It has become fashionable to assert that Donald Trump’s promises in the field of foreign policy are menaces to the global order. His critics, for instance, worry that the president-elect’s vows to get tough on China, seek an entente with Russian President Vladimir Putin, trim U.S. military and financial support to NATO, and shrink U.S. objectives and involvement in the Middle East spell the end of the U.S.-led, rules-based international order, and for that matter of the post-Cold War Pax Americana. Critics expect this may propel conflicts with dire worldwide consequences.
That assessment, however, underestimates a crucial point: The international order and Pax Americana have been unravelling already for quite a while. George W. Bush’s nation-building woes in Iraq, Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind retrenchment, and not the least the latter’s failure to make true his red-line warning on the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, have exacerbated tensions in more than one arc of crisis and have eroded the weight and ascendancy of the United States in international political relations to the benefit of contending powers.
Seen from this perspective, Trump’s election will not be the cause of the decay of the postwar international order and of Pax Americana. Instead, it was a reaction to such decay.
The new administration will thus inherit a world based not on the rule of international law or on American supremacy, but on crude balance-of-power relations and competition between spheres of influence -- a point that the foreign-policy pundit par excellence, Henry Kissinger, has persuasively made.
Against this complex background, the U.S. president will be facing a daunting foreign-policy trilemma, one that will force him to choose at most two out of three of his objectives in this field: taking on China, appeasing Russia, and ensuring the support of the GOP-majority in Congress. One of these objectives will have to be sacrificed.
For starters, present conditions do not lend themselves to a replay of a “Nixon strategy to break the Russia-China Axis,” as Doug Bandow, former Special Assistant to President Reagan, recently called for -- this time through a U.S. rapprochement with Russia aimed at thwarting an alliance between Moscow and Beijing.
Indeed, during the Nixon years, the Soviet Union and China were ideological and geopolitical foes; they even engaged in a proxy war, pitting Vietnam against Cambodia in the late 1970s. It made sense at that time, therefore, to play one communist power against the other, as the Nixon-Kissinger strategy successfully did.
Today, those two countries, far from fighting each other, have been strengthening their ties [https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-russia-marriage-by-robert-skidelsky-2015-06?utm_source=MadMimi ].
In an eventual standoff between the United States and China, all bets are off, for China is not deprived of the means to exact a political toll on the new U.S. administration.
Indeed, Beijing may multiply its provocative moves in the South China Sea; abstain from helping to ease tensions between the United States and North Korea’s regime; adopt a tit-for-tat trade war; and entice U.S. partners by offering them a China-led alternative to the moribund Trans-Pacific Partnership.
What is more, should the United States and China trade off power moves, Russia may take advantage to consolidate and extend its gains in other theaters of operation such as Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
What will Trump do in such a case? Will he let Russian President Vladimir Putin do as he pleases so as to keep concentrated on China?
If so, Trump would open a third battlefront, this time an internal one: against a GOP-controlled Congress that seems willing and ready to push the executive branch to be assertive against a mischievous Russia. This is all the more so after the U.S. intelligence agencies’ findings on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Thus, if Congress decided that the time to respond to Putin has come, Trump would pay a price to court the new czar. A congressional enquiry on the eventual links between Trump and Russia could not be ruled out.
Trump’s ego may push him to confront Putin. He would loathe being the president to relinquish America's leading role in world affairs to a country whose global economic weight is lighter than Italy’s. The first hint of the likely strains between the two leaders was given by the speed at which Trump reacted to Putin’s announced intention to expand Russia’s nuclear capabilities.
So attempts at cooperation with Moscow may last no longer than did those of his predecessors. Unlike diamonds, political honeymoons are not forever -- and this is especially true if one of the partners is named Vladimir Putin.
If Trump finally decides to take on Putin, he will find himself struggling against two powers at the same time --China and Russia -- a geopolitical scenario that, in addition to running counter Trump’s initial foreign-policy intentions, is everything but enviable, as it would likely lead to a full-fledged alliance between Russia and China that will test Trump’s, and for that matter America’s, resolve.
Given the thorny choice that Trump will have to make among the aforementioned, mutually-exclusive objectives, his presumed mastery of the art of the deal will be quickly, and sorely, put to the test. Once again, all bets are off.
