The Donald’s long list of foreign policy failures
From The Barrel
President Donald J Trump is an unusual artist. The author of Art of the Deal has become notorious for a string of failures in his foreign policy deals. He sold himself as transactional, and everything was up for negotiation.
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UNITED States President Donald J Trump is an unusual artist. The author of Art of the Deal has become notorious for a string of failures in his foreign policy deals. He sold himself as transactional, and everything was up for negotiation.
Yet, the clumsiness of his bashfulness has pushed the world onto a precipice of dangerous peril.
From the margins of a heated electioneering campaign, panting from running and bothered, no doubt by a profusion of criminal and civil cases, the Donald enlivened the imagination of a fatigued world about the possibility of ending the US/Nato proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
The embattled Republican Presidential candidate was kind enough to remind even the unconverted, that Ukraine is a proxy. And he was determined to end it once and for all on day one in office, if he was elected.
When pressed on how he intended to do so, he became more philosophical than discreet. He was not the one in office, he remonstrated. And he did not want to supplant or pretend to awaken a President Joe Biden who only worked a measly four hours a day and slept the rest of the other twenty.
This probably triggered DJT, Elon Musk’s endearment for Trump to coin the nickname “Sleepy Joe”.
So many observers were enamoured to champion his stance as anti-war, or DJT’s most favourite, the peace candidate. For this attribution, the preponderance of analysts were prepared to forget history just so he could get a pass. Or to be fair, to temporarily ignore it.
History, for its intransigence, however, insists that it can neither be ignored nor forgotten. And its memory cannot be erased either, especially not by the silliness of political importunity, or by the passage of time.
For, history, is true manifestation of time’s infinite trademark itself.
In surreptitious ways therefore, it reminded those who cared to listen that Trump is a war candidate or an Israeli agent — whichever moniker fits.
Almost seven months later, the Donald continues to approbate and reprobate, oscillating between a buffoon messing around with a nuclear button and a war monger that would destroy Russia. And the right-wing podcasters are endlessly worried. Where is the Section 25 impeachment procedure when you need one!
On January 20, 2025 on the Donald’s swearing-in ceremony, the 56 000 people of Greenland and their Danish colonisers, awoke to the shocking announcement that the United States of America has overweening designs over their sovereignty. From being a colony of the Danish, they would segue seamlessly into the colony of the Yankees.
Besides, the Putuffik Space Base is a Danish-American project, the former, the current coloniser and the latter, a lustful aspirant. Poor Greenlanders or the Kalaallit as they prefer to be known! So soon thereafter, they had to play indignant hosts to Vice President JD Vance’s visit, at great cost.
USSF Colonel Susannah Meyers, the commander of the Base, was fired at the end of that visit. Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark demurred at both the visit and Trump’s vague insinuations of colonisation.
As for the Greenlanders, they said nothing, looking funny at the hypocritical Danish first and disbelieving at the belligerent Americans second. Exactly in that order. All they are committed to do, as incredulous at it may sound, is to first liberate themselves from a leeching Denmark and with conviction, sit out the impatience of a peripatetic Trump.
To date, Trump has failed on this policy adventure abysmally. Predictably!
It must be said that Trump has achieved the improbable. This is that he has failed on foreign policy, a government’s charitable vision that nominally unfurls over an interminably long period of time. And more often than not, history is the judge over such matters.
Trump’s normative foreign policy prescripts have already failed even before history has roused from its slumber awaiting him to vacate office. History is a soft spoken and impartial observer long after the fact.
The signs that Trump was bound to fail, or that he would sabotage his own architecture of being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, became apparent when the Donald was confronted with questions on how he intended to resolve Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
He had fanciful plans, which were blood-curling ominous in their absurdity. Trump supported an unseemly strategy. Starve the Palestinians and then pretend to provide them with food. Massacre them when they gather in desperation. And when Israel Defence Forces incur a lot of casualties, declare a temporary ceasefire.
After so much ethnic cleansing and a proposal for World War II-like Warsaw Ghettoes fit for a holocaust, Trump will build a French Riveria in the splendid beaches of the Gaza shoreline drenched in innocent Palestinian blood.
The incredulity of these designs is not even in the fact that that they are real, but that their authors and their followership, believe in them zealously.
But Trump is in a bind. It is as if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has dutifully assigned the task of awarding the coveted laurel to the languishing Palestinians. The more the slaughtering of the Palestinians endures, to the chagrin of civilised mankind, the further the prize eludes the expectant Trump.
But if the US policy machinery does not curtail the genocidal instincts of the irascible Netanyahu, they would have failed to ride the rising tide of human goodness. Somebody help the devastated POTUS 47 caught between a war-rampaging Bibi and a morally repugnant Jeffery Epstein. A policy bought and paid for, is an embarrassing failure of vision occurring in slow motion.
The ebullience and optimism that characterised Trump’s first 100 days in office, attended by the novelty of return to the White House and other history making factoids, have waned into a lacklustre twilight, typified by a rancorous disquiet of a MAGA base cannibalising itself from the inside.
Trump’s first instinct was not to care, for he is no more up for re-election. But then again, he can’t afford to lose the midterms in 2026 to the Democrats and be rendered lame duck. He may face the unedifying prospect of being possibly impeached.
But every time he says something inelegant about how quickly they must forget about a dead paedophile, the more he feeds into the red embers of an implacable MAGA lot, avowed to torpedo his tenure over a many-layered three-decade-long scandal. What to do?
Start a war, or make peace with Russia. Better still, turn Canada into the 51st State of America. It is not because if the US invaded Canada militarily, the polite Northern neighbours would put up some resistance. Hardly. But it is more of the fact that the justification to so invade would be hard to contrive in a quick turnaround and without a plausible false flag operation.
Was this a humourless quip whipped to mortify the Canadians? Sometimes it is hard to tell.
In the stead of pulling out of Nato, Trump lobbied for the increase of Nato members’ defence spending to 5%. Instead of negotiating with Iran, he authorised Israel to decapitate their nuclear scientists, their negotiators and obliterate all their nuclear sites. Instead of peace between Rwanda and the DRC, Nato is still arming Rwanda and the M-23 rebels continue to capture more territory.
India is upset and therefore insistent that the sudden military flare-up between them and Pakistan was attenuated by a consideration other than Trump’s claim, short of saying he is a liar. It is a mixed masala of foreign policy ersatz, seasoned in threats, deception and a stand-up comedy gone horribly awry.
What would be easier to do is to vilify President Jimmy Carter for returning the Panama Canal to Panama in 1981. To reclaim it, the Donald issued threats of its military re-annexation. In fact, the talking heads in the Oval Office and their loquacious Commander-in-Chief simply backed the purchase of the canal by Blackrock from Li Ka-shing and claim it as a foreign policy victory.
Completely without precedent, President Xi Jinping held tight, resisting the purchase with tactic and stealth, resulting in the inability of the counterparties to fulfil the conditions precedent for the purchase. As a consequence, the deadline effluxed. Just one pitiful domino after another.
But fall they must.
The most prominent attribute of Trump’s second term is the imposition of tariffs, especially to China. And as fate would have it, it is the only tariff imposition he cannot get right for reasons that have been fairly broadcast. Unlike the failure of foreign policy in other instances, none projects incompetence as the one in China.
Trump may still win some, including the Azerbaijan and Armenian corridor for 99 years. Severally or cumulatively, however, they will not erase the fact that Trump is a phenomenal policy disaster for the United States of America and the world at large.
* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.