Charging
He reacted with fury, threats and sky-high new tariffs this month when China announced new limits on U.S. access to much-needed rare earth minerals, but then lowered the temperature while heading to Malaysia on Friday night, telling reporters on Air Force One that both he and President Xi Jinping of China would have to make concessions this week to reach a trade deal. On Sunday, his negotiators announced progress.
After campaigning on a platform of avoiding foreign entanglements, he sent a virtual armada to the Caribbean to pressure Venezuela, apparently seeking to oust President Nicolás Maduro. It continues to increase military pressure, sending an aircraft carrier to the region in recent days and attacking at least 10 vessels that it claimed, without revealing evidence, were transporting drugs.
Most legal experts say the summary killings of civilians (at least 43 have now died) lack legal justification, but Trump refuses to provide Congress or the public with a clear statement of his goal.
And he has been so critical of Ukraine that European officials have repeatedly rushed to Washington to understand whether Trump is siding with President Vladimir Putin of Russia or Ukraine.
More than nine months into his second term, the only thing predictable about Trump’s handling of global affairs is that it will be an unpredictable mix of instinct, grievances and ego. And there is little evidence that his tantrums, swerves and reversals are strategic and well thought out, as his supporters sometimes insist, and not products of impulsivity, mood and circumstances.
Either way, foreign leaders and ambassadors know to remain cautious at all times, and one of them said the other day that he enters the Oval Office with the kind of caution necessary if there were unexploded sticks of dynamite under the couch cushions.
The USS Gerald R. Ford heads to the Caribbean as pressure mounts on Venezuela.Credit: AP
As he prepares to meet with a new Japanese leader and Xi, and after making a rare public plea to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to meet with him, even though his latest diplomacy was followed by an increase in the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, Trump finds himself at a tipping point of sorts. Can he build on the successes he has had in foreign policy, or will his mercurial nature continue to generate confusion and conflict, rather than results?
Less than two weeks ago, he appeared at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and, in a diversion from an hour-long speech celebrating the release of the hostages, urged that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be pardoned in an ongoing criminal case. And he has not stopped short of his decision to impose 50 percent tariffs on Brazil because, in his words, he was carrying out a “witch hunt” by prosecuting former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump friend, accusing him of attempting a coup to prevent the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office in 2022.
Charging
Then there are the attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which will likely accelerate once the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier group is stationed off Venezuela in a few weeks, a move ordered Friday.
But as the Pentagon builds up firepower — roughly one-seventh of the U.S. Navy’s active fleet will be near Venezuela when the Ford arrives — the White House will not declare what its strategic objectives are during the buildup. Officials say publicly that the operation is aimed at stopping the flow of cocaine and fentanyl, but U.S. officials privately admit they are part of a broader campaign to overthrow Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader.
Mixed signals about Ukraine
And then there’s Ukraine, where Trump has gone from repeating Russian talking points to floating the idea of giving Ukraine powerful Tomahawk missiles, only to change his mind.
Charging
In July, just before meeting Putin in Alaska, Trump agreed with his European allies that the most vital step was to obtain a ceasefire so that the guns would be silent while negotiations finally took place. But as soon as he arrived at the US air base in Anchorage, he said he and the Russian leader had agreed that what was needed was a full peace agreement. Ceasefires can be broken, he explained. Only a complete peace agreement would be enough.
European leaders rushed to Washington and rallied around the president in the Oval Office to get him back on track.
When there were no follow-up negotiations for a peace deal, Trump stated that he believed it was possible that Ukraine could regain all the territory it lost to Russia after the 2022 invasion, arguing that the Russians were in “BIG economic trouble” and could not fight. He then said that he was almost convinced to deliver Tomahawks to Ukraine that could reach deep into Russia.
But a well-timed phone call from Putin convinced him that this would lead to escalation with the Russians, and he backed down. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Washington last week, Trump insisted that a ceasefire – which he rejected two months earlier – was the only option, freezing fighting along current lines.
“Let it be cut as it is,” he said, referring to the parts of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine that Russia now occupies. Privately, he warned Zelensky that “his country will eventually be destroyed” by Russia, according to a senior Ukrainian official, the complete opposite of what he had said a few weeks earlier.
The meeting with Putin that the president said would take place in Budapest in a few weeks disappeared, prompting the president to impose his first sanctions on Russian oil exports. White House officials hailed it as a significant moment: It was the first time Trump had added to the thousands of sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But they declined to say what had changed since the spring, when Trump exempted Russia from most of his tariffs.
“The driving force behind this roller coaster,” said Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, “is the president’s desire to be seen as ending the war. He doesn’t care how it ends or with what consequences. Just that it ends and he supports his claim for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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