So, Donald Trump’s heralded intervention to bring resolution to the Ukraine conflict has fallen flat. Rejected by Russia, by the EU states, by Kiev. An unprecedented trifecta of failed foreign policy. His contrived scheme designed to skirt the core issues and interests at stake was a ‘non-starter’ from Day One. That should have been obvious. There was no serious thinking in the White House that might produce a coherent diplomatic strategy. There manifestly was no understanding of Moscow’s position rooted in post-Cold history and events since the U.S. sponsored Maiden coup in 2014 – nor of the intransigence among the ultra-nationalists who pull Zelensky’s strings. Instead, what we got was vintage Trump. An impulsive reaching for a quick triumph to punctuate his brilliance as a statesman. The fixing of an objective without a thought-out plan how to achieve it. A reliance on bullying, intimidation and underhanded dealing – the hallmark of his entire career. Its apparent successes are rooted in corruption, cronyism, and criminality – facilitated by the deference of other parties who lacked his ruthless cold-bloodedness. It is also a record of failures as testified by six bankruptcies – contriving to stiff his partners and creditors in each instance. Against this background, his ability to cast himself as a winner owes more to the perversity of contemporary American society that invites chicanery than to any genius on his part.
On Ukraine-Russia, Trump was grandstanding. There is an element of self-promotion in everything that he does publicly. The idea of being celebrated as a great peacemaker captured his imagination – not because he had any concern about the destruction and human cost or Europe’s long-term stability. Admittedly, he also seemed to have been sold on the fashionable notion that the U.S. should mute its confrontation with Russia so as to be in a position to concentrate all our resources for the titanic struggle with China. The role of warrior-in-chief potentially could be just as appealing as that of peacemaker. In fact, he had it both ways for a while: a Noble Prize candidate for mediating in Ukraine; laurels from Israel’s American legions for reinforcing Washington’s complicity in the Palestinian genocide. What counts for Trump is the limelight and the exaltation. So, he fixates on the one step that could stop the Ukraine fighting quickly – a ceasefire. None of the necessary and suitable preconditions exist; it amounts to calling a timeout of indeterminate length in a war that the other side is winning. Yet, for 3 months that is the centerpiece around which everything pivots – futile proposals hatched by Trump’s virally anti-Russian advisers that only a fantasist images could lead to a settlement of the conflict. The package presented to the Kremlin on a take-it-or-leave-it basis included such zany ideas as the U.S. taking over the critical Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station now under Russian control. This from a government that relentlessly for the past decade has pulled out all stops in its campaign to isolate and undermine the Russian state.
So, the great tariff offensive is mired in its contradictions. Donald Trump’s hairbrained scheme to make the American economy great again by forcing everybody else to pay extravagantly for the privilege of sending trillions in goods to the United States in return for nothing more than electronic banknotes printed by the Federal Reserve in the form of debt securities – securities they found it expedient to place in American financial institutions. The magical circle that has allowed Washington to run huge budget deficits and balance-of-trade deficits for decades without fear of a monetary comeuppance. It was the dollar’s supremacy in the global economy, American control of multilateral institutions like the IMF, and its leveraging of security protections that made this convenient arrangement possible. However, that world no longer exists – a cardinal fact of contemporary international life beyond the comprehension of the hucksters who convinced Trump that this snake oil was the elixir that could cure the national economy of all that ails it – arresting the fading of American economic dominance and, indeed, ensuring its Providential hegemony forever and anon.
An essential truth that we have been willfully overlooking is that Trump is an ignoramus – literally. His pool of knowledge about issues, places or persons is so shallow that you couldn’t drown a gnat in it. He doesn’t read. He thinks in slogans, as well as speaks in slogans. The wide gaps between his declarations and the truth are at once the result of mental laxness and a characteristic of a clinical narcissist whose exalted sense of self can only survive by erasing the line between actuality and what he finds is comfortable and self-serving. Thus, for Trump the truth has no claim on precedence. We have had nine years of the Trump phenomenon to observe how that approach to the world expresses itself. If further evidence were needed, scrutinize his behavior of the past 100+ days. His understanding of the Russian leadership’s state of mind (and that of an overwhelming majority of citizens) is close to zero – despite repeated, candid statements by Putin and Lavrov explaining with exceptional clarity what their views are. The only notions he held were simplistic and mistaken: Putin is a strong leader and a hardnosed wheeler-dealer of the type I’ve known all my life, someone with whom I can strike a deal; Russia is struggling to keep up the war effort; a few territorial concessions are all that is needed to resolve the dispute. Similarly, his understanding of how the global economy works is equally impoverished. Macro-economics is not his thing; after all, he imagines that he became a (nominal) billionaire by being a master of micro finance. Does he even comprehend that supply chains are the connective issue of today’s international economy?
There is another feature of the malignant narcissist that is noteworthy: a powerful drive toward controlling what filters into his mind/feelings. Empathetic understanding of other parties, or detailed knowledge of complicated matters, is perceived as a potential threat to the uninhibited assertion of will. For it is constraining to recognize boundaries, the likely responses of interlocutors, second order effects, or intricate intersections. The imperative is to safeguard the privilege of saying or doing whatever that avaricious, demanding psyche may impulsively want to do at any given moment. Sudden reversals are the inevitable outcome. One day we are told that the U.S. will abandon Ukraine to its fate unless it obeys Washington; the next is announcement with great fanfare of an historic joint resource venture that will entail a massive American presence and stake in Ukraine’s future – such as it might be, an incidental oversight by Trumpian strategists.
For the same reason, the formal obligation to observe institutional rules (e.g. NATO, IMF), treaty stipulations, or alliance commitments is anathema.
Is this an overstatement of Trump’s ignorance? Let us recall that this is the President who advised Americans that they may protect themselves against the COVID-19 virus by injecting themselves with bleach. Too, a President who appoints as Secretary of Health and Human Services a whacko who seems skeptical of the germ theory of medicine.
So, Donald Trump is repositioning his foreign policy people. Waltz is exiled to the United Nations, Marco Rubio becomes interim National Security Adviser – warming the seat until Steven Witkoff has completed his failed missions in Moscow and the Middle East and available to take over. In a normal government, led by a normal person, such a move so early in an administration would be seen as having considerable practical significance. It might reflect the outcome of a dispute fueled by serious policy differences. It might impend important changes in the structure and process of decision-making. Neither is likely in this instance. There is no organized process for setting foreign policy objectives, for choosing among strategies, for formulating the appropriate diplomacy. Structured, orderly deliberation is absent and alien. Decisions are made by Trump on an ad hoc basis. He listens at random to advice from the principal officeholders, from his White house entourage, from golf pals, from FOX TV personalities. From whomever. The appointment of the hapless numbskull Pete Hegseth to head the Pentagon happened because Trump relished the crude inanities that he uttered at FOX. (During Trump’s first term, he habitually chatted late in the night with Sean Hannity about what the latter had broadcast in that evening’s segment). Whatever impresses him he adopts – even if the ideas are contradictory or ephemeral. Hence, the changeability of what he tweets or says from day-to-day – re Zelensky, Putin, Ukraine in or out of NATO, grabbing Greenland/Panama/Canada, trade negotiations with China vs new sanctions, negotiations with Iran vs Trump fatwa forbidding anyone in the world from buying its oil. All of this is transparent and repetitious. Yet, elided by the media and most commentators.
Frankly, there is a case to be made that the psychology of Trump’s unhinged behavior is less of an analytical challenge than is the behavior of all those analysts who insist on normalizing it by ascribing to Trump’s words and actions design and coherent strategy that simply do not exist.