Trump’s legacy at halftime — Weakness through war

With the congressional midterm elections nigh and the midpoint of Donald Trump’s second presidency not far behind, it’s time to ask: How does Trump’s foreign policy measure up so far? And where is it likely to go once he’s a lame duck? Even people you’d expect to be in the know have been off by 180 degrees in their predictions. I recall an op-ed by JD Vance in 2023, before he became Trump’s vice president. “Trump’s best foreign policy,” Vance was convinced, will be “not starting any wars.”

Here we are a couple of years later, mired in what seems to be an unwinnable war of choice launched by Trump in the Middle East — a special military operation, if that is the term, which Trump asked neither Congress nor the United Nations to approve; which has sabotaged the world economy and the livelihood of ordinary Americans; and which vaguely resembles the “forever wars” that he once campaigned against.

That attack on Iran, moreover, followed several other acts of war in all but name (since, again, Trump never consulted Congress before ordering any of them). He’s bombed countries from Yemen to Nigeria. Even more controversially, and certainly illegally, he keeps blowing up civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific (on suspicion, but without proof, that they may be carrying drugs); that death toll now exceeds 230.

Also illegally, but at least successfully, he infiltrated one country in Latin America, Venezuela, to extract its leader, while constantly threatening to do something similar to another, Cuba. And while we’re on the list of threats, he’s also intimidated several of America’s closest allies, suggesting he might annex Canada and take Danish Greenland by force. And all the while — even as he casually muses whether to “annihilate” an entire nation — he still demands recognition as a great, Nobel-deserving “peacemaker.” He certainly hasn’t made peace in Ukraine, where Russia continues to wage a genocidal war that Trump once promised he would settle in a single day.

Nor has he achieved peace, as opposed to tense ceasefires, elsewhere. The massive Israeli destruction of the Gaza Strip may have stopped for now, thanks to Trump’s pressure. But neither the rebuilding of Gaza nor the permanent pacification of the underlying conflict, which Trump’s so-called Board of Peace promised, have come any closer or become any more plausible.

And these examples are only the beginning of a long ledger that allows only two conclusions. First, Trump has lived down to the expectations of his most pessimistic skeptics by sowing chaos and wrecking the international order that the US sponsored and built after World War II. Second, he has broken every promise he gave or implied to his base by delivering more or less the opposite. In that way, and that way alone, Trump has been consistent. Start with that empty slogan (plagiarised from Ronald Reagan) that Trump brandished so liberally during his campaign: “Peace Through Strength.” What he has delivered instead is weakness through war. Worse, what he may leave his successors as a legacy is yet more war as a result of that weakness.

His war in Iran has weakened America in a geopolitical sense — by undermining its credibility — but also in a direct and measurable military sense, as top brass in the Pentagon have warned. By waging the conflict, the US has burned through many of its ammunitions, especially the high-cost missiles it uses defensively (to shoot down incoming ordnance) or offensively (to hit remote targets without sending pilots on dangerous bombing runs).

The resulting shortages, which will take years to replenish, mean that fewer American weapons are now available to friends in dire need, such as Ukraine, or formal allies, such as those in NATO or East Asia, which need to deter Russia, North Korea and China. This scarcity in the former “arsenal of democracy” has of course come to the attention of America’s adversaries in Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang. As these regimes eye their potential prey, from the Baltics to Taiwan and South Korea, they may be tempted to discount the risk of American intervention. The primary casualty is deterrence. That is how American weakness could in time lead to new wars.

But are these autocracies even adversaries any longer? The way Trump fetes their leaders, they may instead feel like America’s new besties. In stark contrast, he likes to humiliate the leaders of America’s traditional allies — for instance by lining them up before (and slightly beneath) his desk in the Oval Office for a good talking to. His contempt for the nominal allies goes beyond the symbolic. He has waged on-again, off-again trade war against virtually all of them, even as he has TACOed toward China. (TACO, short for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” is a financial markets term that was coined last year and stuck because it fits.) If anyone has achieved peace through strength, it’s Beijing, after it showed Trump that it can choke the US with its control over critical minerals.