How chaotic is Trump II going to be?

It matters whether you think his approach is transactional or personalist

“Donald Trump’s foreign policy style” is a five word phrase that I hoped never to have to think about again. But here we are, like it or not. Dan Drezner (a co-author and friend) wrote his account of what it would look like in a piece for Foreign Affairs here. I’ll be publishing a slightly narrower essay on similar themes soon. But in the meantime, here is a brief riff on where I disagree with Dan.

There is lots that we agree on - most particularly Dan’s main conclusion that

the era of American exceptionalism has ended. Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy will cease promoting long-standing American ideals. That, combined with an expected surge of corrupt foreign policy practices, will leave the United States looking like a garden-variety great power.

As Martha Finnemore and I have discussed, American exceptionalism has always been riddled with hypocrisy. Still, even if hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, it is a kind of homage, and on the whole you ought prefer a superpower that can occasionally be shamed into better behavior to one that cannot.

Where Dan and I disagree (I think) is on two things. First, on whether or not Trump has a transactional view of foreign policy. Second, on whether a second administration where Trump is more fully in charge will be more or less chaotic than the first one, where he often was not.

Dan:

The former and future president is a strong believer in using coercion, such as economic sanctions, to pressure other actors. He also subscribes to the “madman theory,” in which he will threaten massive tariff increases or “fire and fury” against other countries in the firm belief that such threats will compel them into offering greater concessions than they otherwise would. At the same time, however, Trump also practices a transactional view of foreign policy, demonstrating a willingness during his first term to link disparate issues to secure economic concessions. On China, for example, Trump displayed a recurring willingness to give ground on other issues—the crackdown in Hong Kong, the repression in Xinjiang, the arrest of a senior executive of the Chinese tech company Huawei—in return for a better bilateral trade deal.

… There were plenty of times when Trump seemed at war with his own administration, often leading to the characterization of his more mainstream foreign policy advisers (such as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster) as the “adults in the room.” The result was a lot of personnel churn and inconstancy in foreign policy positioning, which degraded Trump’s ability to achieve his aims. That should not be an issue for Trump’s second term. Over the past eight years, he has collected enough acolytes to staff his foreign policy and national security team with like-minded officials. He is far less likely to meet resistance from his own political appointees.

Here, I think that Dan’s argument suggests that even if Trump is an exceptional politician in many ways, he is an ordinary one in others. What is exceptional, under Dan’s account, is his crude transactional approach - his desire to reach his goals is completely naked of the ordinary graces of politics. As he demonstrated in term one, he doesn’t give a shit about democracy in Hong Kong or the oppression of Uighurs, and doesn’t pretend to give a shit. All he wants is a deal, and the best deal possible, pushing the other side to make concessions through threats and bluster. In his first term, this crude approach was often frustrated by his underlings. This led to a lot of chaos and inconstancy - but there will be less of that, now that he has his own people, rather than “grown ups” who are constantly looking to frustrate him.

More simply - the argument is that Trump is a politician with goals and a transactional willingness to make whatever deal it takes to achieve them. Those goals were often frustrated in the first term, by other political actors. Now, many of those frustrations will be removed, allowing Trump to at least try to achieve his goals more easily (he may still be frustrated by his own incompetent negotiation style and the fact that other leaders understand him better than they did back then). In political science terms, Dan’s is a rationalist account of Trump, and his interactions with his underlings, which could be modeled as an economic principal-agent problem, if you could add idiocy into your model more easily than the usual formalisms allow.

My theory of Trump is different. Building on Padgett and Ansell’s classic account of the court of Cosimo de Medici, I argued back in 2016 that Trump didn’t have goals in the usual sense of the term. Instead, his motivation was to maneuver everyone else so that they had to keep on paying attention to him, with:

Trump looking to reign triumphant above it all, not particularly caring (a la Padgett and Ansell’s Cosimo) about attaining specific goals, but instead looking to preserve his position at the center of an ever shifting spider web of political relations, no matter what consequences this has for the integrity of the web. This might not be authoritarianism in the sense of a well-honed bureaucratic regime dedicated to horrible ends, but authoritarianism in terms of the general break down of Weberian order and hierarchies in favor of a largely personalized politics in which one’s relationship with an erratic and unpredictable president counts for far more than one’s formal position and authority

This is a very different theory of Trump, which has some consequences for what his foreign policy may be. It suggests that his approach is not transactional but personalist. He doesn’t really care about goals in the ordinary sense of the term. All he cares about is getting other people to pay attention to him, and ideally to show him obeisance. The policies he adopts at any point in time will be the policies that allow him to strengthen his personal authority and dominance, while weakening the authority and dominance of others.

The practical difference is that Dan’s account suggests that Trump’s second term will be more consistent, but possibly less effectual. Trump will be able to pursue his own goals more easily now that others aren’t as easily able to frustrate them. The consequence of the removal of restraints on Trump’s behavior will be more constancy in foreign policy positioning.

My alternative account instead suggests that we will see less constancy in foreign policy. It argues that the most important source of chaos in Trump’s first administration was not the battle between Trump and his underlings, but Trump himself, as he constantly shifted policy, depending on who he had last talked to, and what seemed most likely at any moment to confound and vex his opponents. Now that the restraints are much weaker, we will see that the only constant is Trump’s wish to burnish his self regard, and to ensure that he is always at the center of the spider web.

I should acknowledge that this is a somewhat stylized and artificial confrontation of theories that were not designed to predict the psychology and motivations of a particular individual. It is perfectly possible that Dan may be closer to my position than I’m saying, or that aspects of my argument blur into his.

The visible facts could support either interpretation. If you read John Bolton’s account of his time as Trump’s National Security Advisor, you will see plenty of evidence of Bolton’s stratagems to frustrate Trump moves that he thought were too dovish. Equally, you will see lots of evidence of Bolton’s frustration with Trump’s inconstancy, and his persistent and unsuccessful efforts to build a more robust bureaucratic system for weighing up national security choices. Bolton, in the end, is more of an institutionalist than you might have hitherto suspected.

But if I am right, a Trump that is unleashed from the restraints of ordinary policies, who is enabled rather than constrained by his senior officials will be more inconstant, not less. He will move more unpredictably, without visible shame or remorse, from one policy position to another. It is notable, for example, that just a couple of months ago, he was deploring the consequences of sanctions, and talking up tariffs as an alternative. Now, his people are talking about a new wave of “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran.

In short: I think there is good evidence that an unconstrained Trump will mean a less constant foreign policy. The major source, as I see it, of chaos in Trump’s first term wasn’t the battle between him and his underlings, but Trump himself. If that theory is even half-right, the second term is going to be a very wild ride indeed.