Trump Is a Situational Man in a Structural Bind

Donald Trump ran on peace. Soon he bombed the Middle East. The year was 2025 — and 2017. Back then, just months into his first term, Mr. Trump launched cruise missiles into a Syrian-government airfield, putting a temporary halt to a chorus of warnings that Mr. Trump was some sort of isolationist, out to withdraw the United States from world affairs.

At the start of Mr. Trump’s second term, history didn’t merely repeat; it doubled down. This time, the president evinced greater determination to be a “peacemaker and unifier,” as he put it. Once again, the guardians of foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington fretted that he might dismantle their project. For the same reason, advocates of less American military intervention in the world, myself included, held out a bit of hope.

Perhaps our eyes deceived us, but there was Mr. Trump diving into talks to stop the carnage in Ukraine and Gaza and seeking a diplomatic deal with Iran. The president even sounded curiously flexible toward China, his first-term bête noire. “We will measure our success,” Mr. Trump announced in his Inaugural Address, “not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

This is a laudatory standard, which Mr. Trump deserves credit for setting. But six months into his presidency, he deserves more blame for failing to meet it. He has delivered no peace, whether in Europe or in the Middle East. His strike on Iran sums up his struggles: a frantic, fumbling attempt at negotiation cut short by a risky attack that sets the stage for further war.

Inartful dealings are only half the trouble. Mr. Trump is a thoroughly situational man in a deeply structural bind. Year after year, the United States stations its military forces on geopolitical fault lines in Europe, Asia and the Middle East simultaneously. And year after year, it gets exactly what it has placed itself to receive, inheriting distant conflicts as its own and lurching from crisis to crisis at times of its many adversaries’ choosing. If Mr. Trump is to reduce the country’s exorbitant defense burdens, as he claims to want, he must take the United States out of the position that guarantees them.

But for all of Mr. Trump’s talk, and his critics’ fears, it remains uncertain whether he will even really try.

Mr. Trump got off to a promising start on trans-Atlantic relations, despite eliciting torrents of criticism. He immediately shattered the taboo that had stifled discussion of a diplomatic compromise to end the war in Ukraine — a necessary and productive step. The commentariat recoiled when his administration stated that Kyiv would not retake all its territory or join NATO, but these were concessions not just to Russia but also to reality. Even Mr. Trump’s Oval Office contretemps with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, however ugly, served a purpose: It helped to persuade Mr. Zelensky not to hold out for a major U.S. security guarantee and bring him around to talking about cease-fires with the Russians.

Last month’s NATO summit suggests the latter. European allies pledged to put 5 percent of their economies toward military purposes, and Mr. Trump was all smiles. But Europe spending more doesn’t ensure that America will do less. Unless Mr. Trump develops a multiyear plan to reduce the U.S. military presence on the continent and transfer supreme command of NATO forces into European hands, the United States will remain no less exposed to the risk of war in Europe and no less overstretched globally.

In the Middle East, Mr. Trump also began by making some refreshing and creditable moves. By mid-May, when he visited Saudi Arabia and repudiated the legacy of “Western interventionists,” he could point to a budding record of accomplishment. After a brief air campaign against Yemen’s Houthis, Mr. Trump achieved a cease-fire with the group, which agreed to stop firing on American ships. Mr. Trump lifted sanctions on Syria, giving its new government a chance to survive. Most important, he greenlit talks with Iran despite having scuttled the earlier nuclear agreement in 2018. All he wanted, he maintained, was to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

But Mr. Trump promptly hamstrung his own effort. First, he imposed an unrealistic 60-day deadline on negotiations. Then he swallowed the poison-pill position that Iran surrender its legal right to enrich any uranium, including at low levels suitable for civilian uses alone. Last, he allowed Israel — which had long opposed any deal that would let a nonnuclear Iran strengthen its regional position — to pre-empt his own talks by bombing its foe. Mr. Trump soon joined in with strikes of his own. The war has set back a promising diplomatic track in favor of a far chancier trajectory, in which the United States and Israel potentially mount continual attacks and hope for minimal retaliation, all while losing visibility into Iran’s nuclear activities.

Ironically, Mr. Trump has set himself up to repeat the Biden administration’s mistake of envisaging a new dawn in the Middle East, only to find that the region is too divided and discontented to remain stable in the short term, let alone for good. There is one way to keep the United States out of conflicts there: Remove most of America’s40,000 troopsfrom the region and stop defending unsavory states against their unsavory rivals. So far, Mr. Trump has done nothing of the sort, except to withdraw several hundred soldiers from some vulnerable positions in Syria. Instead, he is proudly supplying Israel’s metastasizing wars and strengthening ties with America’s Gulf allies.

Mr. Trump has saved his most characteristic shortcomings for Asia. Usually, the United States faces a trade-off between cooperating with China and competing with it, but by announcing huge tariffs on everyone — not only China but also Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and others — Mr. Trump managed to damage the prospects for cooperation and competition alike. For many of Mr. Trump’s advisers, the Indo-Pacific is the priority region, where the United States must contain Chinese influence. The president, unfortunately, is reducing America’s own influence there, while making Beijing look reliable by comparison.

To his credit, Mr. Trump seems to want to work with China, somehow, and avoid the nightmare of a war over Taiwan. He has rightly remained ambiguous about whether he would defend the island, giving him leverage to deter both Beijing and Taipei from provocative actions. Yet Mr. Trump hasn’t used it. When he finally meets with President Xi Jinping, he should offer public assurances that the United States does not and will not support Taiwan’s independence, in return for a reduction in Beijing’s coercive activities. This is the kind of major-power deal-making that would promote peace. Mr. Trump, though, has given no sign of attempting it.

Given the large and growing scale of Chinese power, it’s sensible to bolster the U.S. military presence in the Western Pacific, as Pentagon leaders seek to do. But their hoped-for buildup could stoke rather than deter conflict if the United States places more weapons close to Chinese shores. A better approach would be to relocate many U.S. forces from the first to the second island chain, especially from Okinawa to northern Japan and Guam, where they’ll be less threatening to Beijing and harder for it to reach. This step back would reduce the risk that China might target American troops at the outset of a potential invasion of Taiwan, helping to give Mr. Trump or his successors the optionto stay outof what would quickly become World War III.

Given his record, President Trump’s critics might be tempted to dismiss his calls for overseas peace as disingenuous. Closer to home, after all, he has threatened to take over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, and deployed the military on America’s souther n border and the streets of Los Angeles. “Donald the dove” he is not.

Mr. Trump is not a straightforward hawk, either. He does seek to avoid long, costly wars and bring existing conflicts to a close. These days, he displays more intense animus for “the enemy from within,” in his phrasing, than for America’s adversaries abroad. Unlike in his first term, he has brought on some untraditional, restraint-minded advisers. When he says he favors “peace through strength,” he appears to mean it.

Which is precisely the trouble. “Peace through strength” — a Republican foreign policy mantra since the 1980s — implies leaving in place the globe-girdling military positions and defense commitments that entangle Americans in a world of conflicts. Despite the many ways Mr. Trump diverges from the establishment he scorns, they are one in purveying the fantasy that by attempting to attain a position of dominance over everyone everywhere, the United States can deter all manner of bad actions and finally, once the latest round of turmoil subsides, enjoy peace at minimal cost.

This fantasy failed to become reality in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the United States was the world’s uncontested superpower, not to mention a well-functioning democracy. It has no chance of materializing now. Americans, in any case, are already paying a steep and escalating price. At Mr. Trump’s urging, Congress just gave the Pentagon a budget hiked above $1 trillionper year. And that is nothing compared with the costs and consequences of a full-scale war with China, Russia, Iran or North Korea, a perpetual danger so long as the United States places its forces right beside them, all of them, at once.

Still, Mr. Trump is more a custodian of global military primacy than a devotee. At times he defines strength along very different lines, to include pressuring allies, talking with adversaries and being unpredictable. It’s hard to imagine he would have thought to create America’s defense obligations and open-ended deployments if he hadn’t inherited them. The fact, though, is that Mr. Trump has not retracted them. He prefers to transact over them — to wring more favorable terms for American protection, which he’ll then sustain. Alliances, much as they irk him, give Mr. Trump both a grievance and a platform for bullying that he surely wouldn’t like to do without.

Whatever concessions he extracts might narrowly improve upon what came before. Higher defense spending by NATO allies, for example, is welcome. But Mr. Trump cannot solve the problem of American overreach without pulling back substantially.

At the bottom of the president’s foreign-policy vision is a curious void. Mr. Trump is famously all about putting American interests first. Yet he has never figured out what he thinks America’s most basic interests are. He flits between caring little about geostrategic matters, especially compared with trade or immigration, and defaulting to the exorbitant aims of the status quo. He may not truly believe in the latter, but he won’t devise a replacement if he has no concept of what is essential for the United States to defend and what is not.

Having done much to incite fresh thinking in U.S. foreign policy, Mr. Trump may now be holding back the forces within his own movement (as well as on the left and among policy experts) that do have a coherent vision for change — for a post-primacy America that departs the Middle East, hands off most of European defense to Europeans and focuses on security in Asia and priorities at home. In this account, the United States would remain capable not only of defending the homeland but also of ensuring access to global markets and preventing any rival from dominating Eurasia. Washington would preserve most of the benefits of its current posture, at significantly less risk and cost. The world order, in turn, would be strengthened from relying less on a single overextended member.

The same void afflicts Mr. Trump’s diplomatic efforts. In theory, he accepts that other countries naturally put their interests first, just as America should, and tries to make deals that benefit everyone. In practice, he doesn’t seem to understand how other countries actually see their interests. He approaches diplomacy as a grand performance: issue threats, dangle inducements, set a deadline and, at the point of maximum leverage, make the best possible deal. This is really a process-driven approach disguised as a negotiation of interests. Mr. Trump’s process entails the application of power, not rules, but it is a process all the same.

To other countries, however, the underlying stakes matter. It matters to Vladimir Putin that he dominate Ukraine and render it incapable of threatening Russian-held territory in the future. It matters to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Iran retain its sovereign rights and not appear to surrender to foreign attackers that do possess nuclear weapons. And it matters to Benjamin Netanyahu that Mr. Trump fails to make a deal that would prevent an Iranian bomb but strengthen Iran. Perhaps because none of this matters to Mr. Trump, he doesn’t grasp why it matters to others. Without doing so, he won’t close many deals or make much peace.

Throughout the past decade, Mr. Trump has profited politically from opposing wars, or at least from clearing the low bar of sounding less warlike than the rest. It is time to raise that bar. A crowded, competitive world has slashed America’s once vast margin for error. The United States needs to do more than merely avoid the most spectacular blunders of old: It must make a new place for itself in global affairs. After all, every president since George W. Bush has repudiated “major military operations to remake other countries,” in Joe Biden’s words. Mr. Bush himselfdisparagednation building, until the moment he found himself ordering it.

The United States is not doomed to fight unnecessary wars in the Middle East or anywhere else. Events thousands of miles away do not inexorably drag America in. Our wars happen because we choose to wage them. We could make a different choice. At the same time, the choices that count are not only, or mainly, whether to invade or bomb or not. They are also the choices to leave thousands of soldiers in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia after the first gulf war; to give Israel at least $3.8 billion in military aid every year, no matter what; to expand NATO to countries the United States has no intention to defend; to place American military trainers on the outlying islands of Taiwan.

These choices are not politically salient, but they should be. Otherwise the United States will be fated to fight in more unnecessary wars, and potentially much larger ones. To date, Mr. Trump has done little to avert such a future. On his watch, the wars we’ll wage are prevailing over the wars we end and never get into. Then again, it is our watch, too. In his belated opposition to yesterday’s conflicts, and his ambivalent and hollow quest for “peace through strength,” Mr. Trump reflects where the country is — but not where it needs to go.