The mystery flavor of Trump's foreign policy

The second best flavor of Dum-Dum is always "Mystery Flavor." That's because, in my experience, what the question mark-covered wrapper almost invariably conceals is blue raspberry, which is the actual best flavor.

Donald Trump is not anything like as predictable as the premier American brand of spherical lollipops. Two years into his presidency many things about him have become clear — his willingness to break with his campaign rhetoric about solidarity and the importance of the safety net, his refusal to participate in the informal structures that have long defined presidential administrations, his remarkable ability to create new ones.

His views about foreign policy are not among these. Unlike all but two Republican presidential candidates in the last three election cycles, he called the Iraq war a failure not only in execution but in its conception. He heaped scorn on the idea of democracy promotion as a goal of American policy. But he also discussed the possibility of using torture with obvious relish and vowed to dismantle the nuclear deal made with Iran by the Obama administration.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Since then he has surprised some of his supporters by adopting conventional wisdom on the subject of Afghanistan and Syria. He has also, seemingly without attracting the notice of the collusion journalistic industrial complex, arguably done more to set back American relations with Russia than any president in half a century. His choices of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security adviser suggest that he is at the very least open to the perspective of traditional neoconservatives.

"We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency," the president tweeted on Wednesday. This would come as a surprise to many observers, not least in Syria, but it is broadly true that the terrorist organization born amid the ashes of al Qaeda in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is now sitting on embers, with its territory reduced to something like 2 percent of what it controlled at its height.

What are we supposed to make of this and of the Pentagon's subsequent announcement that it would soon begin the process of withdrawing some 2,000 troops from the Levant? Trump's insistence that defeating the Islamic State was the sole aim of his administration's policy there is at odds not only with the views of hawkish Republicans but with the pronouncements of his own national security adviser, who recently vowed that the United States would remain in Syria until Iran had withdrawn its forces. Was Trump speaking aspirationally or off the cuff? Or was the line about the "only reason" a not so subtle rebuke of Bolton and others who insist that American military presence in Syria will be necesssary until — well, who knows exactly. It is impossible to determine his motive.

In 2016, it was easy to understand why social conservatives held their noses and voted for the twice-divorced philanderer and pornographer who was reported to be outsourcing his judicial nominations to the Federalist Society. They were doing the best they could — though I think there was a better argument for staying home. Likewise, conservatives who would like to see the United States adopt a less belligerent foreign policy can be forgiven for choosing not to elect the architect of the adventure in Libya that has given us, among other things, a migration crisis that may well destroy European social democracy forever. Why not take a chance on a man who thought that his past support for the Iraq war was stupid enough to want to lie about it?

The difference between these two — hardly mutually exclusive — sets of priorities is that success is easier to assess in the former case. At the presidential level organized social conservatism means essentially one thing: appointing the right justices to the Supreme Court. When it comes to foreign affairs things are far more complicated. While Trump hasn't exactly earned himself a place on next year's shortlist for the LennonOno Grant for Peace, it is also the case that all of his supposed failures — bombing Assad's forces in Syria, staying the course in Afghanistan, increasing border tensions with Russia — would have been pursued by his opponent. On the other hand, it's almost impossible to imagine a Hillary Clinton presidency attempting, much less achieving, something like Trump's remarkable if inconclusive summit with Kim Jong Un or breaking, even nominally, with the foreign policy establishment on the issue of Syria.

It's still too early to say what's underneath the Trump wrapper.