Almost a year ago, just a few days after the election that caused Donald J. Trump to be the occupant of the White House and therefore U.S. president, I spoke about the election with a friend of the Republican persuasion. I shared that my greatest concern with a President Trump had to do with foreign policy, since that is the area of governance in which an American president has greatest influence and responsibility.
I explained that my major issue was that Trump's apparent isolationist and nativist tendencies, if turned into governing practices, would cause other countries to question the value of accepting U.S. leadership in international affairs, and to assess what might be other options. My guess was that China, as the world's second-largest national economy, would be the natural benefactor of those assessments, especially if it could present its style of governance as more stable and predictable than that of the U.S.
After almost a year of the Trump administration, the actions and practices of Trump, aided and abetted by those around him, and accepted by most elected Republicans -- with some notable exceptions -- have caused the global leadership role to be handed to China faster than I had expected.
Trump has turned out to be a weak president, with little detailed understanding or strategic grasp of the implications or consequences of his actions. His weakness is glaringly obvious in international relations, where his basic characteristics of flippancy, egoism, ignorance and disrespect are magnified in the presence of other national leaders who conduct themselves -- publicly, at least -- with diplomatic decorum, respectfulness for others, and knowledge of issues.
As president, Trump has given the world's nations cause to question whether the U.S. is able to commit itself to major long-term international agreements. Trump has denigrated and/or withdrawn from several strategic international arrangements -- NATO, the Paris Climate Agreement, NAFTA, Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iran nuclear deal -- and by not offering any coherent replacements has given the distinct impression that he knows only how to destroy agreements and not how to create them.
The comparison between Trump and Xi Jinping, for example, is stark and glaring. Xi has just finished consolidating his power at the top of China's ruling structure. His primary governing principles are stability and predictability. In contrast, Trump's governing principles have been chaos and unpredictability. Seduced by the convenience of a 140-character limitation that passes for his preferred mode of communication, Trump's defensiveness and insecurities are on constant display, and therefore provide unfriendly agents anywhere with valuable insights that can be used for motivation and coercion.
The combination of chaos, unpredictability, seduction, defensiveness and insecurity yields a White House that is a palace of puerility. The leaders of America's allies would be wise to not trust President Donald Trump. Perhaps unfortunately, then, I fear that the leaders of America's allies are very wise people.
As with any new presidential administration, the mid-term elections coming up next year will be seen as a referendum on Americans' acceptance of Trump's actions and policies. If the outcome of the 2018 election is a solidly-Republican House and Senate whose members are supportive of Trump, then the outlook for U.S. foreign policy will be one of continued ceding of global leadership to China.
Mid-term elections are full of distractions, and the 2018 election will have at least the usual array of domestic issues on tap which will be used to distract voters from Trump's positions on foreign affairs -- health care, taxation, law-and-order, to name a few. Voters should recognize that it is in foreign affairs that a U.S. president can have the greatest lasting effect, for good or for ill, and the results of the 2018 election will have the potential to influence what that lasting effect might be.
As they vote in 2018, Americans should realize that the outcome of the election for Senators and Representatives will likely determine whether the U.S. will continue to abdicate its global leadership position to China.
