This Is What Trump's Impulsive Diplomacy Looks Like

http://time.com/5311983/donald-trump-north-korea-diplomacy/

This Is What Trump’s Impulsive Diplomacy Looks Like
By Brian Bennett June 14, 2018

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To his fans, Trump’s growing international disruptions are a welcome development. “That’s exactly what we were hoping for when he was a candidate–someone who acts less like a politician and more like a businessman, someone who sees the field and makes a decision,” says Eric Bolling, a former Fox News anchor and early campaign supporter who regularly speaks to Trump and believes the President’s unpredictability keeps foreign leaders off guard.

Of course, Trump is hardly the first President to make decisions spontaneously. President George H.W. Bush surprised his staff in 1990 when he drew a red line after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, telling reporters on the South Lawn of the White House that Iraq’s aggression “will not stand,” and setting the stage for the first Gulf War. President Richard Nixon unexpectedly created what is now a long-standing U.S. policy of not negotiating with terrorists when, faced with questions from reporters about two U.S. diplomats and three others held hostage in Sudan in 1973, he said the U.S. “will not pay blackmail.”

But in previous Administrations, these types of incidents were rare. “This President is interacting on an hourly basis, and there is no filter,” says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “There are no staffers between his impulses and his Twitter finger.” Trump is burning up political capital in the process. “The White House is historically designed in order to limit the risk of embarrassment,” Naftali says. “If he would use his staff better, he wouldn’t find himself in these embarrassing positions.”

There costs are mounting. In the wake of Trump’s break with the other G-7 countries ahead of the Singapore summit, the French government suggested Trump had acted rashly and out of anger, and criticized his inconsistency. Canada’s Parliament unanimously condemned Trump’s criticisms of Trudeau and backed the government’s hardening stance over the NAFTA negotiations.

And while the Middle East hasn’t yet blown up over Trump’s Jerusalem embassy move or his departure from the Iran deal, both are proving destabilizing. Protests along Israel’s border with Gaza have claimed more than 100 lives, and have raised concerns in Cairo that the unrest could spread to the border with neighboring Egypt. European and Chinese attempts to salvage the Iran deal are faltering, and Iran says it will increase its uranium enrichment capacity now that the U.S. has abandoned the pact.

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On his way back to the White House from Air Force One after departing from Singapore, Trump was in a defiant, even ebullient, mood. In defense of his cancellation of the military exercises, for example, he tweeted at his critics, “We save a fortune by not doing war games, as long as we are negotiating in good faith–which both sides are.” A few in Washington agreed, including some Democrats. But there were plenty who saw in Trump’s latest impulsive moves a dangerous trend. The President rolls the die, breaks diplomatic norms and relishes the fact that predicted catastrophe doesn’t come to pass. Which is fine unless it does.