A Warning

“LGBT… Q… I… ZXW?—who knows,” one Trump official laughed, trying to spell out the abbreviation used to define aspects of sexuality and gender. “I just learned what the I stood for.”

“Interracial?” another interjected.

“No. Intersex,” the first explained. “I still don’t know what the hell that actually means, though.” More laughter.

This was a group of senior Trump officials chatting about the president’s participation in a G7 summit. The Group of Seven (“G7”) consists of the world’s wealthiest nations, comprised of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, which gather regularly to discuss economic and security issues. In June 2018, Canada was set to play host to the annual get-together of leaders. The Canadians announced that gender equality and women’s empowerment would be a major focus, among other issues, and several officials mused about whether sexual orientation might come up, too. It was not the agenda they were hoping for.

Some White House aides were not taking the gathering seriously in part because the president himself wasn’t taking it seriously. Trump didn’t like forums where he wasn’t guaranteed star billing, or where he would be outnumbered by other leaders with different points of view. He was never one to sit through long meetings, and most of the issues that concerned our allies didn’t interest him. Additionally, in advance of the summit, Trump alienated—or was in the process of alienating—a majority of the G7 allies. He’d recently slapped tariffs on a number of them and was being criticized by the group, which has historically worked to break down trade barriers, not erect new ones. The president considered pulling out, but it was impossible to come up with a suitable excuse for stiffing America’s biggest allies.

Trump faced two options. He could take the criticism in stride and steer the conversation at the G7 toward issues that could unite the allies. Or he could play the role of sore loser and sow deeper division. None of us were surprised when he veered toward the latter. Advisors braced for the summit to be a failure before Air Force One ever left Washington.

The prediction that the event was going to be “bad” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hosts were upset when the president arrived late. Trump berated other leaders about “unfair trade practices.” He grew irritated with Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe, at one point apparently telling him in a meeting: “Shinzō, you don’t have this problem [of illegal immigration], but I can send you twenty-five million Mexicans and you’ll be out of office very soon.” He tossed Starburst candy at German chancellor Angela Merkel, remarking, “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything.” And then he left the summit early, rounding off the visit with a tweetstorm blasting Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau as “so meek and mild… very dishonest & weak,” and announcing that the United States was backing out of the joint statement signed only hours earlier with the other leaders.

What a horrible mess, I thought. This isn’t how we’d act toward our enemies at an international summit, and these were our close friends. Not only that, we’d wasted an opportunity to show solidarity with them on important issues where we had common interests. Perhaps worst of all, the president alarmed everyone at the summit by publicly calling for a nation-state rival, Russia, to be readmitted into the G7 meetings. Russia had been cast out of the group over its invasion of Crimea. Since then, Vladimir Putin had done little to demonstrate he was a responsible world partner, but the president questioned why the allies should meet at all if Moscow wasn’t invited. It was as if Putin himself had written Trump’s talking points.

In any event, Trump didn’t care about the tiny trail of destruction he left on the way out of Canada. His mind was elsewhere. He was flying to make new friends, on the other side of the world. The G7 was merely a distraction standing in the way of the month’s main event: his meeting with Kim Jong Un, the brutal dictator of North Korea. Trump would later reveal it was the meeting where he and Kim “fell in love.”

National security is the most important responsibility of the commander in chief. He must protect the American people against external threats and provide for the safety and security of the nation. Everything else is secondary to this charge. The primary domain for achieving lasting security is in foreign policy. That’s where the president must have clear-cut plans to keep our extended neighborhood safe by working closely with like-minded allies and keeping dangerous adversaries at arm’s length.

President Trump doesn’t see the world this way. It’s never been fully clear to me why, but he’s flipped the script, distancing himself from America’s friends and courting its foes. He regularly discards the advice of seasoned foreign policy professionals in the administration. He has struggled to develop a coherent security strategy, leaving “America First” open to interpretation and changing his mind on consequential decisions without warning. Worst of all, he has seemingly abandoned a century-long consensus about America’s role as leader of the free world.

Empire of Liberty

To put President Trump’s foreign policy into context, it’s important to understand history. Prior to the twentieth century, we are taught, the United States was an isolationist country. In his farewell address, George Washington said it was America’s policy to “steer clear” of foreign entanglements. John Quincy Adams declared twenty-five years later that the United States was not a nation that went “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” America didn’t become an assertive country, the story goes, until it boldly intervened in the First World War and turned the tide against fascism. This is an oversimplistic rendering.

Since its earliest days, the United States has been an expansionist nation, focused on shaping international developments. The Founding Fathers predicted their young republic would become a strong country, if not the world’s strongest. In the same speech quoted above, President Washington outlined a vision for America to be mighty enough “to bid defiance to any power on earth.” The other Founders shared his aim and believed the United States was a “Hercules in a cradle,” destined one day to flex its muscles globally and create an “empire of liberty.” In the short term, those ambitions were tempered by the need to build the country’s institutions to a competitive level, but once it gained the requisite strength, the United States began spreading its ideals in far-off places.

The continuous effort to shape a more democratic world became a unifying theme, even as the White House changed hands. Historians note that nearly every president in the last hundred years embraced this foreign-policy consensus. Democrat Woodrow Wilson vowed that America would stand for “the principles of a liberated mankind… whether in war or in peace.” Republican Dwight Eisenhower said the country would strive to strengthen the “special bonds” between free people “the world over.” While some presidents were more hawkish than others about reinforcing democracies overseas, variations of the same theme were carried forward from Kennedy to Obama.

Donald Trump is the clear outlier. After getting sworn in, he took shots at his predecessors’ foreign adventurism. “For many decades,” he said, “we’ve… subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.” It was a call to pull back and look inward.

Each of Trump’s claims are false and his attempted point is based on a short-sighted view of history. We would be far worse off today if the United States hadn’t invested in the success of our friends. America would be poorer and less secure, struggling to fend off hostile countries in a more menacing global neighborhood. Instead, we played an active role in the world, which went from being composed almost entirely of dictatorships and monarchies to being majority democratic thanks to our efforts. This opened markets for our goods, facilitated the spread of knowledge, and gave us new partners who would have our backs in times of trouble.

America’s dominant role on the international stage is at risk today. Rising nations are trying to compete against the United States. Henry Kissinger forecast this development a quarter century ago, predicting that in our time America would “be the greatest and most powerful nation, but a nation with peers.” Kissinger argued that the emergence of rivals should not be seen as a “symptom of national decline.” It’s not proof that we overextended ourselves, as Trump says. Competition is a fact of life. Kissinger noted that for most of its existence the United States was not the sole superpower, so “the rise of other power centers” shouldn’t surprise us. We should be concerned, however, if those rivals do not share our values and try to deconstruct the world America built.

Our response at such a pivotal moment must be to fortify our position. We should be deepening relationships with allies. We should be fighting forward with our principles. For every step we take backward, adversaries will step forward on the world stage to accomplish their priorities instead of ours. Unfortunately, my experience serving under this president has left me convinced Trump is shifting America into reverse. He’s not positioning us to strengthen our empire of liberty. Instead he’s left the empire’s flank vulnerable to power-hungry competitors.

“More Unpredictable”

Candidate Donald Trump outlined his foreign policy views in detail for the first time on April 27, 2016. He attached a bumper sticker, “America First,” to his plans for international engagement, declaring it would be “the major and overriding theme of my administration.” Whether he intended to or not, Trump borrowed a longtime isolationist motto, which had been used by individuals opposed to US involvement in the Second World War. It was fitting because his America First plan was isolationist in spirit.

His comments became quite revealing later in the speech. “We must as a nation be more unpredictable,” he told the audience. “We tell everything. We’re sending troops. We tell them. We’re sending something else. We have a news conference. We have to be unpredictable. And we have to be unpredictable starting now.” The exhortation turned out to be the best encapsulation of Trump’s foreign policy: unpredictability. It’s a natural carryover of the president’s governing philosophy, which as we’ve discussed is characterized by careless spontaneity. The president likes to keep everyone guessing about his views, sometimes even himself, but the stakes are much higher in foreign policy than they are on talk shows or Twitter.

After the president was sworn in, the national security team took longer than usual to coalesce. Most incoming officials were not on the campaign, did not know Trump, and were in many cases unfamiliar with one another. For secretary of state, he chose Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon, and General Jim Mattis as secretary of defense. The choices were notable because the two men, both with extensive international experience, did not share Trump’s isolationist, what’s-in-it-for-me attitude toward the world. It became evident that he chose Jim and Rex less because he wanted people who would challenge him and more because he thought their résumés would make him look good. He got the head of the world’s biggest company to work for him, and one of America’s most acclaimed generals! That’s how he characterized it to confidants.

The national security advisor is supposed to sit at the center of the team. Not as a co-equal, but as an honest broker. This person must be the central nervous system, connecting the president at the head with the arms and legs, which provide feedback and carry out his orders. President Trump’s first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, didn’t quite fit the bill. He lasted several weeks before he was ousted for making misleading statements about contacts with the Russians. Those who’d spent any time with Flynn knew he had weird views on international issues and didn’t show great judgment, so the change was for the better.

The bumpy beginning—a team that didn’t really know one another and aides getting fired—meant no one was really “in charge.” The president didn’t have a strong national-security crew to bring along with him from the campaign because he didn’t think he needed one. He was his own best advisor. But all of a sudden Trump was responsible for the most powerful nation on earth. What if a real crisis happened? A top Republican on Capitol Hill reached out to express concern. “It looks like there aren’t hands on the wheel of the car yet,” he said to me. “The administration needs to get its act together fast.” I agreed.

Flynn was replaced by General H. R. McMaster, another celebrated military leader, who recognized the disjointedness of the president’s security team. He resolved to bring order. H. R. saw his mandate clearly. He was supposed to bring the players to the table and execute the president’s vision; soon he was hosting weekly conference calls with White House staff and agency heads. The goal was to keep everyone on the same page on foreign policy, but a recurring problem emerged. No one knew what page the president was on. Or if he was even reading from the same book.

All folks knew was that Trump was living up to his word on using “unpredictability” as a guiding principle. One minute, he might try to jettison a longstanding free trade agreement after a bad phone call with the Canadian president, and the next he might propose cutting off a US lifeline to a stalwart ally because he thought it was costing too much. Everyone developed policy whiplash, from advisors a stone’s throw beyond the Oval Office to ambassadors stationed abroad. What was going on inside Trump’s head? We had no idea what he’d do next, and it wasn’t obvious the president did either. Decisions were made by the seat of his pants. Those privy to the content of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders were red-faced with embarrassment. To us, he came off like a complete amateur, using important calls to brag about himself and make awkward comments.

US allies felt the same way. His strange proclamations and irascibility shocked them. Behind the scenes, they begged us—fruitlessly—to get him to stop tweeting. “Please,” one foreign leader implored, “you must get him off of Twitter. It’s hurting the relationship.” His country had been in the crosshairs of a recent Trump missive, and he argued that he couldn’t be seen by his people working with the United States if the president was going to blast them all the time. We agreed, but assured him it was a lost cause. Trump’s social media addiction was unmanageable.

The volume of tweets-turned-crises abroad grew weekly. More than a year into the first term, members of the foreign policy team were huddling on such an issue. Trump’s social-media missives were limiting US response options to an overseas incident, the full details of which will not be released for some years. A new hire on the team was visibly frustrated. “The president needs to stop tweeting!” he said with exasperation, insinuating that we all should have confronted the bad habit sooner. “Wow, we never thought of that before,” a veteran agency head quipped in response. The official was getting a hands-on lesson in what the rest of us already knew by then—that we were captive to the haphazardness.

We found out fast that the president couldn’t articulate how he wanted to prioritize his foreign policy goals. The NSC tried to address his lack of strategic direction by giving him one. As required by law, the president must produce a security “strategy” for America. H. R. hoped he could work with Trump on developing a plan for international engagement, getting him away from reactive decision-making. He had staff put together a paper extolling the importance of US alliances, hailing post-war institutions like NATO, and calling for tougher action against rivals like Russia and North Korea. The presumption was naive. The president didn’t care, and he didn’t read the lengthy public document, which became more of a discarded homework assignment than a guide for US policy.

If the president’s closest advisors cannot anticipate his next move, then everyone else is really in the dark. The agencies the commander in chief relies on to implement his policies are left directionless, and allies are likewise unable to coordinate with us effectively. Sure, uncertainty can keep foreign enemies on their toes, but after a while, they stop taking you seriously, which is what is happening to Trump. He’s the international equivalent of the “boy who cried wolf”: Friends and foes alike are writing him off. The last words you want to hear about your president from a foreign official are, “Yeah, we do our best not to pay attention.” Regrettably, that’s what they’re saying.

Trump assailed Barack Obama during the presidential campaign for a decline in US global leadership. It would not happen on his watch, he said. In the “America First” speech, then-candidate Trump told the audience that “our friends are beginning to think they can’t depend on us” because of Obama’s eight years of retrenchment. “We’ve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies, something that we’ve never seen before in the history of our country… The truth is they don’t respect us.” Trump said he’d change direction, but if such a trend existed under the Obama administration, he seems to have doubled down on it.

Blinded by the Might

Donald Trump scoffed at President Obama’s outreach to dictators. In 2011, he derided the president for catering to the authoritarian Chinese regime with “pretty please” diplomacy. In 2012, he blasted Obama for “bowing to the Saudi king.” In 2013, he mocked the president’s trip to the notoriously repressive Cuban island to meet Raul Castro. In 2014, he said Obama was foolish for calling Russia a “regional power,” for telling the Russians he would have more flexibility after his re-election, and for letting Putin reemerge on the world stage.

As president of the United States, Trump has shown a far greater affinity for “strongmen” than Obama ever did. Historically, our nation’s chief executives have chosen their words carefully when talking about dictatorial foreign leaders to avoid giving them more credibility than they deserve. Trump, by contrast, lavishes them with praise. Whether he is applauding Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte for his “unbelievable job” cracking down on drugs (a crackdown partly carried out by murdering suspects without a trial) or hailing authoritarian Turkish president Recep Erdoğan as a “friend” whom he is “very close to” (Erdoğan has launched sweeping efforts to jail political opponents and critics), Trump has a soft spot for tough guys.

Saudi Arabia is a prime example. After the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi hitmen in October 2018, the president struggled to bring himself to criticize the regime’s leadership. Even after intelligence community assessments reportedly pegged ultimate blame for the state-sponsored assassination on Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump didn’t want to condemn a man in whom he’d previously expressed “great confidence.” “I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good,” the president told reporters, adding that the Saudi leader had denied involvement in the Khashoggi murder anyway, which seemed good enough for him.

The president acknowledged it was clearly the “worst cover-up of all time,” but he liked the crown prince. He liked him a lot. And he didn’t want to get on the Saudis’ bad side. “I am not going to talk about this anymore!” he vented to lieutenants. “Oil is at fifty dollars a barrel. Do you know how stupid it would be to pick this fight? Oil would go up to one hundred fifty dollars a barrel. Jesus. How fucking stupid would I be?” We really hoped the president wouldn’t go public with that explanation for staying silent. Then he did. Rather than criticize his friend the crown prince, Trump openly thanked him for keeping oil prices low, then later told reporters it was a reason he wouldn’t break with the Saudis.

He may also have been influenced by his son-in-law, Jared, who’d struck up a friendship with the crown prince. Following the killing, Jared was messaging Mohammed bin Salman and urged anyone who would listen to withhold judgment. “You’ve got to see it from his perspective,” he told administration colleagues. “He makes a point—‘My neighborhood is more dangerous than yours. I have Yemen. I have Iran. I have Syria.’ And he’s right!” Jared said with a laugh. “Can you imagine if we had something like Yemen at our southern border instead of Mexico? We’d be acting differently.” An appalled staff member on the other end of the exchange relayed it to others in the West Wing. Jared’s insinuation was that if we were in Saudi shoes, we’d murder journalists, too. NSC leaders were nonplussed.

The Khashoggi episode—made worse by weeks of presidential hand-wringing—damaged America’s credibility, yet it was hardly the worst case of the president’s submission to autocrats. That honor goes to Vladimir Putin. Under President Putin, Russia has reasserted itself on the world stage, challenging the United States at every opportunity and seeking to be a peer competitor. Trump, seemingly unfazed by the regime’s hostility toward Americans, has applauded Putin with regularity.

Most everyone in the administration felt strongly about punishing the Russians—hard—after their 2016 interference. Trump had a different view. While he may not have colluded with Russia as a presidential candidate, at a minimum he cheered them on. “Russia, if you’re listening,” he bellowed at a campaign event in July 2016, “I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand [Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by the press.” It was the first time in memory a US presidential candidate urged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his opponent. The same day, Russian hackers attempted to gain access to Secretary Clinton’s personal office, and in the following weeks, Trump was gleeful at the turmoil caused by Moscow’s ongoing leaks of other stolen emails.

After it became clear that the Kremlin was actively working to manipulate the election, Trump was nonetheless effusive in his praise for the dictator. “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him,” the candidate confessed to reporters. “I’ve already said, he is really very much of a leader. I mean, you can say, oh, isn’t that a terrible thing—the man has very strong control over a country… But certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.” He relished Putin’s mockery of his defeated opponent after the election, tweeting: “Vladimir Putin said today about Hillary and Dems: ‘In my opinion, it is humiliating. One must be able to lose with dignity.’ So true!”

The president’s denial-turned-apathy to Moscow’s actions is why America responded with the diplomatic equivalent of a whimper to one of the biggest ever foreign affronts against our democracy. Of all the failures of Trump’s foreign policy, letting Russia off the hook is perhaps the most frustrating. The outgoing Obama administration imposed modest sanctions on Moscow, including expelling several dozen alleged Russian agents from the United States, but it left the rest to the incoming White House. Trump was reluctant to take further action that might offend Putin, with whom he hoped to develop a close working relationship. He hesitated to even raise the subject in conversations with the Russian leader, dumbfounding people on the inside.

I remember when Congress sanctioned Russia in summer 2017. Representatives vented their anger over how little the administration had done to hold Russia accountable, so they took matters into their own hands and passed legislation punishing the country. Though he would later take credit for the sanctions to claim our administration had been unusually tough on Moscow, Trump in fact was furious. He felt Congress was getting in the way of his goal of a warm friendship with the Kremlin. Russia responded to the sanctions by kicking out hundreds of US embassy staff from their country and seizing US diplomatic compounds. President Trump’s response was startling.

“I want to thank him because we’re trying to cut down on payroll,” Trump told reporters about Putin’s move, without a hint of irony. “And as far as I’m concerned, I’m very thankful that he let go a large number of people, because now we have a smaller payroll. There’s no real reason for them to go back. So I greatly appreciate the fact that we’ve been able to cut our payroll of the United States. We’ll save a lot of money.”

The president’s obvious admiration for Vladimir Putin (“great guy,” “terrific person”) still continues to puzzle us, including those on the team who shrug off his outlandish behavior. Where did the Putin hero worship come from? It’s almost as if Trump is the scrawny kid trying to suck up to the bully on the playground. Commentators have speculated, without any evidence, that Moscow must “have something” on the president. I wish I could say. All I know is that whatever drives his love for Putin, it’s terrible for the United States because Vladimir is not on our side and no US president should be building him up.

We need a comprehensive strategy to counter the Russians, not court them. But Trump is living on another planet, one where he and Putin are companions and where Russia wants to help America be successful. As a result, US officials fear they’re “on their own” in fighting back against Moscow. They’re right. They are. If an agency wants to respond to Russia’s anti-US behavior around the world, they shouldn’t plan on steady air cover from the president. In fact, officials know they risk Trump’s ire if the subject comes up in public interviews or congressional testimony. “I don’t care,” one fellow senior leader snapped when reminded by his staff that he needed to watch his words in Senate meetings. “He can fire me if he wants. I’m going to tell the truth. The Russians are not our friends.”

Trump was once asked during a meeting with Putin whether he raised the subject of election interference. In response to the question, the president turned and offered a light-hearted scolding to his counterpart, wagging his finger. “Don’t meddle in the election, please.” Away from the cameras, advisors groaned. We were similarly confounded in Helsinki, when Trump insisted on having a private two-hour meeting with the Russian president, with no advisors present. This hardly ever happens. What is communicated between world leaders, especially competitors, can easily be misunderstood or misrepresented when there aren’t witnesses to the conversation on both sides. Meeting with Putin privately was a risky move in light of allegations about collusion, and it remains a mystery to us why he demanded it.

I want to make a side note here. The president’s secretive interactions with foreign leaders is generally concerning. International negotiations are often kept under wraps for good reason, but Trump’s efforts have gone beyond the norm. When he hides them from members of his own administration, it should set off alarm bells. What arrangements does he make with regimes like Russia behind closed doors? Why doesn’t he want people to know? The Ukraine scandal demonstrates that it’s not beneath Trump to inappropriately ask personal favors of foreign leaders and submit more lamentable requests. Even if the Ukraine inquiry concludes Trump didn’t commit a federal crime or the Republican Senate declines to convict him, voters should weigh these episodes seriously in the 2020 election. We should see Trump’s actions as fireable offenses, regardless of whether or not Congress determines they are impeachable ones. If the president is reelected, you can count on the fact that he will make other dishonorable requests of foreign powers that Americans and his advisors are unlikely to know about. I, for one, don’t want this president cutting secret deals with Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the Russian security threat has had a predictable yet devastating consequence. Moscow has not been deterred from attacking American interests. It has been emboldened. They continue to take advantage of the United States, around the world and on our own soil. Former director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified in January 2019 that Russia was still sowing social, racial, and political discord in the United States through influence operations, and several months later, Robert Mueller said the same. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” he testified to Congress. “They’re doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

This should be a national scandal, a cause for outrage and action against the Russian government. Instead, it’s being ignored where it should matter most—in the Oval Office. Reporters asked Trump about Mueller’s assessment days later and quizzed him again on whether he’d pressed Putin on the topic.

“You don’t really believe this,” he shot back. “Do you believe this? Okay, fine. We didn’t talk about it.” Then he boarded Marine One.

The person he does believe is Putin. According to a former top FBI official, Trump at one point rejected information he received regarding a rogue country’s missile capability. He said the Russian president had given him different information, so it didn’t matter what US spy agencies said. “I don’t care. I believe Putin,” the official quoted him as saying.

Willful ignorance is the fairest way to describe the president’s attitude toward our enemies. He sees what he wants to see. If Trump likes a foreign leader, he refuses to accept the danger they might pose or ulterior motives they bring to the table. That’s what makes it so easy for him to offhandedly dismiss detailed US threat assessments about nation-states or urgent alerts from our closest allies.

North Korea is another troubling example, one that may be odder than the president’s infatuation with Russia.

Trump is fascinated by the country’s young dictator, Kim Jong Un. “How many guys—he was like twenty-six or twenty-five when his father died—take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden… he goes in, he takes over, and he’s the boss,” he said in awe at an event when speaking about Kim’s rise. “It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn’t play games.” Trump proposed meeting with the leader during the presidential race, a proposal that was rejected by North Korea as a propaganda ploy.

Once in the White House, the president went the other direction. He announced a policy of “maximum pressure” toward the north, punishing the regime for its aggressive behavior. Advisors traveled the world whipping up support for sanctions to further isolate Pyongyang. We were relieved, frankly, because we thought the president was taking a clear-eyed view of the situation, standing up against a horrible government that was not only producing nuclear weapons but starving and torturing its own people. It felt like a righteous cause, and we were proud to be getting tough in a place where other presidents had prostrated themselves.

But Trump couldn’t hold the line for very long. He wanted badly to make a deal with Kim, whom he called “a pretty smart cookie,” though top advisors warned him against it. Many administrations have been trapped in failed negotiations with North Korea, discussions that the regime exploited to buy time and build weapons. It was a bad idea to fall for it again unless circumstances changed dramatically.

Then one day Trump’s unpredictability doctrine kicked in. South Korean officials were visiting Washington to deliver a message that the north wanted to negotiate over its nuclear program. The president brought the officials into the Oval Office, where they reported that Kim wanted to meet personally. Trump, who months earlier had threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” agreed on the spot. Aides—including senior officials at the Departments of State and Defense—were caught off guard. Trump said he would speak to Kim face-to-face, the first meeting between an American president and his North Korean counterpart.

Externally, the White House billed the announcement as an exciting breakthrough. It offered the possibility of reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and created hope for a denuclearization deal. Internally, we thought it was very stupid. Only hours earlier, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters it was far too soon to think about negotiations between US and North Korean officials, let alone a meeting of the two countries’ leaders. To put Trump and Kim in the same room, we thought, there would need to be major concessions from the North Koreans. Rex’s view was that we weren’t going to give them an audience with the most powerful man on earth without forcing them to pay a price; that is, until Trump decided otherwise.

“Maximum pressure” gave way to warm appeasement. Almost immediately, the president was carried away with the theatrics over the substance. Planning began for a summit in Singapore like it was Trump’s quinceañera. It would be a show to remember, proving he was a real grown-up statesman. Someone on cable news suggested Trump might get a Nobel Prize for making peace with Pyongyang, an idea that excited the president. The great dealmaker wanted to make a deal at almost any price, and Kim Jong Un, that smart cookie, knew it.

It was unclear to observers precisely how the United States would convince North Korea to give up its nuclear bombs when other administrations failed to do the same. The strategy and details didn’t really matter to President Trump, though. He was so confident in his ability to forge a personal connection with Kim that it wasn’t really about the details. It was about the chemistry. Unsurprisingly, the Singapore Summit flopped. It didn’t produce any meaningful results, and aides felt validated in their view that chemistry was no substitute for hard diplomacy.

Trump was undeterred. He measured success differently. “I like him, he likes me,” he said at a rally a few months after meeting Kim. “I guess that’s okay. Am I allowed to say that?” He affectionately described the communications between the two leaders. “We went back and forth, then we fell in love. He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” In my time in public service, I never thought I would witness a grown man in the Oval Office fawn over a thuggish autocrat like an adoring teenage fan. Naive doesn’t begin to describe it. Not a single member of the administration—not Rex Tillerson, not Jim Mattis, not Dan Coats, not Mike Pompeo, not Nikki Haley, not Mike Pence—would have spoken that way. Had anyone but Trump said something like that, they’d have been laughed out of the White House. It certainly seems they are laughing in North Korea.

With little progress being made on disarmament talks, our administration put more pressure on Pyongyang. This set the president off. In late 2018, the Treasury Department publicly sanctioned three regime officials for human rights abuses. Trump was furious. “Who did this?” he raged at advisors. “Kim is my friend!”

I lamented to another official that the president was losing sight of reality. North Korea’s government was brutal, untrustworthy, and unlikely to compromise at the end of the day. She agreed, and soon after, Trump’s intelligence chiefs echoed the warning in public testimony. North Korea was performing the same song and dance it always did to get the West off its back, offering a faux olive branch to relieve the pressure until a new US administration came into power.

As we tried to make sense of Donald Trump’s positions or when one of us tried to argue against them, we first had to ask: Why is the president so attracted to autocrats? After a contentious meeting about the president’s engagement with a foreign dictator, a top national security aide offered me his take. “The president sees in these guys what he wishes he had: total power, no term limits, enforced popularity, and the ability to silence critics for good.” He was spot on. It was the simplest explanation.

For instance, Donald Trump sympathized with Saudi crown prince bin Salman’s violent internal purge in 2017, saying the country’s leaders “know exactly what they are doing” and adding that “some of those they are harshly treating have been ‘milking’ their country for years!” This included long-time US interlocutors who were allegedly held against their will, beaten, imprisoned, or put under house arrest.

He celebrated Chinese president Xi Jinping’s move to permanently install himself in office for life, calling it an “extraordinary elevation,” and telling him privately that he was a “king” for having made the bold move.

He enthused to reporters about Kim Jong Un’s ability to control his population: “He’s the head of a country, and I mean he’s the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

And he commiserated with Putin about the free press in the United States, telling the notorious thug, “You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”

Trump’s affinity for autocrats means we are flying blind through world affairs. The moral compass in the cockpit, the one that has charted America’s course for decades, is broken. The president lacks a cogent agenda for dealing with these rivals because he doesn’t recognize them as long-term threats. He only sees near-term deals. “Russia is a foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically… But that doesn’t mean they are bad,” the president said in one interview. “It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they are competitive. They want to do well, and we want to do well.” To him, adversaries are just trading partners to be haggled with until we get a fair shake, and once we do, it’s a win for everyone.

What he doesn’t see, especially with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, is that their governments are programmed to oppose us. They represent the opposite of our values. No “deal” will change that. Until their political systems shift fundamentally or they lose power, they will stand against the free and open international order America built. Like us, they will try to shape the world in their own image. Unlike us, their leaders don’t care about natural rights and are gearing up for a protracted competition.

China should be our biggest worry. In his first-ever speech on the Senate floor, Mitt Romney compared Beijing to “the cook that kills the frog in a pot of boiling water, smiling and cajoling as it slowly turns up the military and economic heat.” Mitt is right. The United States is taking its eye off the ball with China, and our national response has been ad hoc and indecisive under President Trump. We have no serious plan to safeguard our “empire of liberty” against China’s rise. There is only the ever-changing negotiating positions of a grifter in chief, which will not be enough to win what is fast becoming the next Cold War.

President Trump is myopically focused on trade with China, which is only part of the picture. There are many other areas where aides agree we should be holding the Communist government’s feet to the fire. Yet the foreign policy team can’t really get him to focus on anything but the trade war. Americans should ask: Where is his Chinese human rights policy? Why is he so silent about the most significant pro-democracy demonstrations in the regime in two decades, when folks around him are pushing him to act? Where is his defense policy? Where is his proposal to contest China’s influence region by region? Is there any long-term plan? There are government bureaucrats who care about these questions and have their own designs. We’ve discussed ideas around the table, but it doesn’t matter if it isn’t part of a bigger plan. The president can say he wants to keep his enemies guessing, but we all know those are the words of a man without a plan.

Our enemies and adversaries recognize the president is a simplistic pushover. They are unmoved by his bellicose Twitter threats because they know he can be played. President Trump is easily swayed by their rhetoric. We can all see it. He is visibly moved by flattery. He folds in negotiations, and he is willing to give up the farm for something that merely looks like a good deal, whether it is or not. They believe he is weak, and they take advantage of him. When they cannot, they simply ignore him.

Alienating Allies

The president’s attraction to dictators would be less worrisome if it were matched by an equal affinity for our friends. The opposite is true. President Trump frequently alienates America’s most important partners and personally disparages their leaders. His burn-the-house-down exit from the G7 summit in Canada—where he blasted Western friends while en route to meet an Eastern foe—was just one example of his inverted international priorities.

Recall that the president repudiated this type of behavior only months before taking office. “We’ve picked fights with our oldest friends,” he warned, criticizing Obama’s foreign policy. “And now they’re starting to look elsewhere for help. Remember that. Not good.” Allies hoped President Trump would live up to these words, and some did admit to us they felt the Obama administration had given them the cold shoulder. We had an opportunity to win them back.

Hope didn’t last. Right after the inauguration, President Trump made introductory phone calls to foreign heads of state. His conversation with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a close US ally, was a sign of what was to come. The prime minister pressed the president on whether he would follow through with a deal on refugees previously negotiated between the two countries. “This deal will make me look terrible,” he reportedly told Turnbull. “I think it is a horrible deal, a disgusting deal that I would have never made.” Despite the prime minister’s attempt to reason with him, Trump shut down the conversation. “I have had it. I have been making these calls all day, and this is the most unpleasant call all day.” Then he hung up.

Summaries of presidential phone calls with foreign leaders are typically written up afterward and distributed within the White House and to other officials with the appropriate clearances. This is standard practice. The transcripts help a president’s lieutenants to stay in sync with their boss when engaging the same countries. After details leaked from Trump’s early calls, the summaries were put on lockdown. The distribution was limited mostly for security reasons, but also because the content was so routinely and so remarkably embarrassing.

No major US ally has been spared from the president’s indignities. In private, he pillories partner nations and their leaders and is not shy about doing the same in the open, as in the case of his comment about the Canadian prime minister being “very dishonest & weak,” only hours after being hosted by the northern neighbor. He’s done the same with France, mocking President Emmanuel Macron on Twitter for his low approval ratings and high unemployment, and with Germany, criticizing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration for failing to reduce crime and accusing its leaders of being freeloaders that take advantage of US generosity.

The United Kingdom, with which the United States has a “special relationship,” is no exception. After multiple terrorist attacks rocked Britain in 2017, the president scolded the Brits for failing to rein in extremism. “Another attack in London by a loser terrorist,” he tweeted after a train bombing in September 2017. “These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!” Prime Minister Theresa May bristled at the accusation, telling reporters, “I never think it’s helpful for anybody to speculate about what is an ongoing investigation.” In the months to come, her team would become infuriated with our administration, as President Trump criticized May’s handling of Britain’s exit from the European Union.

When confidential internal messages leaked detailing the British ambassador’s critiques of the Trump administration (including the apt observations that the president is “unpredictable” and his White House “dysfunctional”) the president proceeded to validate all of the ambassador’s concerns with an intemperate overreaction. Rather than showing restraint, he punched down, tweeting that the ambassador was “a very stupid guy,” “wacky,” and a “pompous fool.” For no strategic purpose, other than spitefulness, he also took parting shots at May, who was then stepping down as prime minister, calling her policies a disaster. “What a mess she and her representatives have created,” the president said in July 2019, specifically honing in on Brexit. “I have told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way… The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister.”

We have effectively given up on trying to block the president’s criticisms of our friends. It can’t be helped. He wants to say whatever he wants to say, as he does on any other issue. If anything, when he’s told not to say something—to avoid criticizing a leader directly, for instance, or to keep himself from breaking a promise we’ve made— Trump will say it louder. After these outbursts, it’s embarrassing for Trump lieutenants who need to ask the same foreign partners for help on something, whether it is to catch a wanted criminal or to support the United States in an important vote at the United Nations. Imagine someone announced to a crowd that you were a “pompous fool” and then rang you up for a favor. That’s the sort of cool reception American officials receive all the time in foreign meetings.

President Trump does more than humiliate America’s friends. He takes actions or threatens to take actions that will damage them in the long run. For example, Trump has hit Western partners with trade penalties, invoking “national security” provisions of US law to counter what he says are unfair economic practices in places such as Europe. He was on the brink of pulling out of a trade deal with South Korea in the midst of tense discussions on North Korea, putting the US ally in an awkward position. He threatened to scrap a longstanding US defense treaty with Japan, speculating that if America was attacked, the Japanese would not come to our aid but would instead “watch it on a Sony television.” And he regularly threatens to discard existing or pending international agreements with our friends in order to get them to do what he wants, including displaying personal fealty toward him.

You can’t overstate how damaging these presidential whims are to US security. Has it caused us to take a major credibility hit overseas? You bet. We see it all the time. Our closest partners are more guarded toward us than ever before, and it causes dissension within our own team. Every time he back-hands an ally, top officials complain it’s not worth bringing up foreign policy developments anymore with the president, for fear that he’ll kick over the LEGO structures diplomats have patiently built alongside our partners. “There’s no way I’m raising that in the Oval Office with him,” someone might say. “You know it will set him off.” This isn’t helpful either. The president shouldn’t be kept in the dark, yet people worry informing him will cause more harm than good. Others have just decided to resign, unwilling to be party to the dissolution of America’s alliances.

President Trump has repeatedly astounded advisors by saying he wants to exit our biggest alliance of them all: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This would be a huge gift to the Russians, who have long opposed the twenty-nine-nation group. NATO has been the backbone of international security for more than a half century, but the president tells us we are “getting raped” because other countries are spending far less than the United States to be a part of it, adding that the organization is “obsolete.” The president is correct that a number of nations aren’t spending enough on defense and that America has carried the overwhelming military burden. But the United States is also the most powerful nation on earth, and the investments we make in the NATO alliance allow us to project our influence globally to stop danger before it comes our way. Leaving the alliance would not only be foolish but suicidal—an advertisement to foreign enemies that it’s open season against Western countries, each left to fend for themselves.

His ultimatums were unacceptable to some cabinet officials. Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis, for example, specifically adjusted their travel plans to reassure America’s allies of our commitments, despite counterproductive Trump statements to the contrary. Some might say this came close to insubordination. It didn’t. It would have been dereliction of duty to sit by and let our security partnerships wither, and I find it hard to imagine that Trump supporters, who tend to be staunch backers of the military, would be pleased if the president pulled America out of the most powerful military compact in world history. They should be grateful there are folks who’ve talked him down and who’ve kept a reassuring hand on the backs of our allies.

A handful of America’s clever partners have decided they don’t want to wait around to get attacked and ostracized by the president. They’ve learned how to play him to maintain good relations and shift the partnership to their advantage. Our Israeli friends have watched dictators lavish Trump with praise and have learned to similarly cater to his self-conceit in order to get what they want. They’ve named settlements after him and found other extravagant ways to tell Trump how great he is, habitually exploiting the president’s pride to exact concessions. I probably don’t need to say it, but we don’t want this to become the norm either.

I suppose some Americans don’t care about foreign policy until a threat reaches our shores. They should care, because the actions we take abroad—or don’t take—determine whether the United States is safe in the long run. Our friends are among the best stockades against foreign hostility. We’re talking about countries that come to our aid when disaster strikes; that stand up for us in contentious international disputes; that protect our ships, planes, and people; and that are willing to fight and die alongside our troops in remote deserts. They are not, as Trump will tell anyone who cares to listen, out to screw us. We need them. Will Durant argued that the laws of nature—including “the survival of the fittest”—apply to global politics. In nature, cooperation is one of the keys to winning any competition. We cooperate within our families, our communities, and societies in order to overcome threats. We must do the same on the world stage, sticking close to our allies so the United States not only survives, but thrives.

But they no longer trust us. Why should they? Like anyone else, they can’t predict the president’s erratic behavior, and they find his attitude toward them demeaning. I know he lies to their faces (or on the phone) by offering false assurance of his support. He exposes sensitive discussions we have with them, and he tries to bully them into submission. Consequently, many are planning for life without the United States or, worse, how to deal with us as a competitor. The president of the European Council tweeted a viewpoint shared by many of his colleagues in May 2018, writing, “Looking at the latest decisions of @realDonaldTrump someone could even think: with friends like that who needs enemies.”

President Trump’s overall alienation of our closest partners is putting the United States at risk. Historically, our partnerships have given us an advantage over other countries. Our enemies have few friends, while America has many. We can’t afford a change in that calculus.

The Choice

The world depends on the United States to shape history. No person recognized this fact better than Winston Churchill, whose nation depended on American intervention in the Second World War. At the time, he wrote, “How heavily do the destinies of this generation hang upon the government and people of the United States… Will the United States throw their weight into the scales of peace and law and freedom while time remains, or will they remain spectators until the disaster has occurred; and then, with infinite cost and labor, build up what need not have been cast down?”

Are we still willing to throw our weight onto the scales of freedom? Will we be spectators? Or has President Trump decided we are on the wrong team—that we should be in a small club of thugs or a big club of free nations?

The world isn’t sure which way we’ll go. Surveys reveal America’s international image has plummeted under President Trump and that respondents believe the United States is failing to step up to solve international challenges. According to the Pew Research Center, “favorable” views of the United States are at record lows in many nations, and more countries say relations with Washington have worsened, not improved, during Trump’s tenure.

The reputational free fall stems from confusion the president has created with his words and actions. Under his leadership, it appears the United States is switching sides in global politics. In a July 2018 interview, the president was asked to name America’s biggest global adversary. He didn’t lead the list with China, which is stealing American innovation at a scale never before seen in history, or Russia, which is working to tear our country apart. He led off with a longtime ally. “Well, I think we have a lot of foes,” he told the reporter. “I think the European Union is a foe—what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe.”

Today the future of democracy is uncertain. Other nations are threatening our place atop the international order, and while it’s not automatically bad for us to have peers, it is bad if they threaten our way of life. To guard against their nefarious designs, we must stick together and keep fighting for what we believe. We cannot rely on hope. Hope will not stop Iranian missiles or thwart Chinese espionage. As Kissinger wrote, the “goals of America’s past—peace, stability, progress, and freedom for mankind—will have to be sought in a journey that has no end. ‘Traveler,’ says a Spanish proverb, ‘there are no roads. Roads are made by walking.’”

Americans must decide which way we’ll walk. If we want to prevail against aggressors, we must be ready for constant competition. We must be unhesitant in choosing between right and wrong. We must be very clear—our leaders must be very clear—about who is a friend and who is a foe. On that account, President Trump has failed us.