The Washington Post, June 10, 2018
After Trump’s G-7 summit fiasco, be afraid by Jennifer Rubin
After President Trump’s atrocious and irrational behavior leading up to and at the Group of Seven summit, the disintegration of the liberal world order in place since the end of World War II and the potential for a serious international crisis no longer seem hard to imagine. The president, unmoved by history, ignorant of facts and guided by sycophants, has not been forced to grapple with the real world nor to hear views that don’t coincide with his twisted worldview, in which allies are ripping us off and aggressive strongmen are to be admired and accommodated. Trump — after departing the G-7 meeting early — reversed his earlier decision to sign on to the joint statement with other member nations. He no doubt was reacting to the public tongue-lashing from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who told the press, “I highlighted directly to the president that Canadians did not take it lightly that the United States has moved forward with significant tariffs on our steel and aluminum industry.” Trudeau continued by declaring that the Trump administration’s decision to invoke “national security” to justify tariffs was “insulting” given Canada’s alliance with the United States in multiple wars. As Trudeau put it, “Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.” Trump can never tolerate criticism, let alone such public and direct criticism, so he accused Trudeau of making “false statements” and reneged on the decision to sign the joint communique. Trump demonstrated once again that he is erratic and untrustworthy — with his own allies! The contrast between his antagonistic relationship with democratic allies and his never saying a bad word about Russia defies explanation, unless one is to buy into the theory that he is indebted in some fashion to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose campaign to interfere in the U.S. elections helped land Trump in the White House. Even before this diplomatic disaster, Trump was already grumbling about his failure to get our allies to capitulate. The Post’s Damian Paletta and Anne Gearan report: President Trump told foreign leaders at the Group of Seven summit that they must dramatically reduce trade barriers with the United States or they would risk losing access to the world’s largest economy, delivering his most defiant trade threat yet to his counterparts from around the globe. Trump, in a news conference before leaving for Singapore, described private conversations he held over two days with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany,
Italy, Japan, and Canada. He said he pushed them to consider removing every single tariff or trade barrier on American goods, and in return he would do the same. But if steps aren’t taken, he said, the penalties would be severe. “We’re the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” Trump said. “And that ends.” I have no idea what he is talking about. Our allies are not stealing anything. It is far from clear what, if anything, would satisfy him. If — and it is a big if — Trump is serious about erecting barriers to U.S. markets, we are looking at a full-blown trade war with our closest allies and trading partners, along with the trade wars with China and Mexico. All this would redound to the benefit of exactly one country, Russia. A worldwide recession would not be hard to imagine. Trump becomes irrational and unhinged when contradicted, and given the degree of contradiction permitted within his inner circle (none), it must be unnerving indeed to discover that our allies view him with disdain if not contempt. Arriving late and leaving early from the G-7 gathering, Trump played the petulant child, trying so very hard to say that he didn’t want to be part of their group anyway — so there! Worse still, his disturbing invitation for Russia, the United States’ most worrisome foe, to join the G-7 suggests he really cannot tell who is a friend and who is an enemy. Trump’s Republican enablers, who ridiculed liberal Democrats for coddling dictators and ignoring allies (ah, the good old days when they groused, inaccurately, about the return of a Churchill bust!), should see what their groveling has wrought. They now back a president who does not put America or the West first. A Manchurian candidate could not show greater fealty to Russia nor more diligence in helping Russia pursue its goals. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who refuses to consider reclaiming Congress’s role in trade, will see the consequences that flow from his and his fellow Republicans’ neglect of their constitutional obligations. Republicans have rejected their obligation to restrain an unfit executive and lessen the damage by reasserting Congress’s rightful power in areas such as trade. They are now Trump’s facilitators in his apparent desire to blow up the international world order — the world order America helped created and has always led. In that sense, McConnell, too, is helping, wittingly or not, to make Russia great again. Last week, McConnell bragged that the past 16 months have been the best he’s ever seen for conservatism. Unless “conservativism” means the anti-liberal regimes in Europe and Russia, that evaluation is daft. Starting trade wars, coddling enemies, inflating the debt, tolerating widespread corruption and fanning despicable racial animus make for “success” in conservatives’ minds? No wonder many former Republicans cannot abide the current GOP. These political outcasts have for decades been against every one of the things I just listed; the GOP now accepts and
even celebrates every one of them. The question is not why former Republicans have left the party but what purpose the party serves beyond sustaining Trump. As Trump is poised to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, he declares he’ll know within a minute whether the meeting will be a success. Here is a man declaring his gullibility and waiting to be snookered with a few smiles, some stomach-turning flattery and many empty promises from a calculating adversary. Trump seems not to know that the first meeting between the U.S. president and the dictator of North Korea is not an amazing achievement for the United States; it’s a huge win for Pyongyang. In the case of the Singapore summit, we really do see a zero-sum equation. Trump, for fear of failing, seems to have defined “success” down to a photo op, thereby giving a massive victory to Kim, who obtains legitimacy and reduces, if not eliminates, any real risk of military action against his regime. Kim will do what North Korea has done again and again : speak nice words, pull the United States into fruitless discussions and give up nothing of consequence. The empty gesture of formally ending a war that has been over for 65 years achieves nothing for the United States but will burnish Kim’s image. The notion that real denucelarization is even possible needs to be rethought. How could an entirely closed regime, replete with secret labor camps and a substantial military, ever allow inspectors to rove the entire country to determine what it has and what, if anything, it is giving up? How could Kim give up the jewel of his regime, the very thing that got him a summit with the world’s only superpower? Getting “investment” or economic aid from the West likely sounds like colonialism redux to the North Korean regime. Taking “help” from the West would be inviting the fox into the henhouse from their perspective. Surely someone in the Trump administration understands this, right? (Where is national security adviser John Bolton when you need him?) Trump is now so desperate to show he’s “right” — a master negotiator who breaks every precedent — that it is becoming more and more likely the summit will deliver plenty of glad-handing but no concrete moves toward denuclearization. In that respect, Trump is exactly like every other American president who got pulled into a process whose end result is North Korea’s continuing status as a nuclear power. The main difference is that none of Trump’s predecessors were dim-witted enough to give the ghoulish dictator of North Korea a public-relations triumph. Oh, and they managed not to get into fights with Canada. ***
European leaders are indignant and defiant over Trump’s G-7 statement. But they’re not surprised.
In an image released by the German government, President Trump speaks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders during the G7 Summit in Quebec. (Jesco Denzel/Via AFP/Getty Images)
by Griff Witte and James McAuley
BERLIN — It was an image that, in its Rockwellian presentation and characters, seemed to capture an emerging era. European leaders stood arrayed on one side of a narrow conference room table, leaning in. On the other side: President Trump, seated alone, his arms folded. The photo, released Saturday on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Instagram account and later tweeted by Trump national security advisor John Bolton, fast became a Rorschach test for an increasingly troubled relationship. Trump was clearly isolated. But was he making an overdue stand against an expiring global order? Or was he just the odd man out in the world’s most powerful club? The enchantingly unreadable facial expressions make it impossible to know. On the day after the Group of Seven summit blew up in spectacular fashion, with Trump using idle time on an airport runway to insult his host and repudiate an agreement he had made with allied leaders only hours earlier, emotions were far easier to divine.
Allies were indignant. They were defiant. Yet they were hardly shocked by the outcome of a critical global gathering that had gone worse than any that longtime foreign policy players had seen. “It was not a surprise,” said Norbert Röttgen, chair of the foreign affairs committee in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. “The president acted and reacted in the childish way he could be expected to.” To the U.S.’s closest partners, the pattern has become disturbingly familiar. Trump’s abandonment of the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear agreement and his decision to impose protectionist tariffs on European steel and aluminum products have established a level of animosity between the United States and Europe that, by many measures, surpasses even the rift over the Iraq War. The depth of exasperation showed in a Sunday afternoon statement from French President Emmanuel Macron’s office. "International cooperation cannot be dictated by fits of anger and throwaway remarks,” the statement said. “Let's be serious and worthy of our people.” After President Trump withdrew from the G-7 joint statement, his advisers blamed Canada's Justin Trudeau while lawmakers and Democrats criticized Trump. (Jenny Starrs /The Washington Post) For many in Europe, the question now is how best to preserve any kind of multilateral cooperation. Dealing with Trump’s whims and last-minute changes of mind has proven a strategic nightmare. “How is it possible to work this way if once you have agreed to something, two hours later the guy decides he doesn’t agree with what he agreed with?” said François Heisbourg, a former French presidential national security adviser. “Is there any space for a multilateral order under these circumstances?” Trump’s choice to abandon the G-7 communique was announced in a pair of tweets as he prepared to lift off early from the two-day summit in Quebec City. The decision – which came with an attack on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for being “weak and dishonest” -- directly contradicted an announcement by Trudeau minutes earlier in which he declared that all seven member-states had signed the joint statement. In that announcement, Trudeau had said the summit was “very successful,” but he also said Canada would retaliate against metals tariffs that had been aimed at allies. Following Trump’s tweets, Trudeau’s office issued a statement saying he “said nothing he hasn’t said before — both in public, and in private conversations with the President.”
The dispute was joined on Sunday by Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief economic adviser, who accused Trudeau of “betrayal” in advance of the president’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and said that Trudeau had “stabbed us in the back.” How to handle Trump has become one of the most pressing issues confronting U.S. allies. Röttgen, the Bundestag's foreign affairs committee chairman, said they have learned to anticipate his outbursts and U-turns, and should respond to them accordingly. He criticized Merkel’s team for releasing the much-discussed photo. “By portraying him as the naughty boy in the room, he will stick even more to his behavior and it will get worse,” said Röttgen, who is a member of Merkel’s centerright Christian Democratic Union. “We have to ignore his behavior and concentrate on what is left of the substance of the transatlantic relationship.” Just how much is left is a matter of debate. Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, wrote in his tweet of the photo that it was “Just another #G7 where other countries expect America will always be their bank. The President made it clear today. No more.” Others used the image to mock Trump: “Just tell us what Vladimir has on you,” European Parliament member Guy Verhofstadt imagined Merkel saying. “Maybe we can help.” The relationship between the United States and its allies could be frayed even further if the trade war escalates — a scenario that Röttgen said he expects, with the United States in his view likely to move against German carmakers. But Röttgen derived at least some hope from Trump’s proposal for entirely tarifffree trade among allies. Although Trump coupled the idea with a threat, and most experts see the notion as far-fetched, Röttgen said it is at least a basis for discussion. Of all European countries, Germany has the most to lose from a trade war with the United States. The United States had a $151 billion trade deficit in goods with the European Union last year. Germany alone, with its high-end automobile and appliance exports, accounted for $64 billion of that. Trump has repeatedly complained on Twitter about German automobiles flooding the U.S. market and has asked his administration to examine possible tariffs as a way to curb their popularity among American consumers, a point he reiterated on Twitter on Saturday.
But amid the animosity, there were signs among otherwise frustrated allied leaders that they see Trump and his “America First” agenda as an aberration and not necessarily as expressive of a new reality. Macron emphasized his belief that Trump’s vision of America was at odds with American values. “President Trump saw that he had a united front before him,” Macron said via Twitter. “To find itself isolated in a concert of nations is contrary to American history.” Other European leaders, meanwhile, continued their attempts to try to tamp down transatlantic disagreements. Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May preferred tact to confrontation, even after Trump allies allegedly told the Telegraph newspaper that the U.S. president had grown weary of May’s “school mistress tone.” Asked Saturday evening by the press whether she "liked working with him,” May responded, "We have a very good relationship with President Trump.” May did, however, allow that she and Trump had “a very frank discussion” about trade. May is not only hoping that Trump lift new tariffs on European aluminum and steel, but that he will promise a favorable pro-Brexit trade deal with the United Kingdom after it leaves the European bloc. There were also a few palpable cracks in what Macron had called a European “united front,” especially on the subject of Russia. Trump had called for Russia to be readmitted into the G7 group, much to the dismay of leaders of Germany, Britain and France. Not so with Italy. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who arrived in Quebec less than a week after the swearing-in ceremony for his new populist government, took Trump’s side. He said on Twitter that Russia’s return to the group was “in the interests of everybody.” He softened his stance in other remarks, telling reporters that Italy is not seeking sanctions to be removed “overnight.” With virtually no political profile before arriving in Quebec, Conte is a little-known academic chosen as a compromise representative of two insurgent parties now governing Italy. But he seemed to make an impression on Trump, who wrote on Twitter that Conte would soon visit the White House. “He will do a great job — the people of Italy got it right!” Trump wrote. Political anaylsts in Rome were skeptical of Conte cozying up too much to Trump.
“Conte went too far ahead with Trump,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political science professor at LUISS Guido Carli, a university in Rome. “And then he backtracked a little and realized he was out of step with our natural partners.” In a front-page analysis story Sunday, one of Italy’s major dailies, the center-left La Repubblica, said of Conte that “every move made by the premier has been conceived so as to break the European front and attempt to build an anti-EU axis with Trump.” But if that was the goal, there was clear defiance in the European response. Peter Altmaier, the German economy minister and one of Merkel’s closest allies, tweeted Sunday that “The West doesn’t break so easily.” “We are all The West, if we live and defend its values,” he wrote. “Especially, when it’s difficult." In much of the European press, the tendency was to underscore the historical significance of the rift between the United States and its continental allies. For Le Monde, a leading French daily newspaper, Trump’s approach seemed a deliberate attack on the postwar consensus. “Donald Trump is the same age as the world order put in place by the United States at the end of the Second World War, but one would swear he decided that the latter will not survive him,” the newspaper wrote: Der Spiegel, the German weekly, called Trump’s performance in Quebec “a scandal without precedent” and said that Merkel and other U.S. allies must now be prepared for anything — especially on trade, a topic dear to German hearts. McAuley reported from Paris. Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli in Rome, William Booth in London, and Luisa Beck in Berlin contributed to this report
