From North Korea to Iran and the trade war with China, rival countries have started calling Trump’s bluff

Donald Trump got elected promising he could solve disputes in the US’ favour without repeating the Iraq mistake or sacrificing the economy. One by one, other countries have realised he does not have a backup plan when the bluffing fails

Rob York

Published: 11:00pm, 28 May 2019

Why you can trust SCMP

Politicians the world over make contradictory promises, but few have had their contradictions exposed as plainly as US President Donald Trump. From North Korea to Venezuela, Iran and now China, 2019 has been distinctly unkind to Trump’s promises from 2016.

In the 2016 election, Trump capitalised on Americans’ frustrations with the US’ relative decline and Barack Obama’s more deliberate responses to foreign policy issues by promising he would make the US respected and, if necessary, feared again.

Less well remembered is that Trump just as savagely attacked the last Republican president, George W. Bush, and his decision to commit the US to an open-ended conflict in Iraq. This helped Trump build an unusual coalition of hawks who felt Obama was not tough enough, and doves who wanted fewer foreign entanglements.

But when one puts these two planks – toughness, but without war – together, a problematic assumption is revealed. Namely that Trump – either through deal-making savvy, charisma or a fearsome bluff – could resolve the knottiest US foreign policy dilemmas without force. And Trump’s business acumen and bold words have so far failed at convincing rival countries to abandon their own interests to accommodate the US’.

First, North Korea. No US administration has accepted Pyongyang as a nuclear state, but Trump’s has protested against its proliferation most loudly. Between threatening total destruction, insulting the leader of the North personally and stacking his cabinet with advisers who spoke ominous words about a coming reckoning, Trump worried North Korea-watching academics and policy wonks in 2017 and 2018 who feared he did not understand the consequences of a new Korean conflict.

What they may have missed is that Trump has, on more than one occasion, shown he does indeed understand the ramifications – saying after the Singapore summit that a deal has to be reached to keep South Korea’s capital out of danger, and claiming his election prevented war. It was therefore natural that, once the North signalled an openness, he would assume his opportunity to flex his deal-making skills had arrived.

But we all know what happened in Hanoi, when Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un broke down, sending the US back to the drawing board and the North back to weapons testing — if on a smaller scale than in 2017. What is less discussed is how clearly this pattern has repeated itself elsewhere: in response to the leadership crisis in Venezuela, Trump’s administration came out firmly on the side of the opposition, said “all options” were possible for resolving the crisis and even, for good measure, sent National Security Adviser John Bolton out in public with what looked like possible troop deployment plans.

But just as North Korea refused to concede to Trump’s denuclearisation demands, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro refused to step down and the nation’s military would not depose him. As hopes of a decisive resolution faded, reports began to circulate that Trump was unhappy with Bolton for nearly provoking a conflict from which the US would gain little.

Then, more recently, the US stepped up the pressure on Iran, dispatching an aircraft carrier to the region and claiming that intelligence had identified grave new threats emanating from Tehran. The problem is that analysts of the region virtually all agree that an attack on Iran would be far worse than the Iraq invasion Trump so loudly criticises.

World needs a secure Middle East, not Trump destabilising Iran

Reports again began circulating of Trump’s dissatisfaction with advisers, and though he has since taken to Twitter to ramp up anti-Iran rhetoric, even the subtext of this is that the US has no plans for pre-emptive strikes — and Iran has made clear it has no plans to escalate.

What does this mean for China and the trade war? Though his administration considers China a massive long-term problem for the US, no one on Trump’s team has put war on the table. The problem is a different set of contradictions – Trump’s promise to end China’s profiting at the US’ expense, but also to deliver economic prosperity to Americans.

Since Trump’s China strategy has rested primarily on losing less than Beijing in an exchange of tariffs — and the US stock market has risen and fallen on the likelihood of tariffs continuing — his approach to China could be a drag on the US economy going into his 2020 re-election campaign; an economy whose strength has been a riposte against all criticisms Trump faces.

Trump’s stock market ‘weapon’ a double-edged sword in trade war

North Korea decided it was better off with a nuclear programme. Venezuela’s military decided it was better off with Maduro. Iran has so far rebuffed a new deal with a president who abrogated the last. And now it appears China has decided that tariffs are less onerous than yielding to US demands on the structure of its economy. In short, neither Trump’s charm nor his bluffing are having the desired effect.

Once this lesson sinks in, the question is what his new tactic will be.

Rob York is a production editor at the Post and a PhD candidate in Korean history at the University of Hawaii

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