Trump’s Foreign Policy? Reality TV Politik
Making peace is harder than buying skyscrapers. The president is learning this the painful way in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
There’s realpolitik. And then there’s reality TV politik. There’s foreign policy realism, of the kind associated with Henry Kissinger. And then there’s Donald Trump’s twist: real estate-ism.
Anyone trying to assess the foreign policy of this White House needs to appreciate these distinctions. The various individuals responsible for national security in the Trump administration are united in their rejection of both the liberal idealism that informed the speeches (if not the actions) of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the neoconservative version of idealism that inspired George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. Yet there is much more to Trump 2.0 than the hard-nosed realism of Richard Nixon—a key influence on Trump, as I have argued elsewhere.
No previous president has livestreamed his Oval Office meetings with foreign leaders. That week in February when Trump hosted—and, to varying degrees, humiliated—the French president, the British prime minister, and the Ukrainian president introduced to great-power politics the unmistakable style of The Apprentice, the TV show that made Trump a household name. As Trump acknowledged, his and Vice President J.D. Vance’s shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, was “great television.”
At the same time, the negotiations that he and his golfing friend Steve Witkoff are conducting in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East draw on an earlier chapter in Trump’s career. As Witkoff explained to The Atlantic, he and Trump see diplomacy as functionally indistinguishable from doing real-estate deals. “Diplomacy is negotiation,” Witkoff told Isaac Stanley-Becker. “I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
It is not difficult to ridicule the way Trump and Witkoff have approached the task of ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, a task Trump insisted on the campaign trail that he could achieve within 24 hours. Witkoff’s sycophantic interactions with President Vladimir Putin, a cold-blooded practitioner of realpolitik, have been painful to watch. His account of these interactions in an interview with Tucker Carlson was risible.
The fact that the war has significantly escalated since Trump’s peace initiative began—with Russian air strikes reaching new peaks and Ukraine countering Sunday with an audacious drone attack on Russian strategic bomber bases—speaks for itself.
Yes, Trump inherited a truly terrible strategic position from Joe Biden and his foreign policy team, who substituted “de-escalation” for deterrence and watched as America’s enemies inflicted harm on its friends in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel. A formidable Axis of Authoritarians emerged under the Biden presidency, uniting China, Iran, and North Korea in support of Russia’s war. Even if the Original Sin of Biden’s mental decline and its concealment did not impact foreign policy as much as domestic policy, he certainly was not equal to the task that confronted him. As Walter Russell Mead has rightly said: “In 2023 and 2024 America needed a president who could explain. . . what we needed to do to stop the drift toward a new era of international confrontation. This is something Mr. Biden would have struggled with even if he were in full possession of his capacities; it was utterly beyond him in his diminished state.”
To those in the national security establishment currently criticizing Trump and Witkoff, Senator Lindsey Graham asks questions as legitimate as they are profane: “What the fuck have you done when it comes to Putin? How did your approach work?” Trump is far from the first president to try to schmooze Putin.
Yet the failures of the recent past do not absolve us from asking if reality TV plus real estate adds up to a strategy.
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Why, Prof. Ferguson, must I pay twice to read your posts?