The sight of the Indian, Russian, and Chinese heads of state holding hands in late August led even Donald Trump to concede that the U.S. had “lost” India and Russia to China. But the president suggested that he wasn’t bothered: “May they have a long and prosperous future together!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Behind the display of bravado, Trump must surely have sensed that his approach to foreign policy was catching up with him. His signature style, which involves breaking trust with America’s friends while alternately cozying up to and lashing out at its competitors, rests on a notion central to his self-conception: the deal.
As dealmaker in chief, Trump has turned U.S. trade negotiations into a series of deals, haggled with Nvidia and AMD on China exports so America could get in on the deal, and called an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement the “ultimate deal.” He covets the Nobel Peace Prize, ostensibly as a tribute to his dealmaking prowess.
Yet Trump has little to show for his methods: no end to the war in Ukraine, no new modus vivendi with Russia or China, no progress on Middle East peace, no breakthroughs on trade, and certainly no Nobel Peace Prize. The recent rupture in relations with India follows breaches with Europe and Canada. Mexico may be next.
Why is Trump’s dealmaking backfiring so spectacularly? The answer may lie in his dismissal of an important bit of American dealmaking folklore: namely, that a deal is a deal.
Several aspects of Trump’s posture, although ill-suited to the current moment, are not new. He hesitates to make long-term commitments and has a penchant for acting alone—traits he shares with a unilateralist strain in U.S. foreign-policy making that persisted well into the 20th century. He takes pride in driving a hard bargain, as have other tough American negotiators, including Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker.
But a crucial difference separates these statesmen from Trump’s team: They were credible. They knew that American power and influence depended on the conviction, among both friends and enemies, that if the U.S. reached an agreement, it would keep its word. And they knew that America would cease to be able to reach agreements if it could not be counted on to deliver on its commitments.
At times the concern with credibility was excessive. It kept the country from cutting its losses as quickly as it needed to, for instance in Vietnam and more recently in Afghanistan. But the underlying idea was that a reputation for keeping commitments would deter enemies and attract friends. Allies who felt confident that America would keep its promises were willing to accede even to disadvantageous requests—such as equipping their militaries with hardware that only the U.S. made, or forswearing nuclear weapons despite living in a nuclear-armed neighborhood, or endorsing Washington’s sanctions or export controls on powers that might otherwise have been friendly to them.
When America goes back on its word, leaving allies exposed, such countries learn their lesson and start hedging. Having paid a price for relying on America, they draw closer to others they may need to depend on in the future. They are less receptive when America asks them to take costly action to serve American interests, because the payoff of America reciprocating the goodwill is no longer there. America may then try to extract concessions with threats in place of promises, but even this may be ineffective, because a country that can’t be trusted to fulfill a promise also can’t be trusted to rescind a threat.
James Baker, who came to his posts atop the Treasury and State Departments with next to no diplomatic chops but ample experience cutting deals as a Texas lawyer, echoed that point when asked about the secret to his success. “The worst thing you can do, in my opinion, in a negotiation is to get caught in a lie,” he said in 2020, reflecting at age 90 on his long career. “Then it’s almost all over, because the other guy thinks to himself, Boy, I can’t trust anything this fellow says.”
That about sums up U.S. foreign policy today: No one trusts what we say.
Trump, like any president, has the right to develop his own foreign policy, and no one should pursue a policy just because a predecessor did so. Yet just as judges appeal to precedent to create stability and predictability in the law, policy makers must be attentive to the risks of casually discarding their nation’s commitments. This is especially true for commitments that touch on what the historians Philip Zelikow and Ernest May called “capital-P” policies—policies that have a “deep underpinning” in America’s history and embody “widely held views regarding national interests” as well as “widely accepted axioms about how a nation should behave.”
One can argue that Trump was elected to disrupt the old elite nostrums. But Trump is not only disrupting his predecessors’ deals—whether NATO or AUKUS or the World Health Organization or the Paris Agreement. He’s undermining his own diplomacy.
He imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico because he had complaints about the 2020 agreement between America and those two countries—a treaty that he negotiated and championed in his first term. He promised European allies that he would levy sanctions on Russia if Vladimir Putin didn’t agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine—then concluded his summit with Putin in Alaska without any such agreement. He slapped a 50 percent tariff on India months after he’d welcomed Narendra Modi to the Oval Office, toasted him as his “great friend,” and committed to doubling trade between the two nations by 2030. South Korea promised to ramp up investment in U.S. manufacturing, only for Trump to follow up a recent meeting with the country’s new president by arresting hundreds of Korean workers in an immigration raid at a Hyundai construction site in Georgia. Even countries that have not experienced Trump’s betrayal directly can read the signs, which aren’t subtle.
China and Russia have long sought to rewire the world for their own purposes and recruit others to their cause. They now have a target-rich environment. And they recognize that even when Trump is mad at them, the threatened consequences—new tariffs, export controls on chips, sanctions, or security guarantees to countries that are countering their ambitions—are either never imposed or quickly rolled back once Trump determines that they may cost him politically.
China has held firm in the face of Trump’s tariffs and been rewarded with the option to purchase U.S.-designed chips that are foundational to global leadership in artificial intelligence. Russia has pocketed the gain in stature from Trump’s diplomatic overtures and conceded nothing in return. Trump inverts the motto popularized by his onetime secretary of defense Jim Mattis: Instead of “no better friend, no worse enemy,” Trump’s America is a fickle friend that leaves the field to its opponents.
In the short term, Trump has scored some legitimate wins: NATO allies have promised to pay more for their own defense, Asian allies have offered more favorable terms of trade, and Ukraine has granted the U.S. expanded access to crucial minerals. But as his relentless pressure on allies becomes the new normal, those allies have every reason to adapt to protect themselves rather than accede to his demands.
Trump has now been the primary actor in both American and global politics for more than a decade. No one can argue that he, or the MAGA movement he leads, is a passing phenomenon. And no country’s leadership is under any illusion about what a deal with Trump is worth.
And so a number of countries are seeking to “de-risk” from America—to diversify supply chains, reduce dependency on American technology, and strengthen partnerships with other countries—in the same way America once pushed them to “de-risk” from China. What was conspicuous at the summit last month was not only the links between Russia and China, who professed a “no limits” partnership several years ago, but the eagerness of countries such as India, Egypt, Turkey, and Vietnam—all of which the U.S. has courted over the better part of several decades—to join this ascendant club.
America continues to have a stronger hand than any other single country in the world, but its power is not unlimited. The rest of the world produces more than two-thirds of all goods and services, and the U.S. lags behind China in both manufacturing capacity and leadership in several important technologies.
Trump may want to restore America’s industrial base, make the U.S. preeminent in the industries of the future, pay less for troop deployments, counter China and Iran, and curb the drug trade, but he cannot make these things happen by himself. And the more he tries, the more the flaws in his strategy are exposed. His promises to end wars—in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in 24 hours—have gone nowhere. Rather than striking deals, he issues angry missives on Truth Social.
Marco Rubio, Trump’s national security adviser and secretary of state, once suggested that his predecessors in the Biden administration would be “polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline.” The irony is that while Trump has taken pride in being neither polite nor orderly, the decline in America’s position has been swifter than nearly anyone imagined. There is no easy way to reverse it—but a president who knows how to strike a deal could make a worthy start.
The post The Art of the Decline appeared first on The Atlantic.
