Trump Is a Weak Man in a Strongman�s World

Without his bodyguard of generals, the president is becoming the overseas
arsonist his 2016 critics feared.
Oct. 19, 2019
President Trump during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White
House.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Ross Douthat

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist
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For a long time in arguments about the perils posed by the Trump
presidency, my watchword has been: Trump is weaker than you think. Too
weak to pass legislation. Too weak to get his hacks appointed to Federal
Reserve seats. Too weak to use the bully pulpit, or any instrument, to
boost his approval ratings above roughly 42 percent. Too weak to prevent
leaks or maintain staff loyalty; too weak to plot dirty tricks without
their swiftly being publicized; certainly too weak to hold on to power
via extralegal means.

But if Trump�s weakness makes him less of a threat to the constitutional
order (such as it is) than some critics imagine, in foreign policy it�s a
different matter. There, a weak and flailing chief executive can do as
much damage as a ruthless and aggressive one. A domestic weakness that
produces gridlock and inertia, scandal and impeachment, is unfortunate
but not necessarily disastrous. A weakness on the global stage that
tempts other powers toward military aggression risks much more
significant disasters.

Before he took office this was one of my major fears for Trump � that his
erratic, feckless qualities would inspire ambitious foreign leaders to
test him in ways that made Jimmy Carter�s presidency look like easy
sailing. Trump �need only be himself,� I wrote, �in order to bring an
extended period of risk upon the world.�

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Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

As with my other major fears (domestic unrest on a late-1960s scale and a
stock market plunge), the worst-case scenario did not initially
materialize. Trump�s foreign policy was hardly Metternichian, but
filtered through a bodyguard of generals his various impulses produced
something that almost seemed strategic: near-victory over ISIS, de-
escalation in the Koreas, a reasonable focus on containing China. And the
world under Trump was in certain respects more tranquil than the world of
Barack Obama�s second term.
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I gave the administration some credit for this. I hoped it would last
once the generals departed.

It isn�t lasting. Trump�s betrayal of the Syrian Kurds over the past week
is a moral travesty, but the Kurds have been betrayed by America before.
What distinguishes this fiasco is its utter thoughtlessness, its
disconnect from any strategic purpose, the sheer obviousness with which
Trump allowed himself to be rolled by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the
inability of his advisers to salvage the situation before it led to war.

The constituent elements of the debacle � the blunder itself, the bluster
and excuse-making afterward, our pretend-strongman president�s
transparent admiration for the foreign tough guy � were all exactly what
Trump�s campaign style led one to expect. So were the dead bodies, the
refugees, the anger from allies, the glee from rivals. So was the message
sent to those allies and rivals, to Riyadh and New Delhi and Jerusalem no
less than Moscow and Beijing: that this American president can be easily
hoodwinked and flattered and bullied, and the only repercussions will be
Mike Pence showing up at your doorstep looking like a disappointed owl.

Even from his most reliable supporters, the defenses of Trump here have
been strictly comparative. It�s not as bad as the Iraq War/the Libya
intervention/the Syrian civil war/the rise of ISIS. The foreign policy
establishment is overreacting; far worse debacles happened on its watch.

And there�s some truth to this. Trump became president because the smart
people in charge of U.S. foreign policy failed in disastrous ways, and
even after this past week his own failures haven�t nearly matched their
body count.

But the comparative defense only holds up until it doesn�t. Maybe
Erdogan�s war can be contained, but maybe there�s a regional conflict and
a reconstituted ISIS downstream from this debacle � in which case Trump
will have repeated the blunders of his predecessors, but with vastly less
excuse.

And even if this particular crisis stabilizes, the decision-making
approach that Trump used makes Kaiser Wilhelm look like a model of cool
statesmanship, and its application in a crisis involving a real great
power could be catastrophic. Nothing about these events supplies any
confidence that his advisers can effectively direct him, or that the kind
of advice available to him (see Rudy Giuliani, shadow secretary of state)
won�t keep on getting worse. Nothing about the relative calm of years one
through three guarantees that the test isn�t lurking in year four.

Or in year five or six or seven, should Trump be re-elected. Which points
us to the central issue for Republican-leaning voters and Republican
senators alike. Both groups have grown used to Trump, in part because
human beings grow used to all things, but in part because the most
alarmist predictions, mine included, did not accurately describe his
first two years in office.

But those voters and legislators have to ask themselves, at the polls in
2020 or sooner in a Senate trial, what seems more likely to predict
Trump�s governance going forward: The relatively restrained pattern of
the McMaster-Mattis-Kelly period, or the unchecked impulses that just
gave us death and betrayal and humiliation for no reason, none at all,
save that our president is unfit for his job.