trump’s advantage both on
the domestic front, where the Democrats struggle to cobble together a political
response to the president’s words and deeds, and globally, as America under
Trump rewrites the rules of the game that have governed global interaction for
more than 70 years.
For the moment, it looks like advantage Trump. The risk,
however, is that at some point people, organizations and governments will
choose structure over chaos and build a new framework of global interaction
that does not include the United States in the singular leadership position it
enjoys today.
In his effort to “Make America Great Again,” Trump is
transforming what was once an
indispensable nation on the international stage into something the world
will learn to ignore. Ever the domestic political animal, living for the moment
with no true sense of history or strategic vision, Trump may see his approach
get him through one or even two terms in office. But America is far greater
than one man, and when his time is up, the “King of Chaos” will have left a
trail of destroyed relationships and bad feelings from which his successor, or
successors, may never be able to fully recover.
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