When it comes to foreign policy, Donald Trump baffles and frustrates plenty of people on both sides of the aisle. People on the left clutch their pearls and declare that Trump loves to pal around with dictators, while some on the right head to their fainting couches when Trump stops short of toppling the Iranian regime (as wonderful as it would be for the Islamic Republic to fall).
One of the biggest misunderstandings about President Trump is that he approaches governance — especially foreign policy — much like he approaches business. He sees policy items as transactions and negotiations.
This week, Victor Davis Hanson sat down with The Spectator World’s Freddy Gray to talk about a wide range of topics, one of which was Trump’s robust and transactional approach to foreign policy. Hanson remarked that America is safer under Trump because of his “deterrent, vigilant presidency,” which marked a stark contrast to Joe Biden’s “laxity and his empty braggadocio.”
Hanson is working on his second book about Trump, which will focus on his 2024 comeback. He hearkened back to Trump’s books on business to explain how Trump uses the principles from those books in his dealings with foreign adversaries (and sometimes with allies).
“It's amazing how transparent he is if you read some of those ghostwritten books, ‘The Art of the Deal,’ ‘The Art of the Comeback,’” Hanson said. “It's almost — he's almost operating on spec.”
“You go into a negotiation and you act crazy, you say things, and you demand 75% advantage of the particular contention, and then you scream and yell and people don't like you, and then you, you sigh and you kinda grab your forehead as you go down from 75 to 60, and then you hit a magical point of advantage that's tolerable to both sides, 55% in your favor,” he continued. “And then the key is, you'd never tell anybody you took the person because you might do business with him again.”
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Next comes the part that frustrates people on both sides of the aisle at different times. Trump heaps praise on the people he’s been criticizing and fighting with once the negotiation ends and the president gets what he wants.
“You praise Kim Jong-un,” Hanson said. “He said, ‘God bless America, God bless even Iran.’ And he said, ‘I don't know why they want to kill me. I didn't kill him. I don't want to kill Khamenei.’”
“And same thing with Putin,” he continued. “And people misinterpret that, ‘Oh my gosh, he loves dictators.’ He doesn't love dictators. It's just transactional.”
Hanson related a conversation he had with some European diplomats who expressed their surprise that Trump, the man who was going to end NATO, got the majority of NATO member countries to pony up for their share of defense spending. They asked Hanson, “Would that have happened with people we like rather than people we detest?” Of course, the answer was no.
“I think his attitude is, ‘The more unpredictable, fluid, volatile, rambunctious I am, that bothers my friends and allies, [but it] bothers my enemies more,’” Hanson concluded.
After a dozen years of foreign policy failures under Barack Obama and Biden, Trump’s successes in two nonconsecutive terms have been refreshing. And we owe much of that to his unorthodox approach to dealing with both allies and adversaries.
