Trump's foreign policy magic actThe Hill, Jul 9, 2019, Grady Means
It’s almost as if Las Vegas has come to Washington, D.C., and the hugely popular magic tricks always feature misdirection. The audience’s attention is drawn in one direction while the real action is somewhere else. Nowhere is this becoming more evident than in the nearly three years of President Trump’s successful foreign policy show.
On the biggest stage, he excoriates our NATO allies and yet comes home with a larger NATO budget and an unprecedented visit from the European Union (EU) to seriously negotiate a trade deal. He pulls the same stunt with Canada and Mexico, with similar results. But that, of course, is not the trick. The real stunt is that he then begins to negotiate a much more important deal with China without needing to watch his back from Europe, Canada and Mexico.
He publicly embraces brutal authoritarian leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea one day and then increases a defense budget aimed at each of them the next. He puts huge economic and naval pressure on China and then quietly asks for a little help on North Korea.
He totally distracts and muddies the waters with Twitter storms and often embarrassing public behavior, and then delivers surprising and unpredicted results. It is almost as if he has a plan.
At each stage of the show, he is roundly criticized by the “experts†at think tanks, “old hands†from the Defense and State departments, some foreign diplomats, and a gaggle of TV pundits — until his strategies begin to work. It is almost as if he knows something that is not taught in Ivy League international relations courses or the War College — it is well beyond Clausewitz or Sun Tzu.
The past few weeks are a case in point.
More:
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/451762-trumps-foreign-policy-magic-act
