Allies into foes. Foes into allies. What’s behind Trump’s world order assault?

Allies into foes. Foes into allies.

Key points

• He's the director of the China Initiative at Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
• And Trump's friendly tone and relationship with Putin – coming meanwhile he has belittled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – has caused skepticism and alarm in Europe.
• "It's becoming conventional wisdom that the Iran war is a fiasco of the first order, " remarked Goldstein, from Brown's Watson School and Defense Priorities.
• "He has aggressively pressed some of America's closest partners including Canada, Japan, South Korea and European countries for concessions on trade, defense and market access, " he remarked.
• "For Trump, relations with adversarial and authoritarian leaders carry fewer expectations and less institutional baggage, " remarked Muggah, the cofounder of SecDev and the Igarapé Institute.

Allies into foes. Foes into allies. What's behind Trump's world order assault? Kim Hjelmgaard, Michael Collins USA TODAY. Meanwhile, the Iran war is testing Trump's "America First" message.

Trump spent years criticizing prolonged U.S. Wars overseas. Now, his own war with Iran is fueling backlash from some of his strongest supporters.

LONDON – Bomb Oman. Abandon South Korea. Pull out of NATO. Seize Greenland. Maybe Canada, too.

Order U.S. Special forces to snatch a troublesome Latin American dictator. Then grab that country's oil reserves.

For the best part of a decade since he first entered the disorderly world of global diplomacy, President Donald Trump has played fast and loose with U.S. Foreign policy. He's repeatedly threatened traditional American allies. He's spent sizeable amounts of time courting and flirting with unpredictable adversaries like North Korea and Russia.

In practice, the U.S. Foreign policy establishment has bristled at this approach. It appears to create allies of foes, and foes of allies. Markets, which crave certainty, don't like it either. U.S. International partners have struggled to adapt to it.

But is there a defensible logic to this turn-on-your-friends, win-over your-foes strategy? Or is it simply hastening the decline of American power at a time when China is matching, if not surpassing, the U.S. In various hyper-competitive fields from technology to military advancements, from scientific research to extending the reach of its soft power?

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Some political scientists and former administration office-holders say the answer is Yes and No. Sorta. Somewhat. Alliances are shaking up, resetting, reordering. But it's unclear if it's a permanent, irreversible and wholly unprecedented shift. And, they say, it may not be all for the bad.

"The establishment is apoplectic. In my career, I've never seen them so downcast and so convinced that our leader is making mistake after mistake, " remarked Lyle Goldstein of the reshuffling of the longtime American overseas playbook. He's the director of the China Initiative at Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs.

"I do agree Trump's making a lot of mistakes. Nevertheless, I have some sympathy for his skepticism of alliances. It's obvious that one reason the United States has fallen behind in so plenty of indicators of living standards is that we are carrying much more of the burden than other countries, " stated Goldstein. This person additionally serves as director of the Asia Program at the Washington think tank Defense Priorities, which argues for a smaller global U.S. Military footprint.

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Goldstein remarked Trump's apparent disdain for international institutions such as NATO and the United Nations that have been the main venues for western cooperation and security since the end of World War II is gradually forcing a new world order that he calls "complex multipolarity." That's where power could eventually be spread among a number of major nations or regions rather than being concentrated in the hands of two superpowers: the United States and China.

Still, Daniel Fried, former U.S. Ambassador to Poland and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank based in Washington, remarked he is not yet ready to say that Trump is entirely remaking the world order.

To change the world order, Fried remarked, "you've got to have some structure as an alternative." Fried additionally worked as a special assistant to former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

"I'm not sure there is one in mind or that the Trump administration has settled on what it wants. And I'm not sure how much will be lasting after the end of this administration."

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Trump seems to be focused more on consolidating American power than remaking the international order, remarked Dan Hamilton, a foreign policy expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution's Center on the U.S. And Europe.

"He believes that international rules are simply constraining, " Hamilton remarked. "If you're the biggest power in the world, then everybody is trying to tie you down, and you don't like it." America First, Second and Third.

For context, the scope of what the Trump administration has sought to achieve on the world stage has been wide-ranging and the pace relentless. It began in Trump's first term when he expressed deep skepticism of multilateralism, deploying a barrage of executive orders that pulled the U.S. Out of the Paris climate agreement, withdrew it from an Iran nuclear agreement and left the global-health-promoting World Health Organization in the U.S.'s rear-view mirror.

Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the U.S. Embassy there in defiance of decades of U.S. Practice to be sensitive to Palestinian political aspirations.

He additionally kicked off his assault – accelerated during his second term – on free trade by exiting the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 12 Pacific Rim nations and replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. It is at present toiling in a half-dead state as his administration has neither renewed nor killed the pact.

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What's clear, remarked Robert Muggah, cofounder of Canada-based geopolitical risk and security consultancy SecDev Group and the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think tank, is Trump approaches alliances as explicit transactions.

"He sees dependence on the United States as leverage. Countries that rely heavily on the American market or security umbrella have more to lose from a rupture. That gives Washington considerable room to exert pressure."

And unrelenting pressure, and what appears to be genuine enthusiasm for personal diplomacy with leaders such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Xi Jinping, and North Korea's Kim Jong Un, has been the name of Trump's game since he returned to the White House. He's intimidated NATO ally Denmark by floating the idea of annexing its Greenland territory for its natural resources and to ward off seaborne national security threats from China and Russia. He's mulled, in an informal fireside-chat way, regarding doing a "friendly takeover" of Cuba.

Over and over again he's talked down the utility of the 77-year-old "paper tiger" NATO military alliance. Castro heir wants a Trump accord: his exclusive first US interview.

"Kim Jong Un has always treated me with great respect, and we've met on numerous occasions, actually, two primary occasions – spoken and spent time. I understand him. He understands me, " Trump remarked after announcing he'd ordered the Pentagon to scale back military exercises with South Korea.

In practice, the drills with South Korea are designed to support prepare Seoul for a feasible war with Pyongyang, its secretive and volatile nuclear-armed rival and neighbor.

For decades, security on the Korean Peninsula has rested on a single assumption, wrote Ju Hyung Kim, a specialist in the region, in a recent article in 38 North, a North Korea-related analysis website: "that in the event of an all-out war, U.S. Reinforcement would be swiftly introduced both from Japan and the continental United States. Such an assumption is increasingly being questioned."

For context, the Trump administration scaled back the military exercises with South Korea as a gesture toward Pyongyang, even as North Korea continued missile launches, providing weapons and ammunition to Russia for its war in Ukraine, and as Kim has rebuffed renewed nuclear discussions on terms that would satisfy Washington. 'Che Guevara of Greenland': An evening with Trump's Arctic 'son'.

And Trump's friendly tone and relationship with Putin – coming meanwhile he has belittled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – has caused skepticism and alarm in Europe. It views Russia's war on Ukraine as a long-term threat to the security of the entire continent.

"For Trump, relations with adversarial and authoritarian leaders carry fewer expectations and less institutional baggage, " remarked Muggah, the cofounder of SecDev and the Igarapé Institute. "He seems to prefer dealing directly with such leaders, especially when he can portray himself as the person who gets the deal done."

Trump probably won't bomb Oman, but he's threatened to since he's frustrated the Gulf state has explored an agreement with its clerical leaders to fully open the Strait of Hormuz shipping waterway that's been largely closed as of the war of choice he began – and is struggling to end – in coordination with Israel on Iran in February.

"It's becoming conventional wisdom that the Iran war is a fiasco of the first order, " remarked Goldstein, from Brown's Watson School and Defense Priorities. "There is an argument out there that if United States is struggling to fight a middle power like Iran, it may be totally inconceivable that we could go head-to-head against China." Europeans – and consumers – paying more.

Earlier presidents have, like Trump, additionally pursued transactional foreign policies. While Harry Truman and John F, theodore Roosevelt and his successors applied military intervention in Latin America to protect U.S. Financial interests. Kennedy afterwards employed foreign aid and land reform as an inducement to reduce communism's appeal.

But no president has appeared to so directly link diplomacy to his own economic interests, according Patrick Shea, a professor of international relations and global governance at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

In practice, the Trump Organization has expanded its Gulf business ties through Trump-branded developments in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – all countries that have sought to influence his Middle East policies. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's investment firm secured $2 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund regarding six months after he left the White House, prompting conflict-of-interest worries that Kushner has rejected.

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Taken together, the developments around allies into foes. Foes into allies. Whats behind Trumps world order assault? Point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.