By Adam McConnel
Guildenstern: “There! How was that?”
Rosencrantz: “Clever!”
G: “Natural?”
R: “Instinctive.”[1]
Now we know definitively — because he told us so himself — what drives US President Donald Trump’s decision-making: instinct [2]. That Trump had no long-term plan or strategy behind his decisions had long been clear to most observers, but some commentators, both pro- and anti-Trump, had tried to find other explanations for his inconsistent, contradictory, even illogical decisions. Hopefully, Trump’s own admission will help everyone digest the situation’s reality and move on to the more essential issue, which is dealing with the chaos that Trump’s blustery, haphazard waffling creates.
Trumpian diplomacy’s leitmotifs
One of Trump’s few consistent diplomatic themes is his love-hate focus on China, which he also displayed during his first term. Most of the time he threatens Beijing, but then he throws in positive comments from time-to-time [3]. The contrast between Trump’s aggressively anti-China stance and his relatively friendly relations with Moscow led to claims that Trump is attempting a “reverse Nixon,” i.e. a tactical shift, the opposite of Former US President Richard Nixon’s approach to China in the early 1970s. Nixon aimed to draw China away from the USSR and towards the US during the Cold War.
However, Nixon, and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, had a known long-term strategy and developed tactics aimed at bringing about that strategy’s success. Trump has not revealed any similar strategy or vision, and his statements and actions do not match what one would expect from a statesperson who had worked out such a strategy. Similarly, some observers have suggested that Trump utilizes the “mad man” approach, another technique attributed to Nixon. But Nixon used that tactic only for a handful of specific situations; Trump’s general behavior is erratic and was so during his first term.
In the end, the problem with divining whether a statesperson uses unpredictability as a tactic is that it verges on conspiracy theory territory: any such inconsistent or irrational decision-making could be rationalized, ex post facto, as purposeful by claiming the “mad man” tactic.
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Trump is a known quantity
Ultimately, Occam’s Razor [4] is the best tool with which to approach President Trump’s policy preferences because we have had plenty of time to gauge his behavior. In addition to more than four years as President, Trump had public prominence as a New York socialite and television personality for the 30 years before he took office in 2017. If Trump had devised a doctrine to guide his approach to international relations, we would know what it is. For example, Trump has obsessed over tariffs since the 1980s [5], so it is not a surprise that tariffs have been a constant feature of his Presidential terms.
But no foreign policy doctrine that would imply, even demand, a consistency in behavior and decision-making is evident from President Trump’s preferences. Instead, Trump clearly acts on impulses that are generally self-serving [6]. Subsequently, foreign affairs become, for Trump, a calculation that is far more about his personal gain than any other contributing factor. US interests impinge on his decisions only in terms of Trump’s assumed voting base; anti-China and pro-Israel stances have dominated his foreign policy decisions because he determined that those subjects will win him the public support that he desires. Little-to-no ethical or ideological foundations exist for his decisions in regard to international relations.
Trump’s favorite word: tariffs
Again, tariffs provide the instructive example. Usually, tariffs are a technique employed by industrializing economies to protect domestic industries broadly while they develop competitiveness, or by industrialized economies to protect certain narrow sectors or products, often for political reasons.
Trump, however, brandishes tariffs as a threat or a bargaining position, so any foreign country and any imported goods are potentially his target. He proceeds according to his own calculation of whether he can gain fast concessions from his target, and what the immediate results are. Trump has already threatened or even applied massive tariffs several times, only to lessen or retract them hours later after concessions from the opposite side.
The most recent episode, culminating last week in his sudden reversal of the global tariffs he had enacted only days earlier, was precipitated by Wall Street’s panicked sell-off. Trump may have overplayed his tariffs this time because bond markets continue to indicate long-term turbulence [8]. Stronger actors also retaliated with their own tariffs on US goods, as China did and as the EU was preparing to do.
Why?
The broader question is why Trump feels the need to wield tariffs like a scythe, slashing through the global economy like Alexander taking a sword to the Gordian Knot. As mentioned above, Trump has promoted tariffs since the 1980s as a policy tool, and ranted about how other countries were “ripping off” the US.
The reality is that the US benefitted massively from the global free trade regimes established in the 80 years since WWII. Most Americans enjoy living standards unprecedented in human history, and part of the reason is the liberal global order, which enabled much of the globe’s wealth to flow into the US American officials understood that rising life standards abroad would create a more prosperous, more peaceful, and safer world, which was clearly to America’s advantage [9]. In other words, the US did not construct the global finance and trade system out of purely altruistic motives, or out of naivete.
Trump apparently never grasped that other countries prospering from free trade was actually a sign that the global system worked as envisioned, and that the US was a direct beneficiary even if it was not immediately obvious.
His mind seems dominated by zero-sum calculations: if another country profits, then, by definition, it means that the US loses and is treated unfairly in that particular bilateral relationship. He cannot see the forest because of an excessive focus on a certain tree. Thus, tariffs became his answer.
Trump’s meandering speech patterns and frustrated attempts to understand that larger machinery around him remind one of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are the doomed courtiers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whom Tom Stoppard turned into tragicomic symbols of the modern condition in his brilliant black comedy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Trump has only instinct and others’ words to help him comprehend the ongoing drama that he finds himself swept up in. So his policy decisions are instinctual, but we all hope that he will listen more to others’ instructive words during the coming four years.
