Trump 45 vs. Trump 47
- Lex Rieffel
- Feb 25
- 5 min read
To justify my claim to be a policy wonk, I need to look back from time to time to assess what I wrote years ago on an issue of current interest.
When Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the USA in 2016, I was a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brooking Institution with the privilege of having my opinion pieces published in the Brookings blog on the Brookings website.
My first opinion piece about President Trump was posted on 15 November 2016, less than two weeks after the election. Three other pieces were posted in mid-December, mid-January 2017 (before the inauguration), and mid-May 2017. Each of these pieces can be found in the Miscellaneous Policy Issues topic on my website. Here is my quick assessment of what I wrote then.
My first piece riffed on the song R-E-S-P-E-C-T made famous by Aretha Franklin. I started by referring to a view set forth by Machiavelli in the 16th century that it is better for a leader to be feared than to be loved. I suggested that in today’s world—both domestically and internationally—it was more important to be respected.
I contrasted Barack Obama’s last meetings with foreign leaders during his presidency (Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and the APEC Summit leaders in Lima, Peru) with the prospective first meetings by President-elect Trump with Chancellor Merkel, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At that moment, given the statements made by Trump during the election campaign, it was hard to imagine these three leaders respecting Trump as much as they respected Obama.
Then I imagined Trump’s participation in multilateral meetings, in particular the scheduled G-7 Summit in May, the G-20 Summit in July, the U.N. General Assembly in September, and the back-to-back APEC and East Asia Summits later in the fall. I speculated (wrongly) that Trump would skip the G-7 Summit. I was correct in speculating the Trump would skip the East Asia Summit (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson attended), but wrong in predicting he would skip the APEC Summit (in Danang).
I concluded with: “Sometimes gaining a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T is complicated but doing so on the multilateral stage in Asia as well as with individual leaders in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere could help to “make America great again.”
ASSESSMENT: I still believe that for leaders in today’s world to be effective, respect is more important than fear or love. But there has been a sharp distinction since 2016 between Trump’s respect domestically and his respect internationally. He has gained the respect of as much as half of the voting population in the USA. Internationally, it seems that Trump is more feared than respected in the early weeks of his second presidency.
My mid-December 2016 blog post was about “the art of policymaking”. Here I focused on Trump’s cabinet choices and the distinction between good business deals and good public policy.
I explained that good business deals are “discretionary”, targeting specific industries or companies or organizations, or individuals. Good public policies are “rules based”; they establish the basis for treating a broad category of activity by all participants equally. I went on to explain that why in a democratic system like ours, first-best policies are often political nonstarters. Consequently, the constant challenge for policy makers is to adopt second best policies rather than third best ones.
I further explained that good public policies are rarely white or black choices but rather shades of gray. They often involve trade-offs between short-term pain and long-term gain. I concluded: “Good policies can make the poor as a whole better off; deals tend to make the rich richer. Let’s hope that the cabinet members and agency heads in the Trump Administration appreciate the difference and make policies that are good for America and for the rest of the world.”
ASSESSMENT: This is probably the sharpest of my four pieces because Trump’s approach to governance has become even more transactional, deal oriented. His cabinet choices in his second presidency seem to have little grasp of what makes good public policy. Already within the first 100 days of this administration, concerns are visible among his political base about the potential harm to their families and friends from some of his policies.
In mid-January 2017, ten days before his inauguration, I returned to the issue of Trump’s participation in upcoming international summit meetings. I started by sketching out the history of these summits: the G-7 beginning in 1976, APEC in 1989, G-20 in 2008, and East Asia in 2011 (when the US joined for the first time). My focus here was on US relations with Asia, suggesting that the Trump Administration would pull back on the Obama Administration’s “pivot to Asia”. This time I predicted correctly that Trump would skip the East Asia Summit in the Philippines and participate in the APEC Summit in Vietnam. I concluded: “[Trump] will opt out of the EAS, leaving it to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to sweet talk the Asians. As the New Year begins, it looks as though political leaders across Asia will feel more confused by the end of 2017 than they are now about America’s role in their region — and about the Trump administration’s policy objectives going forward.”
ASSESSMENT: Not much to be said here. The signs of confusion in Asia about the policies of the Trump Administration were pretty clear in mid-January 2017 and they only became clearer during the following four years.
My mid-May 2017 blog post focused on President Trump’s first foreign trip during his presidency: a set of Mid-East Summits in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Rome to meet with the Pope, Brussels to meet with EU and NATO leaders, and Sicily for the G-7 Summit meeting. I began by evoking Mark Twain’s account of his visit to the Holy Land in 1867 published under the title “Innocents Abroad”.
Then I launched into a consideration of Dale Carnegie’s popular book published in 1936 “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. I suggested that for the next 60 years, this formula seemed to be working for the USA, but during the next 20 years (1996-2016) the USA seemed to be losing more friends and influencing fewer people. I suggested that this change might reflect a shift in the focus of US policy from aggression by state actors (Germany and Japan in World War II; the Soviet Union in the Cold War) to nonstate actors (the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism).
I called attention to an op-ed piece in the Washington Post by Fareed Zakaria headlined: “Trump is turning other countries against the United States”. Zakaria stresses the difference between managing foreign policy and doing a business deal. Measuring success in business deals is relatively straightforward: the agreed dollar amount. There is no comparable metric for measuring success in foreign policy. A bigger difference is that in the competitive environment of business deals, losers move on and are quickly forgotten. In foreign relations, countries that feel like losers don’t go away; they fight back.
Finally, I recalled Theodore Roosevelt’s fondness for an African proverb: “speak softly and carry a big stick.” I concluded: “It became the hallmark of his foreign policy. No country in the world today doubts that the U.S. has a big stick. They all hear a loud voice from the White House and wonder who will be next to end up on America’s enemies list.”
ASSESSMENT: Hard to improve on this conclusion. It seems to be more true than it was in May 2017.
Links to the reposts on my website
15 Nov 2016
16 Dec 2016
10 Jan 2017
15 May 2017
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