[Pete F.]

Floridaman has accomplished little good and his ill considered attempts at policy will have long term effects on our place in the world.

Keep claiming he is a stable genius, he is as far from that as one can get.

When this passes the name Trump will end up in history books, used like Quisling and Benedict Arnold.

Trump’s self-absorption is total; his inability to accurately perceive external reality is profound. Because this renders our president deeply antisocial and anti-historical, his worldview begins and ends with “Trump.”

As a result, he entered office unable to appreciate America’s objective strengths in conducting our foreign relations. These matchless blessings included friendly neighbors; peerless economic vitality; our leadership of important global institutions; the strength of our alliances and multilateral relationships; and a reputation, for all our faults, as a democracy which embraces political freedom and human rights. Encased in his feral inner landscape, Trump saw these assets as vulnerabilities.

Thus Trump’s view of the post-World War II global order is essentially dystopian. The world’s liberal democracies built a system in which America promoted global stability by advocating democracy, free trade, and international institutions which facilitated cooperation and ameliorated conflict. But Trump saw it as trap in which America was played for the sucker by its “allies,” cheated by trading partners, menaced by Muslims, and invaded by foreigners spreading crime and taking jobs.

To repel these presumptive “threats,” Trump offered his own distinctive and boundless grandiosity—casting himself as a one-man solution, a peerless negotiator who would subjugate our foes (frequently, in fact, our allies) through the sheer force of his unique personality. He would make Mexico pay for his wall; seize Syrian oil; rip up unfair trade deals; force those chiselers in NATO to pay up; and exert his will without the trouble of maintaining alliances or exercising considered global statesmanship

Blinded by his insoluble inability to accurately process external reality, Trump had no design for realizing his most fantastical promises—let alone any grasp of the long-term consequences to America stemming from his zero-sum instincts. In his fantasies of greatness, Trump-as-Superman was strategy enough.

For nearly three years, we have seen the consequences of this worldview. He disparages our intelligence agencies when they reach conclusions which displease him. He treats the State Department with contempt, compelling an exodus of career professionals and eviscerating our diplomatic capacity. He replaces the language of democracy with venality and vulgarity, He greets the world’s autocrats as his geopolitical kin. The global image of America has become the gargoyle visage of a bigot and bully.

Inevitably, Trump’s craving for attention and inability to transcend his own impulses leads to verbal incontinence, intellectual incoherence, and contradictory actions. Nor is this likely to change: Trump’s subjective and ever-shifting sense of reality and addiction to instantaneous self-gratification leave him utterly incapable of thinking strategically.

For Trump, there is no strategic through-line. While the Chinese think in epochs, Trump thinks in fragments of news cycles dissociated from each other, his frequently self- cancelling behaviors driven by his oscillating needs of the moment. He threatens North Korea’s dictator with “fire and fury”; then conducts vapid kabuki summits and “falls in love” with Kim Jong-Un’s “beautiful letters.”And when Kim, unimpeded, treats America with accelerating contempt while developing a nuclear arsenal which could eradicate Seattle, Trump browbeats our South Korean allies about the cost of their defense, and compels the Japanese to wonder whether North Korean missile tests will require developing their own nuclear capacity.

In Trump’s mind, he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize; in reality, he has made the region a far more dangerous place.

https://thebulwark.com/trumps-person...oreign-policy/