Donald Trump's presidency is drawing admiration from global dictators, a fact he celebrates. This article analyzes Trump's misguided belief that his personal connections with these leaders will yield benefits for the US, overlooking the fundamental reality that their interests often diverge from American ones. It examines Trump's interactions with Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping, highlighting his naivete and lack of understanding of the geopolitical complexities involved.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Nhac Nguyen/Pool via Reuters, KCNA via Reuters, and Agustin Marcarian/Reuters. Badge illustrations by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Slate's reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington. Donald Trump ’s return to the White House is making the world’s biggest tyrants happy—a fact that Trump not only acknowledges but crows about with pride, as if that alone augured well for the world.
(Getting along is a worthy goal in itself for allies and neutrals, but, when it comes to adversaries, calling him “one of the most respected men”—oblivious or indifferent to the fact that Hungary’s president is in fact the most despised leader in the European Union, an open Putin ally, and the most active obstacle to EU and NATO unity. As for Orbán’s “strongman” style of leadership, Trump agrees: “He’s a tough person, smart.” The president’s assumption here is that, because these leaders are strong, because he likes them and they like him, and because they get along, they can do deals together. He can get them to do things by dint of their friendship—things that other presidents cannot. This is Trump’s delusion. First, they are not really friends; he thinks they’re showing him respect, when in fact they’re only pushing his buttons, having learned from his previous four years in the White House that he’ll treat them well, or at least won’t treat them harshly, if they pretend to show him respect. Second, he doesn’t understand that most leaders act in accordance with their interests, which are often quite different from—in some cases, antithetical to—U.S. interests. He doesn’t quite grasp this essential fact of international politics because he doesn’t quite grasp what U.S. interests are. The fact is, in his first term, Trump’s overtures to dictators yielded no benefits to the United States. At a joint news conference with Putin in Helsinki, when it came to the question of whether the Kremlin tried to influence the U.S. elections—yet, despite that and other instances of kowtowing, he got nothing from Putin, either at the Finland summit or throughout his four years in office. Trump now says that Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he’d been president—but Putin did fight a war in Ukraine, starting in 2014 and continuing all through Trump’s first term, with no hesitation. (That war was confined to eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, but it wasn’t a mere border skirmish; more than 14,000 people were killed.) Trump’s own plans for Ukraine were vague and ill-defined; he seemed to offer little more than the outlines of a plan that Trump put forth to end the war in Ukraine. Trump, who said he would make the war stop even before he took the oath of office, is finding that these things are harder to settle than they seem. Will he take revenge on Putin for betraying him? Since Trump seems genuinely reluctant to keep supplying Ukraine with billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, it’s unclear how. Putin doesn’t seem fearful. In the same way, Trump held two summits with Kim in his first term—beaming about their friendship before, during, and after, even boasting at one rally that the two”—yet, again, came away with nothing. This was because Kim had no interest in revealing the size and location of his nuclear arsenal, much less pledging to dismantle it. At one point in their meetings, Trump showed Kim a slideshow on how he could turn the North Korean coastline into a thriving tourist destination. At least Trump has no illusion that Xi might accede to fairer trade practices on the basis of some camaraderie. But he does seem to believe that punishing tariffs—or the threat thereof—would force Xi to cave in. Trump doesn’t seem to realize that, mainly involving the rupturing of U.S. and Western supply chains, many of which still involve China. Xi calculates that, given the Chinese Communist Party’s control over his country’s economy (and his own personal control of the CCP), he can hold out longer than Trump in this sort of asymmetric trade war. Orbán is one authoritarian leader who may be sincere in his desire for warm relations with the new American president. He faces challenges from within the EU. The European leaders know they have to please Trump, at least to some extent, dependent as they are on the U.S. for security (through NATO, which is U.S.-led) and economic stability (through the dollar and the international financial system). So, to appease the American president, Orbán may believe he could pressure the Europeans to ease up on any penalties they might inflict on Hungary. The only problem is that Hungary has very little to offer the United States in exchange, except for deeper association with Europe’s least democratic regime. It is a mystery to many why Trump behaves so deferentially to tyrants. Some believe that Putin must have a hold on him—money, blackmail, something. Whether or not this is true, Trump would very likely treat Putin the way he’s treated him all these years because, at bottom, Trump respects people with ultimate power.
DONALD TRUMP TYRANTS DICTATORS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Geopolitics PUTIN KIM JONG-UN XI JINPING
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