A Vision of Trump at War
How the President Could Stumble Into Conflict
Just a few months into the Trump administration,
it still isn’t clear what course the president’s foreign policy will
ultimately take. What is clear, however, is that the
impulsiveness, combativeness, and recklessness that characterized Donald
Trump’s election campaign have survived the transition into the
presidency. Since taking office, Trump has continued to
challenge accepted norms, break with diplomatic traditions,
and respond to perceived slights or provocations with insults
or threats of his own. The core of his foreign policy message is that
the United States will no longer allow itself to be taken advantage of
by friends or foes abroad. After decades of “losing” to other countries,
he says he is going to put “America first” and start winning again.
It
could be that Trump is simply staking out tough bargaining positions as
a tactical matter, the approach to negotiations he has famously called
“the art of the deal.” President Richard Nixon long ago developed the
“madman theory,” the idea that he could frighten his adversaries into
believing he was so volatile he might do something crazy if they failed
to meet his demands—a tactic that Trump, whose reputation for volatility
is firmly established, seems particularly well suited to employ.
The
problem, however, is that negotiations sometimes fail, and adversaries
are themselves often brazen and unpredictable. After all, Nixon’s madman theory—designed
to force the North Vietnamese to compromise—did not work. Moreover,
putting the theory into practice requires the capacity to
act judiciously at the appropriate moment, something that Trump, as
president, has yet to demonstrate. And whereas a failed business deal
allows both parties to walk away unscathed if disappointed, a failed
diplomatic gambit can lead to political instability, costly trade
disputes, the proliferation of dangerous weapons, or even war. History
is littered with
examples of leaders who, like Trump, came to power fueled by a sense of
national grievance and promises to force adversaries into submission,
only to end up mired in a military, diplomatic, or economic conflict
they would come to regret.
Will that happen to Trump? Nobody knows. But what if one could? What if, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol,
Trump could meet a ghost from the future offering a vision of where his
policies might lead by the end of his term before he decides on them at
its start?
The problem is that negotiations sometimes fail, and adversaries are themselves often brazen and unpredictable.
It
is possible that such a ghost would show him a version of the future in
which his administration, after a turbulent start, moderated over time,
proved more conventional than predicted, and even had some success in
negotiating, as he has pledged, “better deals.” But there is a real risk
that events will turn out far worse—a future in which Trump’s erratic
style and confrontational policies destroy an already fragile world
order and lead to open conflict—in the most likely cases, with Iran,
China, or North Korea.
In
the narratives that follow, everything described as having taken place
before mid-March 2017 actually happened. That which takes place after
that date is—at least at the time of publication—fiction.
STUMBLING INTO WAR WITH IRAN
It
is September 2017, and the White House is consumed with a debate
about options for escalation with Iran. Another dozen Americans have
been killed in an Iranian-sponsored attack on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and
the president is frustrated that previous air strikes in Iran failed to
deter this sort of deadly aggression. He is tempted to retaliate much
more aggressively this time but also knows that doing so risks
involving U.S. troops even further in what is already a costly and
unpopular war—the very sort of “mess” he had promised to avoid. Looking
back, he now sees that this conflict probably became inevitable when he
named his foreign policy team and first started to implement his new
approach toward Iran.
Well
before his election, of course, Trump had criticized the Iran
nuclear agreement as “the worst deal ever negotiated” and promised to
put a stop to Iran’s “aggressive push to destabilize and dominate” the
Middle East. Some of his top advisers were deeply hostile to Iran and
known to favor a more confrontational approach, including his first
national security adviser, Michael Flynn; his CIA director, Mike Pompeo;
his chief strategist, Steve Bannon; and his defense secretary, James
Mattis. Some of Mattis’ former military colleagues said he had a
30-year-long obsession with Iran, noting, as one marine told Politico, “It’s almost like he wants to get even with them.”
During
his campaign and first months in office, Trump whipped up anti-Iranian
feelings and consistently misled the public about what the nuclear deal
entailed. He falsely insisted that the United States “received
absolutely nothing” from it, that it permitted Iran to eventually get
the bomb, and that it gave $150 billion to
Iran (apparently referring to a provision of the deal that allowed Iran
to access some $50 billion of its own money that had been frozen in
foreign accounts). Critics claimed that the rhetoric was reminiscent of
the Bush administration’s exaggerations of Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction programs in the run-up to the Iraq war. In February 2017, in
response to an Iranian ballistic missile test, Flynn brashly declared that he was “officially putting Iran on notice.” Two days later, the administration announced a range of new sanctions on 25 Iranian individuals and companies involved in the ballistic missile program.
Trump whipped up anti-Iranian feelings and consistently misled the public about what the nuclear deal entailed.
Perhaps
just as predictably, Iran dismissed the administration’s tough talk. It
continued to test its missiles, insisting that neither the nuclear deal
nor UN Security Council resolutions prohibited it from doing so. Ali
Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, even taunted Trump for his
controversial immigration and travel ban, thanking him on Twitter for
revealing the “true face” of the United States. Tehran also continued
its policy of shipping arms to the Houthi rebels in Yemen and providing
military assistance to Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, neither
of which proved particularly costly to the Iranian treasury. U.S.
efforts to get Russia to limit Iran’s role in Syria were ignored, adding
to the White House’s frustration.
To
the surprise of many, growing U.S. pressure on Iran did not immediately
lead to the collapse of the nuclear deal. As soon as he took office,
Trump ended the Obama administration’s practice of encouraging banks and
international companies to ensure that Iran benefited economically from
the deal. And he expressed support for congressional plans to sanction
additional Iranian entities for terrorism or human rights violations, as
top officials insisted was permitted by the nuclear deal. Iran
complained that these “backdoor” sanctions would violate the agreement
yet took no action. By March 2017, U.S. officials were concluding
internally—and some of the administration’s supporters began to
gloat—that Trump’s tougher approach was succeeding.
Different
behavior on either side could have prevented relations from
deteriorating. But ultimately, the deal could not be sustained. In the
early summer of 2017, real signs of trouble started to emerge. Under
pressure from hardline factions within Iran, which had their own
interest in spiking the deal, Tehran had continued its provocative
behavior, including the unjustified detention of dual U.S.-Iranian
citizens, throughout the spring. In June, after completing a review of
his Iran policy, Trump put Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on
the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations and
announced that continued sanctions relief would be contingent on
Iran’s release of all U.S. detainees and a return to negotiations to
address the nuclear deal’s “flaws.” Instead of submitting to these
demands, Iran responded with defiance. Its new president, a hard-liner
who had defeated Hassan Rouhani in the May 2017 election, declared that
in the face of U.S. “noncompliance,” Iran would resume certain
prohibited nuclear activities, including testing advanced centrifuges
and expanding its stockpile of low-enriched uranium. Washington was
suddenly abuzz with talk of the need for a new effort to choke off Iran
economically or even a preventive military strike.
The
Trump administration had been confident that other countries would back
its tougher approach and had warned allies and adversaries alike
that they must choose between doing business with Iran and doing
business with the United States. But the pressure did not work as
planned. China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and
the United Kingdom all said that the deal had been working before the
United States sought to renegotiate it, and they blamed Washington for
precipitating the crisis. The EU even passed legislation making
it illegal for European companies to cooperate with U.S. secondary
sanctions. Trump fumed and vowed they would pay for their betrayal.
As
the United States feuded with its closest partners, tensions with Iran
escalated further. Frustrated by continued Iranian support for the
Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Pentagon stepped up patrols in the Strait of
Hormuz and loosened the rules of engagement for U.S. forces. When an
Iranian patrol boat aggressively approached a U.S. cruiser, in
circumstances that are still disputed, the U.S. ship responded with
deadly defensive force, killing 25 Iranian sailors.
The
outrage in Iran bolstered support for the regime and led to widespread
calls for revenge, which the country’s new president could not resist.
Less than a week later, the Iranian-backed militia group Kataib
Hezbollah killed six U.S. soldiers in Iraq. With the American public
demanding retaliation, some called for diplomacy, recalling how, in
January 2016, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign
Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke directly to defuse the situation
after U.S. sailors drifted into Iranian waters. This time, the EU
offered to mediate the crisis.
But
the administration wanted nothing to do with what it considered the
Obama administration’s humiliating appeasement of Iran. Instead, to
teach Iran a lesson, Trump authorized a cruise missile strike on a known
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence headquarters, destroying
three buildings and killing a dozen officers and an unknown number of
civilians.
Trump’s
advisers predicted that Iran would back down, but as nationalist fervor
grew in Iran, Tehran escalated the conflict, calculating that the
American public had no desire to spend more blood or treasure in the
Middle East. Kataib Hezbollah and other Shiite militias in Iraq, some
directed by Iran and others acting independently, launched further
attacks on U.S. personnel. Tehran forced the weak government in Baghdad
to demand the Americans’ departure from Iraq, which would deal a huge
blow to the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State, or ISIS.
As
Washington reimposed the sanctions that had been suspended by the
nuclear deal, Iran abandoned the limits on its enrichment of
uranium, expelled the UN monitors, and announced that it was no longer
bound by the agreement. With the CIA concluding that Iran was now back
on the path to a nuclear weapons capability, Trump’s top advisers
briefed the president in the Oval Office. Some counseled restraint, but
others, led by Bannon and Mattis, insisted that the only credible option
was to destroy the Iranian nuclear infrastructure with a massive
preventive strike, while reinforcing the U.S. presence in Iraq to deal
with the likely Iranian retaliation. Pompeo, a longstanding advocate of
regime change in Iran, argued that such a strike might also lead to a
popular uprising and the ousting of the supreme leader, an encouraging
notion that Trump himself had heard think-tank experts endorse on
television.
Once
again, nervous allies stepped in and tried to broker a diplomatic
solution. They tried to put the 2015 nuclear deal back in place, arguing
that it now looked attractive by comparison. But it was too late. U.S.
strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in Arak, Fordow, Isfahan, Natanz,
and Parchin led to retaliatory counterstrikes against U.S. forces in
Iraq, U.S. retaliation against targets in Iran, terrorist attacks
against Americans in Europe and the Middle East, and vows from Tehran to
rebuild its nuclear program bigger and better than before. The
president who had vowed to stop squandering American lives and resources
in the Middle East now found himself wondering how he had ended up at
war there.
FIGHTING CHINA
It
is October 2017, and experts are calling it the most dangerous
confrontation between nuclear powers since the Cuban missile crisis.
After a U.S.-Chinese trade war escalated well beyond what either side
had predicted, a clash in the South China Sea has led to casualties on
both sides and heavy exchanges of fire between the U.S. and Chinese
navies. There are rumors that China has placed its nuclear forces on
high alert. The conflict that so many long feared has begun.
Of
the many foreign targets of Trump’s withering criticism during the
campaign and the early months of his presidency, China topped the list.
As a candidate, Trump repeatedly accused the country of destroying
American jobs and stealing U.S. secrets. “We can’t continue to allow
China to rape our country,” he said. Bannon, who early in the
administration set up a shadow national security council in the White
House, had even predicted conflict with China. “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to ten years,” he said in March 2016. “There’s no doubt about that.”
Not long after the election, Trump took a congratulatory phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, breaking with decades of diplomatic tradition and suggesting a
potential change in the United States’ “one China” policy. It wasn’t
clear whether the move was inadvertent or deliberate, but either way,
Trump defended his approach and insisted that the policy was up for
negotiation unless China made concessions on trade. “Did China ask us if
it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies
to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S.
doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle
of the South China Sea?” he tweeted. “I don’t think so!” In February 2017, after a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump announced that
the United States would honor the “one China” policy after all. Asia
experts were relieved, but it must have infuriated the president that so
many thought he had backed down. “Trump lost his first fight with Xi
and he will be looked at as a paper tiger,” Shi Yinhong, a professor at
Renmin University of China, told The New York Times.
There
were other early warning signs of the clashes to come. At his
confirmation hearings for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson appeared to draw a new redline in
the South China Sea, noting that China’s access to islands there “is
not going to be allowed.” Some dismissed the statement as overblown
rhetoric, but Beijing did not. The state-run China Daily warned that any attempt to enforce such a policy could lead to a “devastating confrontation,” and the Global Times said it could lead to “large-scale war.”
Then there were the disputes about trade. To head the new White House National Trade Council, Trump nominated Peter Navarro, the author of The Coming China Wars, Death by China,
and other provocative books that describe U.S.-Chinese relations in
zero-sum terms and argue for increased U.S. tariffs and trade sanctions.
Like Bannon, Navarro regularly invoked the specter of military conflict
with Beijing, and he argued that tougher economic measures were
necessary not only to rectify the U.S.-Chinese trade balance but also to
weaken China’s military power, which he claimed would inevitably be
used against the United States. The early rhetoric worried
many observers, but they took solace in the idea that neither side could
afford a confrontation.
It
was the decisions that followed that made war all but inevitable. In
June 2017, when North Korea tested yet another long-range missile,
which brought it closer to having the ability to strike the United
States, Trump demanded that China check its small ally and announced
“serious consequences” if it refused. China had no interest in promoting
North Korea’s nuclear capacity, but it worried that completely
isolating Pyongyang, as Trump was demanding, could cause the regime to
collapse—sending millions of poor North Korean refugees streaming into
China and leaving behind a united Korea ruled by Seoul, armed with
North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and allied with Washington. China agreed
to another UN Security Council statement condemning North Korea and
extended a suspension of coal imports from the country but refused to
take further action. Angry about Trump’s incessant criticism
and confrontation over trade, Xi saw the United States as a greater
danger to China than North Korea was and said he refused to be bullied
by Washington.
At
the same time, the U.S. current account deficit with China had swelled,
in part because growing U.S. budget deficits required borrowing from
abroad, thus driving up the value of the dollar. That, combined with
Chinese intransigence over North Korea, convinced the White House that
it was time to get tough. Outside experts, along with Trump’s own
secretary of state and secretary of the treasury, cautioned against the
risks of a dangerous escalation, but the president dismissed their
hand-wringing and said that the days of letting China take advantage of
Americans were over. In July, the administration formally branded China a
“currency manipulator” (despite evidence that it had actually been
spending its currency reserves to uphold the value of the yuan) and
imposed a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports. To the delight of the
crowd at a campaign-style rally in Florida, Trump announced that these
new measures would remain in place until China boosted the value of its
currency, bought more U.S. goods, and imposed tougher sanctions on North
Korea.
The
president’s more hawkish advisers assured him that China’s response
would prove limited, given its dependence on exports and its massive
holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds. But they underestimated the intense
nationalism that the U.S. actions had stoked. Xi had to show strength,
and he hit back.
All Trump wanted to do was get a better deal from China.
Within
days, Xi announced that China was taking the United States to the World
Trade Organization over the import tariff (a case he felt certain China
would win) and imposed a 45 percent countertariff on U.S. imports. The
Chinese believed that the reciprocal tariffs would hurt the United
States more than China (since Americans bought far more Chinese goods
than the other way around) and knew that the resulting
inflation—especially for goods such as clothing, shoes, toys, and
electronics—would hurt Trump’s blue-collar constituency. Even more
important, they felt they were more willing to make sacrifices than the
Americans were.
Xi
also instructed China’s central bank to sell $100 billion in U.S.
Treasury bonds, a move that immediately drove up U.S. interest rates and
knocked 800 points off the Dow Jones industrial average in a single
day. That China started using some of the cash resulting from the sales
to buy large stakes in major U.S. companies at depressed prices only
fueled a nationalist reaction in the United States. Trump tapped into
it, calling for a new law to block Chinese investment.
With
personal insults flying back and forth across the Pacific,
Trump announced that if China did not start treating the United States
fairly, Washington might reconsider the “one China” policy after all.
Encouraged by Bannon, who argued privately that it was better to have
the inevitable confrontation with China while the United States still
enjoyed military superiority, Trump speculated publicly about inviting
the president of Taiwan to the White House and selling new antimissile
systems and submarines to the island.
China
responded that any change in U.S. policy toward Taiwan would be met
with an “overwhelming response,” which experts interpreted to mean at a
minimum cutting off trade with Taiwan (which sends 30 percent of its
exports to China) and at a maximum military strikes against targets on
the island. With over one billion Chinese on the mainland passionately
committed to the country’s nominal unity, few doubted that Beijing meant
what it said. On October 1, China’s normally tepid National Day
celebrations turned into a frightening display of anti-Americanism.
It
was in this environment that an incident in the South China Sea led to
the escalation so many had feared. The details remain murky, but it was
triggered when a U.S. surveillance ship operating in disputed waters in
heavy fog accidentally rammed a Chinese trawler that was harassing it.
In the confusion that ensued, a People’s Liberation Army Navy frigate
fired on the unarmed U.S. ship, a U.S. destroyer sank the Chinese
frigate, and a Chinese torpedo struck and badly damaged the destroyer,
killing three Americans.
A
U.S. aircraft carrier task force is being rushed to the region, and
China has deployed additional attack submarines there and begun
aggressive overflights and patrols throughout the South China Sea.
Tillerson is seeking to reach his Chinese counterpart, but officials in
Beijing wonder whether he even speaks for the administration and fear
Trump will accept nothing short of victory. Leaked U.S. intelligence
estimates suggest that a large-scale conflict could quickly lead to
hundreds of thousands of casualties, draw in neighboring states, and
destroy trillions of dollars’ worth of economic output. But with
nationalism raging in both countries, neither capital sees a way to back
down. All Trump wanted to do was get a better deal from China.
THE NEXT KOREAN WAR
It
is December 2018, and North Korea has just launched a heavy artillery
barrage against targets in Seoul, killing thousands, or perhaps tens of
thousands; it is too soon to say. U.S. and South Korean forces—now
unified under U.S. command, according to the provisions of the Mutual
Defense Treaty—have fired artillery and rockets at North
Korea’s military positions and launched air strikes against its advanced
air defense network. From a bunker somewhere near Pyongyang, the
country’s erratic dictator, Kim Jong Un, has issued a statement
promising to “burn Seoul and Tokyo to the ground”—a reference to North
Korea’s stockpile of nuclear and chemical weapons—if the “imperialist”
forces do not immediately cease their attacks.
Even Trump’s harshest critics acknowledge that the United States had no good choices in North Korea.
Washington
had expected some sort of a North Korean response when it preemptively
struck the test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable
of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental United States,
fulfilling Trump’s pledge to prevent Pyongyang from acquiring that
ability. But few thought North Korea would go so far as to risk its own
destruction by attacking South Korea. Now, Trump must decide whether to
continue with the war and risk nuclear escalation—or accept what will be
seen as a humiliating retreat. Some of his advisers are urging him
to quickly finish the job, whereas others warn that doing so would cost
the lives of too many of the 28,000 U.S. soldiers stationed on the
peninsula, to say nothing of the ten million residents of
Seoul. Assembled in the White House Situation Room, Trump and his aides
ponder their terrible options.
How did it come to this? Even Trump’s harshest critics acknowledge that the United States had no good choices in North Korea.
For more than 20 years, the paranoid, isolated regime in Pyongyang had
developed its nuclear and missile capabilities and seemed impervious to
incentives and disincentives alike. The so-called Agreed Framework, a
1994 deal to halt North Korea’s nuclear program, fell apart in 2003 when
Pyongyang was caught violating it, leading the George W. Bush
administration to abandon the deal in favor of tougher sanctions.
Multiple rounds of talks since then produced little progress. By 2017,
experts estimated that North Korea possessed more than a dozen nuclear
warheads and was stockpiling the material for more. They also thought
North Korea had missiles capable of delivering those warheads to targets
throughout Asia and was testing missiles that could give it the
capacity to strike the West Coast of the United States by 2023.
Early in the administration, numerous outside experts and former senior officials urged Trump to
make North Korea a top priority. Accepting that total dismantlement of
the country’s nuclear and missile programs was not a realistic nearterm
goal, most called for negotiations that would offer a package of
economic incentives and security assurances in exchange for a halt to
further testing and development. A critical component, they argued,
would be outreach to China, the only country that might be able to
influence North Korea.
But
the administration preferred a more confrontational approach. Even
before Trump took office, when Kim blustered about developing the
capacity to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon, Trump responded on Twitter: “It won’t happen!” On February 12, 2017, North Korea fired a test missile 310
miles into the Sea of Japan at the very moment Trump was meeting with
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago estate, in Florida.
The next morning, Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, announced that
the United States would soon be sending a signal to North Korea in the
form of a major military buildup that would show “unquestioned military
strength beyond anything anyone can imagine.” Later that month, Trump announced plans for a $54 billion increase in
U.S. defense spending for 2018, with corresponding cuts in the budget
for diplomacy. And in March 2017, Tillerson traveled to Asia and declared that “the political and diplomatic efforts of the past 20 years” had failed and that a “new approach” was needed.
In
the ensuing months, critics urged the administration to accompany its
military buildup with regional diplomacy, but Trump chose otherwise. He
made clear that U.S. foreign policy had changed. Unlike what his
predecessor had done with Iran, he said, he was not going to reward bad
behavior. Instead, the administration announced in the summer of 2018
that North Korea was “officially on notice.” Although the White House
agreed with critics that the best way to pressure North Korea was
through China, it proved impossible to cooperate with Beijing while
erecting tariffs and attacking it for “raping” the United States
economically.
Thus
did the problem grow during the administration’s first two years. North
Korea continued to test missiles and develop fissile material. It
occasionally incited South Korea, launching shells across the
demilitarized zone and provoking some near misses at sea. The war of
words between Pyongyang and Washington also escalated—advisers could not
get the president to bite his tongue in response to Kim’s outrageous
taunts—and Trump repeated in even more colorful language his Twitter
warning that he would not allow Pyongyang to test a nuclear-capable
missile that could reach the United States.
When
the intelligence community picked up signs that Pyongyang was about to
do so, the National Security Council met, and the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff briefed the president on his options. He could try to
shoot down the test missile in flight, but shooting carried a high risk
of missing, and even a successful intercept might provoke a military
response. He could do nothing, but that would mean losing face and
emboldening North Korea. Or he could destroy the test missile on its
launch pad with a barrage of cruise missiles, blocking Pyongyang’s path
to a nuclear deterrent, enforcing his redline, and sending a clear
message to the rest of the world. Sources present at the meeting
reported that when the president chose the third option, he said, “We
have to start winning wars again.”
LEARNING FROM THE FUTURE
These
frightening futures are far from inevitable. Indeed, for all the early
bluster and promises of a dramatic break with the past, U.S.
foreign policy may well turn out to be not as revolutionary or reckless
as many fear. Trump has already demonstrated his ability to reverse
course without compunction on a multitude of issues, from abortion to
the Iraq war, and sound advice from some of his more seasoned advisers
could moderate his potential for rash behavior.
On
the other hand, given what we have seen so far of the president’s
temperament, decision-making style, and foreign policy, these visions of
what might lie ahead are hardly implausible: foreign policy disasters
do happen. Imagine if a ghost from the future could have given world
leaders in 1914 a glimpse of the cataclysm their policies would produce.
Or if in 1965, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson could have seen what
escalation in Vietnam would lead to a decade later. Or if in 2003, U.S.
President George W. Bush could have been shown a preview of the results
of the invasion of Iraq. In each case, unwise decisions, a flawed
process, and wishful thinking did lead to a catastrophe that could have
been, and often was, predicted in advance.
Maybe
Trump is right that a massive military buildup, a reputation for
unpredictability, a high-stakes negotiating style, and a refusal to
compromise will convince other countries to make concessions that will
make America safe, prosperous, and great again. But then again, maybe he’s wrong