Opinion | Trump needs a foreign policy time machine – The Washington Post – The Washington Post
He claims many foreign policy problems wouldn’t have happened if he were president. Oh, really?
In 2016, Donald Trump promised to a build a wall. This year, he should promise to build a time machine to go back and fix all the world crises he claims would never have happened if only he hadn’t lost the 2020 election.
Okay, I made up that part about the time machine. But I’m not kidding about Trump’s habit of insisting that pretty much nothing would have gone wrong in the world if he were still president.
After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, for example, he told supporters: “If the election wasn’t rigged, there would be nobody even thinking about going into Israel.” More recently, he told Time magazine: “It would have never happened. You wouldn’t have had — Hamas had no money. Do you know that?”
I didn’t know that. Trump’s logic appears to be that his decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and impose unilateral sanctions against Iran ended the flow of financial support to Hamas. Trump’s ill-advised move definitely accelerated Tehran’s nuclear program (Iran now has more than enough highly enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb), but there is scant evidence that it led to a meaningful decline in Iranian support for proxy groups across the region. In fact, Hamas regularly fired rockets at Israel during Trump’s presidency while continuing to build the vast tunnel network in which its fighters now hide with their hostages.
After Iran fired a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel on April 13, Trump insisted, predictably, “That’s because we show great weakness” and claimed that “it would not have happened if we were in office. You know that, they know that, everybody knows that.” Again, Trump seems to know a lot of things he can’t remotely prove.
Granted, a direct Iranian attack against Israel is unprecedented. But it’s not as though Iran didn’t attack other U.S. allies in the region while Trump was president. In 2019, for example, Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen claimed credit for a massive missile and drone strike against Saudi oil facilities that sent world oil prices soaring by 20 percent. The United States concluded that the projectiles had been fired directly from Iran, and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denounced the attack as “an act of war,” but the Trump administration never retaliated. So the idea of Iran attacking a close U.S. ally in the Middle East — even Israel — while Trump is in office is hardly far-fetched.
Nor is there any real evidence that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin would have refrained from invading Ukraine if Trump were still commander in chief. Trump never tires of claiming that Putin “would never have done it with me. … He understood the consequence and we had a good relationship.”
Trump conveniently omits the fact that Russia was invading Ukraine throughout his presidency — there was nonstop fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed separatists. While the Trump administration did place sanctions against Russia and send weapons to Ukraine, Trump interrupted those weapons deliveries to try to blackmail the Ukrainian government into impugning his political opponent, Joe Biden, and he generally cozied up to Putin at every opportunity.
Fiona Hill, the Russia director on Trump’s National Security Council, told me that Putin didn’t widen his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was in office because “he didn’t have to. He got what he wanted in terms of undermining Ukraine’s position. Anything that was being done on Ukraine’s behalf was done in a half-hearted way.” In a similar vein, former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the New York Times: “It’s just not accurate that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians.”
Trump has slightly more credibility when he suggests that Putin might have been emboldened to fully invade Ukraine after seeing the botched U.S. exit from Afghanistan in 2021. But, of course, he never mentions that the “disgraceful” and “embarrassing” U.S. withdrawal was the result of a remarkably one-sided agreement his own administration negotiated with the Taliban. That deal required the United States to pull all of its forces out but did not require the Taliban to stop fighting. Biden merely reaped what Trump sowed.
In claiming that recent crises would never have occurred if he were still in power, Trump is not only engaging in wishful thinking. He is also rewriting history to pretend that his foreign policy was a smashing success — and that many of the world’s problems today are Biden’s fault. A Trump spokeswoman said last week: “President Trump secured historic peace around the world and deterred our enemies through strong leadership; and Joe Biden’s weakness and failure has invited aggression and war in both Ukraine and the Middle East.” Talk about historical revisionism.
Trump had a few genuine foreign policy achievements, including the Abraham Accords in the Middle East and the defeat of the Islamic State (which he jeopardized by trying to pull U.S. troops out of Syria).
But Trump failed to stop or even slow either the Iranian or North Korean nuclear programs, and he failed to effectively counter growing threats from Russia or China. Instead, he needlessly antagonized U.S. allies by insulting other democratic leaders and threatening to withdraw U.S. forces from their countries. Trump was much better at tearing up agreements (the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord) than negotiating new ones. He prioritized style over substance — e.g., he renamed NAFTA while leaving its content largely intact.
Biden is absolutely right to say, as he did in a new Time magazine interview, that Trump’s presidency had “a significantly diminishing impact on our ability to get things done internationally” by casting doubt on the United States’ reliability as a partner.
Biden’s own record in restoring U.S. credibility is mixed (in part because the whole world knows Trump could win again), but he is right to tout his foreign policy achievements in that same interview. As he pointed out, “NATO is considerably stronger than it was when I took office,” not only because European nations have increased their defense spending but also because the alliance has expanded to include Finland and Sweden. Biden said that Putin hoped to see “the Finlandization of NATO” but instead he’s gotten “the Natoization of Finland.” Biden’s visit to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day last week highlighted the alliance’s newfound unity.
Biden is right, too, that he has “been able to put 50 nations together to help in Ukraine” and that he has advanced important coalitions in the Pacific region such as AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-United States), the Quad (United States-Japan-Australia-India), the U.S.-Philippine basing agreement, and the Japan-South Korea-U.S. trilateral relationship. In addition, he signed the Chips and Science Act to boost America’s technological competitiveness and reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers of semiconductors.
But does any of that matter? The electorate doesn’t appear to be giving Biden much credit for his impressive foreign policy record, in part because foreign policy is seldom a top concern for voters and in part because the current president isn’t in his predecessor’s league when it comes to braggadocio. Trump is better at touting imaginary achievements than Biden is at touting genuine achievements.
I fear that Trump’s “wouldn’t have happened” version of recent events could prove effective. The further we get from his presidency, the more voters are likely to forget his actual record of chaos and dysfunction, which did not stop at the water’s edge. It’s imperative we remember what actually happened — not what Trump fantasizes — to avoid a sequel that might be even more dangerous and destructive.