The head of the world’s most powerful state, United States President Donald Trump may have celebrated his first 100 days in office with a bit of a whimper. Last week, embarrassed by continued media crowing over lapses in his election promises, the President had to struggle to get his bill to repeal ObamaCare passed in a congress dominated by his own party.
Unfazed, President Trump has announced that he will make his first presidential foreign trip later this month – not to ‘special relationship’ partner the UK, nor ‘closest allies’ Europe, but, to straight into the hottest, wildest, war zone on Earth: west Asia. The US President is expected to visit Riyadh, Saudi Arabia first where he hopes to meet a gathering of Arab country leaders and, then, he goes on to Israel where his itinerary seems to be a mix of state visit and religious pilgrimage.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is counting the costs of those 100 days of Trump Administration, with military actions, both violently real and deceptively ‘alternative’, swift reductions in US commitments to international economic and social aid, nonchalant praise of ruthless dictators and similarly ruthless elected Third World leaders, and, almost overnight changes in foreign policy towards global climate challenges.
Unlike the overly cautious Obama regime, the Trump regime has dropped the world’s most destructive non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan, fired powerful missiles against Syria, carried out a secret commando attack in Yemen, and drone strikes on Yemen and Somalia. It also stationed the world’s most powerful naval task force near the volatile Korean Peninsula while simultaneously carrying out massive military invasion exercises in the same region. Meanwhile it continues to actively support insurgencies against the Syrian regime while sending more undercover ground troops into Syrian border areas ostensibly for combating the Islamic State insurgency.
Cumulatively, the daily death toll may rise to over a 100 in all these various zones of warfare in which direct and indirect US involvement has intensified under the Trump White House. Some analysts did predict that Donald Trump would not stick to those isolationist foreign policy ideas that he touted to his low-brow vote banks during his election campaign. Other analysts had also anticipated that the Washington Establishment, or, at least the conservative Right wing of that Establishment, would gradually take over policy in the White House.
In the last weeks of those 100 days, as Trump began to face the realities of domestic and world politics and realise their unbendable natures, he had to shift his reliance for advice from those Hard Right cronies who crept in behind him into staff positions to the experts already in place in the Administration institutions or put in place by the Republican party leadership.
That was when Tomahawk missiles got launched during dinner with China’s President Xi Jin-Ping and Mrs. That was also when that ‘mother-of-all-bombs’ (so-called) got dropped by the USAF on some remote mountain hide-out in Afghanistan that apparently killed just 37 insurgents.
But this assertion of control over White House foreign policy (what the State Department is doing no one cares) has also seen a sustained barrage of hostile postures, pronouncements and non-aggressive military actions against North Korea, perhaps the world’s most paranoid state and, the one that is actively exercising with its weapons of mass destruction.
What the recent revival of US interventionist foreign policy is also exposing however is the inexperience and, perhaps, the ineptness of the new US administration as a whole – not just the President but also the Cabinet and the Republican Party leadership.
The strike on the Syrian airbase was low key (despite the weaponry used) with little major damage except for the loss of valuable aircraft. Again, those strike fighter jets, provided by military ally Russia to Syrian, can quickly be replaced, even by improved versions. Since that quite unprovoked direct aggression for the first time by the US against Syria, there has been no follow up by Washington in mediating in the Syrian war.
Instead, the ‘global policeman’ has watched while Russia and Turkey now labour to bring all those regional forces involved in that crisis in to process that may inch toward a lessening of the fighting. Last week, after a summit meeting in Russia between President Putin and Turkish President Erdogan, a plan to establish ‘safe zones’ in parts of Syria was announced. Washington has clearly been caught off guard by the Putin initiative.
Similarly, after that initial blast against China that warned Beijing that Washington was ready to act ‘unilaterally’ against North Korea, within weeks, Trump and fellow Administration officials, were publicly conceding to China the mediatory role with Pyongyang. True, the sabre-rattling also continued in the form of continued mass military invasion practices on Korean shores, off-shore naval concentrations, and even an over-flight of the Peninsula (safely on the South Korean side, of course) by USAF heavy bombers.
One more, that reassertion of the global policeman role did not follow through. As in Syrian, another global player is performing the key role.
The Republican Party has its own recent ideological shifts and concomitant organisational orientation to blame for this clumsiness in both domestic and global governance. In short, the party leadership has sought to move closer to right-wing conservative ideology rather than hold on to the mainstream of right-liberal policy.
The old Republican mainstream embraced strong open-market economic policies with some progressive bent in social policy. Such Republican leaders supported abortion rights, gay rights, and limited state support for health care even as they advocated more privatisation and de-regulation of business and tax cuts. In foreign policy, the Republican mainstream originally was parallel to Democratic Party policy in continuing with America’s interventionist role in world affairs and asserting US dominance.
For both Republicans and Democrats, it was “America is No. 1” and dominating the world and, not, as Trump and his Hard Right allies advocated, “America first” and the world later. After those first few heady weeks of sweet victory, when Trump did not do much on foreign policy than brag about his plans for American military power, faced with the need to react to world events, the Administration suddenly shifted towards traditional US foreign policy. Hence those sudden military actions.
The clumsiness was also revealed in the lack of coordination between President and Cabinet and implementing agencies like the military. It came out glaringly (and humiliatingly) with Trump’s bombastic announcement that he had sent an ‘armada’ towards North Korea. Within two days, the Administration was eating humble pie and indirectly admitting that the Commander-in-Chief was totally wrong as to the whereabouts of his armada. Not only was the route of the naval task force incorrect, but even the purpose of that initial sailing was not to ‘show the flag’ to North Korea but to join the Australian Navy in routine ocean exercises.
This and other gaffes by the American head of state has not only diminished America’s standing in the world as its sole ‘superpower’ but also endangered what’s left of global stability by its vague policies and sudden aggressive military actions.
The world’s media, consequently, has largely been harshly critical of Trump’s 100 days’ performance, although many conservative commentaries did call for caution and a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude. The right wing Washington Times newspaper in Washington, DC, echoed many other conservative-liberal commentaries globally in urging that cautious approach arguing that even clumsiness has occurred in these early days, the new Administration needs time due to the inexperience of its leader.
The Washington Times praised the return to conservatism, especially the broad Republican emphasis on the private sector.
Meanwhile, the liberal-left The Guardian, UK, titled its editorial comment on Trump’s first 100 days as ‘One Hundred Days of Failure’. The newspaper is scathing in its dismissal of Trump’s political behaviour and twists in policy. Clearly a newspaper that looks up to the US’ leadership role in the world, The Guardian feels hugely let down by what it sees as an incompetent elected to the White House.
China’s Xinhua news agency feels, in a commentary, that Trump’s foreign policy so far is ‘tough’ but lacked any consistent policy or strategy.
The New York Times predictably titled its editorial on Trump’s performance as “100 Days of Noise From Donald Trump”! It, too, was scathing in its criticism of this new Republican in the White House. Again, one could sense the disappointment of this venerable media organ in the new American leader for his failure to fulfil traditional roles suitable for the US as the global leader. As another European commentator observed, it is still too for history to genuinely appreciate the new American leader. One hopes that his policies will ensure the world will survive to have a history.