Contra Klippenstein yesterday, it's not Trump being a typical global statesman, saying one thing publicly, another privately.
It's that Trump is a weathervane as a well as a blowhard, with his own gaseousness arguably spinning his own vane.
So this:
This is the world of statecraft at the highest level, where leaders say one thing and do another. This is not only for “deniability” sake or to intentionally mislead the public. It’s just the way of the world that includes a set of rules and workarounds that allows leaders to never be frank.
Is close to laughable.
Klip should know better.
THIS, per my weathervane comment above:
Trump’s own foreign policy thinking does not align neatly with either of the two main camps. The president does not do systematic foreign policy, but rather acts on the basis of a collection of impulses that could never amount to anything so grandiose as a doctrine. Those gut instincts include a sense that the United States should look out for itself only, ignore any rules or norms that might constrain it, use force aggressively without regard to civilian casualties, and seek “deals” with other states that advantage the United States and/or make Donald Trump look good personally.
It looks, in effect, like an internationalized version of Trump’s approach to New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s.
Is the reality.
Beauchamp notes he's been saying some version of this since Trump's first run in 2016.
He then looks at what this means today, specially with a Trump 2.0 going more quickly off the handle, off "script" (that others want for him) and more:
His lack of ideology does not mean that he can be permanently persuaded by one faction or the other, but rather produces volatility. The president has teetered back and forth between interventionism and isolationism, depending on the interplay between Trump’s idiosyncratic instincts and whoever he’s talking with on a particular day.
Given the near-dictatorial power modern presidents have over foreign policy, this will likely produce something worse than ideological rigidity: an incoherent, mutually contradictory policy that ends up undermining itself at every turn. At a moment of acute geopolitical peril, when Trump’s ascendant hawkish allies are calling for yet another war of regime change in the Middle East, it’s easy to see how that could end in true disaster.
So, at best, he's "manageable" in some way, to some degree, and no more.
It's a reality that, without articulating it quite so strongly, nor tying it to Trump's past, I recognized clearly at the start of Trump 2.0.
Beauchamp then gets to the "weathervane" angle:
Trump’s second-term record, in short, is a tangle of incoherent policies and whiplash-inducing policy shifts. There is no consistent vision of the world, just whatever Trump decides policy should be in the moment — regardless of how much it contradicts what he’s said or done previously.
Bingo.
Per the "manageable," Beauchamp gets to this next:
While he has some fixed and unchangeable views, like his peculiar idea that trade deficits are inherently bad, there are many areas on which he doesn’t have a strong opinion about the facts — and can be talked in one direction or another. This is the well-known phenomenon of Trump making public pronouncements based on whoever he spoke to most recently.
Again, bingo.
The problem is that in Trump 2.0, as Beauchamp notes, there are NO "careerists" to at least partially stabilize him. Look at the texting scandal already at NSA. Hegseth at Defense. Rubio at State. Gabbard at DNI. All total flunkies inside the White House, with a chief of staff who knows zip about foreign policy.
But, not just Klip, but people like The Dissident, Simplicius and John Mearsheimer all appear to not yet 100 percent grasp at times.
Beauchamp spends the rest of the piece detailing Trump's whiplash-inducing moves.
Now, he was somewhat this way in Trump 1.0, but not this hyperactively and sharply.
And, Trump 1.0 leads us to "not a dove."
This comes via Greg Sargent at New Republic, talking about Trump railing at Cucker Tarlson. In it, he references a 2023 Beauchamp piece. Again, Zach nails it.
He devotes much of the first half of the piece to refuting a Christian Parenti piece claiming Trump 1.0 (and presumably 2.0) is an anti-imperialist. (Leftists like Parenti are why I identify as a "skeptical leftist.")
The nutgraf of his response summary is well in:
This is a president who pardoned convicted war criminals, assassinated Iran’s top general, and deployed troops to seize Syria’s oil deposits — openly admitting he wanted to hand them over to ExxonMobil. A second term promises more of the same: He has already asked advisers for “battle plans” to invade Mexico in an effort to combat drug cartels.
Bingo.
But, we have a longer takedown of a claim by the guy now Trump's Veep, Bagger Vance. that Trump is a "dove" of some sort. A long block quote is needed here:
The strongest argument for Trump’s dovish credentials, in all of these accounts, is that Trump did not start any new wars. While Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama toppled Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, Trump kept the peace.
“In Mr. Trump’s four years in office, he started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration,” Vance writes. “Not starting wars is perhaps a low bar, but that’s a reflection of the hawkishness of Mr. Trump’s predecessors and the foreign-policy establishment they slavishly followed.”
It’s certainly true that nothing Trump did compares in scope to the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. But few presidents in history ordered anything of that magnitude; the brief 2011 US intervention in Libya doesn’t come close. And when you compare Trump’s record to those of other post-Cold War US presidents, the evidence is clear: Trump is no less willing to use military force, and arguably more so.
Some of the data is sobering. Contra Parenti, Trump did a lot more than order “few missile and drone strikes”: In Iraq and Syria alone, drone strikes launched against ISIS and other terrorist groups killed an estimated 13,400 civilians, per data from Airwars, a nonprofit watchdog affiliated with the University of London. That’s roughly three times as many as were killed by American bombs in the 1991 Gulf War, the 1998-1999 Kosovo intervention, and the Libya war combined.
It’s relatively easy to show Trump’s culpability here: His administration relaxed Obama-era rules of engagement designed to protect civilians. And once swampy Joe Biden became president, drone strikes in Syria and Iraq virtually ended.
That’s just one area. His broader record, in the Middle East and elsewhere, provides plenty of evidence of Trump’s hawkishness.
In 2017, Trump became the first US president to order an attack on the Syrian government, bombing an airfield in retaliation for chemical weapons strikes, something Obama famously refused to do. In 2018, he pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and bombed Syrian government positions again. In 2019, Trump approved airstrikes on Iranian soil, only to call the planes back literally while they were in the air. And in 2020, he had General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds force, assassinated while the Iranian leader was near the Baghdad airport.
Similarly, Trump dramatically increased US airstrikes on Islamist groups in Somalia over Obama levels, and approved the sale of unguided “dumb” bombs to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen (something the Obama administration blocked). Though Trump frequently stated his opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and eventually did negotiate a withdrawal agreement, he began his presidency by escalating it — sending 3,000 new troops to fight the Taliban, a more than 25 percent increase from the pre-Trump presence. He also openly bragged about relaxing rules of engagement for bombings in Afghanistan, a policy that nearly doubled civilian casualties per year over the Bush- and Obama-era average.
In 2017, before he became friends with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Trump nearly started a war with his country — deploying an “armada” (his words) to the region, and threatening the North with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” in the midst of mounting tensions surrounding Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
There you are.
There's more where that came from. For example, I haven't even cited Beauchamp analyzing Trump on China. (And, that thought right now is scary indeed.)
Read all of both pieces. And, for the people I called out, and more? Learn something!
It probably won't happen. The Dissident wrote about Trump and foreign policy about six hours after I posted this. I tagged him with the Substack version of this piece, in part because he and the others above are actually named in the subhed there.
I'm sure he won't like it, and doubt he responds. Even without a link to post then, I said he was wrong last week about Tulsi Gabbard being a sellout rather than an opportunist. I then wrote about that, and further information today indicates she's not even totally being an opportunist.
And, re Iran? Beauchamp says "let's make a deal" Trump got mad a deal didn't happen, and flipped. That, like his ironclad belief in tariffs and hating trade deficits, is another "North Star" — negotiations must be on his terms, especially with weaker partners. (It's why Trump TACOs to Xi and Putin, too.)
I also disagree with the header of his piece. Rather than Trump sheepdogging populists, the most "MAGA" of the populists are self-sheepdoggers.
I've already called out Simplicius, not just once but twice, for issues broadly related, at least, and Mearsheimer, which is why their names have been mentioned. In my Mearsheimer call-out, I noted that yes, Trump did want to establish an American imperium, while saluting Dissident for getting that partially correct.
I also tweaked the header here to put "neocon" before "dove." But, in dealing with his backers, they self-sheepled because he encouraged the "dove" thoughts.
Further proof Zach is right, as am I? June 19's news is that Trump is now weathervaning again on Iran and talking about "two more weeks of negotiations."
Additional note: I have yet to write a full thought piece about The Dissident, but we're getting closer. The "307" in his handle is presumably NOT a reference to Wyoming's area code, but what is it? Also, while a lot of people aren't perfect spellers, he gets some bigger names wrong. For instance, he consistently spells Miriam Adelson with two D's. Something like that tells me that, while he's an anti-neocon pergressuve on foreign policy, and one who's well read, he's not an "insider." And, other than saying Dems hate the First Amendment, not a single piece on US domestic political issues, like climate change, national health care, etc.
