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FINANCIAL TIMES
How Trump laundered the US foreign
policy elite’s reputation Washington’s think tanks are united in
their contempt for US president Edward Luce Washington should thank Donald Trump. Rarely has
one man done so much to redeem so many reputations. Before Mr Trump’s
arrival, America’s foreign policy elite were living on borrowed time.
Most of them backed the Iraq war, the “global war on terror” and US
unilateralism. They were co-architects of America’s greatest strategic
errors since the Vietnam war — arguably worse. By doing so, they helped
present China with its largest geopolitical advance since the Ming
dynasty.
Now most
traditional foreign policy conservatives are members of the renegade
“Never Trump” movement. Aside from local differences, they are
hard to distinguish from their Democratic foreign policy crowd.
Washington’s bipartisan think-tank elite was famously dismissed as the
“blob” by an official in Barack Obama’s administration. For every
problem, they usually advised a military solution. For the most part Mr
Obama ignored their advice. Mr Trump does too. Yet by opposing a
president despised by the establishment, their reputational slates are
now wiped clean. Afghanistan is the exception that proves the rule.
It is one of the few areas where Mr Trump has fallen in line with
Washington groupthink.
Now in its 18th
year, America’s Afghan war is inching ever closer to defeat. Much
like the US electoral map, Afghanistan’s cities prefer pro-government
modernisers. But the Taliban control more and more of the small towns
and rural areas. It looks like a matter of time before Mr Trump pulls
the plug on the longest war in US history. Yet who is to say he would be
wrong? The answer would be likely to include most of Washington. Unlike George W Bush, Mr Trump has so far avoided
starting new wars. This could change: his potential to mess up remains
epic, particularly with China. Tabs should also be kept on Mr Trump’s
anti-Iran alliance with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. But he has done nothing so far to rival the damage
unleashed in the first two years of Mr Bush’s presidency. The irony is
that Mr Bush made many of the mistakes of which Mr Trump stands accused.
Only Mr Bush made them on a grander scale. These include undermining the western alliance. Mr
Trump dismisses Europe, sidelines Nato and revels in a unilateral
America. Mr Bush did the same. From his mockery of “old Europe” (France,
Germany and others opposed the Iraq war), to his brushing aside of
Nato’s offer to come to America’s aid after 9/11, Mr Bush did at least
as much as Mr Trump to crack western unity. Today, Never Trumpers accuse
the US president of wrecking the rules-based international order. They
are right. Yet they were happy for Mr Bush to discard that order when he
invaded Iraq.
Mr Trump is also
accused of incompetence. Again, his critics are correct. But his
dislike of experts pales against Mr Bush’s appointment of interns and
bible school graduates to help govern a foreign country. The insouciance
with which Mr Bush staffed Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority
exacted a price we are still paying. Their spell helped empower Iran,
give birth to Isis, and tarnish the idea of US benevolence in the Middle
East. Mr Trump, like Mr Obama, is dealing with the fallout — albeit by
making the problem worse. But he did not create it. In most professions, such a litany of errors would
prompt a soul-searching. Heads would roll. Schools of thought would
close down. The
magic of Mr Trump is that by uniting the elites in revulsion against his
abrasive style, he has restored their sense of moral self-belief.
Last month, William Kristol, a leading Never Trumper and Iraq war
cheerleader tweeted: “Shouldn’t an important foreign policy goal of the
next couple of decades be regime change in China?”
On China, Mr Trump
and the blob are ominously coming around to the same view — that it must
be confronted. They differ on methods. Mr Trump’s critics would
prefer the US to build an allied consensus to win the “new cold war.”
They dislike Mr Trump’s bilateral pugilism. They also bemoan his
obliviousness. How could he have not known of the arrest of one of
China’s business stars on the same day he was negotiating a truce with
its president? Yet they concede that Mr Trump has identified the
right target. All of which presages danger. Whenever Mr Trump leaves
office, the chances are that the blob will find itself back in the
situation room. The story of this young century is a series of US
blunders that boosted China’s power far beyond its expectations. It
would be odd to hand back control to the people who brought this about. |