Once again, President Trump is threatening his country’s own partners with everything from tariffs to bombs. Once again, he is fawning over a nuclear-armed tyrant deemed to be one of the biggest dangers to U.S. security. And once again, the world is left trying to make sense of a United States that has upended the world order that it established eight decades ago.
Nearly 10 years after Mr. Trump first came to the White House on the slogan of America First, his attack-thy-friends, befriend-thy-enemies approach to international relations has become the feature, not the bug, of U.S. foreign policy. Traditional alliances from Europe to Asia to the Middle East have frayed while the president courts those once seen as its adversaries.
Even so, the past few days have thrown the Trumpian worldview into stark relief. Mr. Trump declared that he would bomb Oman, a key friend in the complicated diplomacy of the Middle East, if he decides it is getting in the way of his war with Iran. He was set to impose punitive new tariffs on Canada, once considered the United States’ closest friend. And he announced that he would pull back military support from South Korea, the bulwark of the U.S. network of partners in the Asia-Pacific.
At the same time, he again began sending public mash notes to North Korea’s absolute dictator, Kim Jong-un, with whom by his own description he “fell in love” in his first term. Mr. Kim, who rules one of the most oppressive nations in the world, never did give up his nuclear weapons, as Mr. Trump once declared he would. Instead, Mr. Kim has vastly expanded his nuclear arsenal in defiance of Mr. Trump, who nonetheless remains a suitor, no matter how unrequited.
“He dumps on our friends and cozies up to our enemies,” said James J. Blanchard, a former ambassador to Canada and Democratic governor of Michigan. “If someone once told me that Russia is our friend and Canada is our enemy, I’d have told you we’re in an upside-down world.”
Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that none of the bombastic threats were new. But he pointed out that Mr. Trump had not always followed through on them. The United States, he noted, had not pulled out of NATO, abandoned South Korea, bombed Oman or seized Canada and Greenland.
“Increasingly, the bullying rhetoric is being priced in by countries around the world,” Mr. Fontaine said. “They don’t dismiss it, but they don’t take the threats literally either. As more and more unfulfilled threats are issued, people listen less. It undermines the president’s credibility.”
Mr. Trump has long argued that his approach to other countries, however unorthodox, makes sense for the United States. Under previous presidents, allies took advantage of America’s security presence and trade rules without reciprocating, Mr. Trump maintains. He sees relatively high trade deficits and relatively low NATO military spending as proof that so-called friends are exploiting the United States.
As for sweet talking North Korea, China, Russia and other longtime adversaries, Mr. Trump contends that the confrontational policies of the past failed to achieve what they set out to, so better to try more diplomacy. He still hopes to reach a nuclear accord with North Korea, seal a comprehensive trade deal with China and reestablish full ties with Russia by brokering an end to Moscow’s war in Ukraine. He has pushed aides for a meeting this fall with Mr. Kim, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The war with Iran has provided a new scorecard for the allies that deserve support and those that do not. Countries that have declined to facilitate military operations against Tehran or use force to help guarantee passage through the Strait of Hormuz have in his view betrayed the United States, even though he never asked for their opinions before starting the war. After targeting Britain, France, Spain, Italy and others for not doing more to help him against Iran, Mr. Trump has now focused his ire on South Korea.
“We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?” he said this week after announcing that he would scale back joint exercises with South Korea.
By contrast, he went on, “Kim Jong-un has always treated me with great respect, and we’ve met on numerous occasions, actually, two primary occasions — spoken and spent time. I understand him. He understands me.”
If so, that distinguishes Mr. Kim from European and Asian allies who still do not understand Mr. Trump, even if they have come to expect his volatile outbursts. Until now, presidents of both parties have valued their relationships with overseas friends. And while there have been plenty of moments of tension over the years, they have worked to keep them from escalating too far.
Now the allies are the ones trying to avoid exacerbating the situation. “They grit their teeth and bear it because in the end they do not want to see irreparable damage done to the alliance over the next two years,” said Victor D. Cha, the president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In short, allies may like and trust the U.S. less today, but they still need the U.S.”
Mr. Cha, who was an Asia adviser to President George W. Bush, said that President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea actually has a good relationship with Mr. Trump and does not want to harm that. “Lee is also as transactional as Trump, so if Trump’s outreach to Kim Jong-un works, that is very much in South Korea’s interests,” Mr. Cha said.
The presence of U.S. forces in South Korea since the 1950s war has long irritated Mr. Trump, who sees it in zero-sum terms. In his first term, he sought to pull troops out and cancel military exercises, judging them wasteful and unnecessarily provocative toward his friend in North Korea. He sought to charge South Korea billions of dollars for U.S. protection, and linked security issues to his complaints about Seoul’s trade policies.
Mr. Trump is not the first president interested in bringing troops home from South Korea so long after the war. President Jimmy Carter promised to scale down U.S. forces there, but gave up amid resistance from Congress and his own administration. Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was Mr. Bush’s defense secretary, surprised the South Koreans by redeploying a brigade to Iraq, and never returned it. Today, about 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, according to the Congressional Research Service.
“There could be a strategic case for restructuring the U.S. military presence on the peninsula,” said Michael J. Green, the chief executive of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney in Australia, “but none for making them a pawn in a flirtation with the world’s cruelest dictator — particularly at a time when North Koreans are coming back from the Ukraine war battle hardened and backed by a larger missile inventory than they had in 2018.”
Oman, for its part, has for years been an important interlocutor between the United States and Iran, helping to facilitate negotiations when the two sides were open to talks. But Mr. Trump has grown increasingly aggravated that Oman has sought to broker a deal with Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz.
He first threatened to mount an unprovoked war on the sultanate in May, saying that “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up.” On Monday, he lashed out again, declaring that if Oman “gets in the way” of his efforts to reach an agreement with Iran, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
Canada faces a different form of hostility from Mr. Trump, who vowed to slap new tariffs of 50 percent on more than 500 Canadian goods, including hockey sticks and cheese, Tuesday at midnight. Just 90 minutes before his self-imposed deadline, Mr. Trump, as he often has done, pulled back from the brink and suspended the tariffs for three days to give more time for talks.
But even if the two sides eventually reach an accord, there remain many points of friction between the neighbors, exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s oft-expressed ambition to take over Canada and make it “the 51st state.” Just last month, the opening of the new Gordie Howe International Bridge linking Detroit with Windsor, Ontario, was delayed for weeks over various grievances Mr. Trump has with Canada.
Mr. Blanchard said he suspected that the latest eruptions against Canada and other U.S. allies stemmed from Mr. Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close. Neither bombing nor negotiations have forced Iran to surrender control of the Strait of Hormuz or to make verifiable commitments to abandon its nuclear program. The president appears stuck in a geopolitical trap without a clear path forward.
Mr. Fontaine said that Mr. Trump’s approach to allies and adversaries undermined U.S. interests. “There should be benefits to being a friend of America, and costs for being an enemy,” he said, “not the other way around.”
