The Buffoon Doctrine

Not longer after Trump decided to ineffectually fire a whole boatload of cruise missiles at Syria, I co-authored a piece on why “Trumpian Unpredictability” is no virtue.

Thus, for the United States, unpredictability carries enormous risks. That’s true for Nixonian calculated irrationality, too, but much more so for Trumpian unpredictability. Rivals and allies can easily interpret mixed signals from different voices in the administration and frequent high-profile policy reversals as evidence that the president does not mean what he says, that he has no idea what he is doing, or that he can change his mind on a whim. Intentionally fostering uncertainty reduces the credibility of existing commitments.

Unraveling the American alliance network by undermining confidence in Washington is probably the worst way to implement an America First policy. It undercuts a major source of American strength without gaining the benefits that might follow from strategic retrenchment — that is, of making deliberate decisions about what commitments are key to American security and which can be shed, while taking steps to ensure that unwinding those commitments don’t harm vital interests and alliances.

However, Trump’s bizarre international tour raises an important question: how much damage can one buffoon do to American leadership? Most of our readers know that Trump insulted allies, engaged in bizarre behavior, and generally made a hash of things. For what it’s worth, Dusko Markovic, the Prime Minister of Montenegro said that Trump’s shove was no big deal. But he leads a country with a population smaller than the city of Washington, DC; Montenegro’s annual GDP is less than one quarter of the cost of the USS Gerald R. Ford. Trump could have pulled a Greg Gianforte on him and Markovic would have brushed it off. The important thing is that it was just another unforced error.

More important, Trump dressed down NATO members—yet again—for supposedly not paying their fair share. As I’ve argued before, Trump’s approach to burden sharing stems from deeply flawed understandings of the benefits of the US alliance system. And, as Andrew Moravcsik explains, the ledger itself looks very different when you take into account the de facto division of labor between the United States and the major European powers.

Collectively, Europeans spend more and deploy far more combat troops abroad than anyone except the US. Yet Europe’s real comparative advantage lies in the fact that it is the world’s pre-eminent “civilian superpower”. Its unique capacity to project economic and diplomatic power, often in situations where the US is powerless to defend its interests unilaterally, is just as essential to western security as American military might.

The EU is the world’s largest trading bloc — and Europeans know how to exploit it. Iran offers a recent illustration. Three decades of American sanctions hardly had any impact, since trade between the two countries is essentially nil anyway. Yet almost as soon as the Europeans imposed strong sanctions in 2014, Iran began to negotiate towards a nuclear agreement. Europe also provides two-thirds of the world’s official development assistance and is the largest funder of the UN and almost all other international organisations.

Indeed, given that Trump wants to mount a scorched-earth campaign against America’s diplomatic capabilities and its foreign-assistance program, perhaps Europeans should be dressing down the United States.

But the point isn’t just that Trump’s wrong on the merits. It’s that the merits are pretty much secondary to his conduct. Trump excoriated NATO members—and pointedly failed to mention America’s Article V commitment to defend NATO against aggression—at a ceremony commemorating 9/11.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. triggered NATO’s collective defense clause, known as Article Five, prompting alliance members to rally around their ally. It is the first and only time the clause has been invoked.

The unveiling of the World Trade Center memorial was meant to be symbolic of the United States’ commitment to the alliance — but Trump’s failure to mention Article Five left commentators doubtful.

Something like a third of the coalition troops killed in Afghanistan were from NATO member-states, or NATO partners, other than the United States. In other words, if Moscow hoped that Trump would cause needless frictions in the American alliance system, then it got its wish.

But we also should take a deep breath. While I believe that American institutions—at home and abroad—are more fragile than we often recognize, it’s going to take a lot more than these kinds of antics to bring NATO crashing down. Nonetheless, it is emphatically not a good thing that transatlantic cohesion depends on our allies taking the President of the United States neither literally nor seriously.

Image by Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons