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The Top 10 Trump Administration Foreign-Policy Mistakes

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wednesday

Let’s admit it: It’s hard not to watch a video of a plane crash or a building demolition, and one feels the same disturbing fascination watching the Trump administration’s handling of U.S. foreign policy. We have front-row seats to the greatest voluntary liquidation of a great power’s status and geopolitical influence in modern history: The results are dramatic and alarming, but it’s almost impossible to look away. And it’s been less than eight months.

So many bad things have happened that even full-time foreign-policy mavens have trouble keeping track of all of them. Do you even remember Signalgate? As a public service, therefore, today I offer my top 10 Trump administration foreign-policy blunders (so far).

Let’s admit it: It’s hard not to watch a video of a plane crash or a building demolition, and one feels the same disturbing fascination watching the Trump administration’s handling of U.S. foreign policy. We have front-row seats to the greatest voluntary liquidation of a great power’s status and geopolitical influence in modern history: The results are dramatic and alarming, but it’s almost impossible to look away. And it’s been less than eight months.

So many bad things have happened that even full-time foreign-policy mavens have trouble keeping track of all of them. Do you even remember Signalgate? As a public service, therefore, today I offer my top 10 Trump administration foreign-policy blunders (so far).

1. The terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad trade war. I’m not a free trade absolutist, and I recognize that there are a few legitimate reasons to restrict international trade via tariffs or other measures. But President Donald Trump’s inconsistent, erratic, and unwarranted assault on the global trade order manages to harm the United States and lots of other countries at the same time.

Although market reactions have thus far been muted for various reasons, taxing foreign imports is already reducing U.S. and global economic growth, fueling inflation, hampering U.S. manufacturing by increasing the cost of imported inputs, and pissing off a lot of other countries. It is also at odds with some of the administration’s other goals: Asking allies to spend more on defense and then taking a baseball bat to their economies is self-defeating, and using tariffs to punish governments whose leaders happen to irritate the thin-skinned U.S. president makes the United States look like vengeful bully.

The managed, rule-based liberalization of the world economy is one of the most impressive foreign-policy achievements of the post-World War II period, and it is one of the reasons that most Americans live more bountiful lives today than their grandparents did. Is that order perfect? No. Does it require constant maintenance and occasional, well-thought-out reforms? Of course. What it doesn’t need, however, is the sort of destructive dumpster fire that Trump has ignited—an approach that is both economically illiterate and geopolitically foolish.

2. Coveting Greenland, Canada, and maybe more. What kind of strategic genius openly declares in advance that he’d like to take territory that clearly belongs to another country? Trump’s proposal to make Canada the 51st state and his punitive tariff policy toward that country—see above—helped defeat a pro-Trump candidate in the last Canadian election and may have permanently alienated a society that has been an exceptionally good neighbor for more than a century.

His equally misguided desire to seize Greenland makes neither strategic nor economic sense, but it has roiled relations with Denmark, previously one of the most pro-American countries in Europe. Not anymore: A recent poll by a Danish newspaper found that 41 percent of Danes now regard the United States as a threat. And does Trump realize that undermining existing norms against this type of imperial behavior will open the door to similar predatory actions by others? The answer is no—he doesn’t.

3. Uniting others against the United States. In a multipolar world, one’s goal should be to attract as many important allies as possible and keep your main rival(s) isolated. As German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck put it, in a world of five rival powers, the goal should be to be one of three. The late U.S. Secretary of State Henry........

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