Trump Transformed.

AuthorHeilbrunn, Jacob
PositionThe Realist

Now that he has been in office for two years, Donald Trump is moving to assert control over foreign affairs. The most prominent members of his original foreign policy team--Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, James N. Mattis and Nikki Haley--are gone. Their departure has provoked consternation among those members of the foreign policy elite who viewed them as the "adults in the room," as the popular phrase had it, who would restrain Trump himself.

During his first two years, Trump took several steps that appealed to his base--abandoning the Iran nuclear deal, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, imposing trade tariffs and demanding that NATO allies contribute more financially--but he did not fundamentally reorient American foreign policy. In recent months, with his declarations that he wishes to withdraw American troops from Syria as well as Afghanistan, Trump has signaled that he is returning to the precepts that he enunciated in 2016. But as Trump--besieged by the Russia investigation and stymied on the domestic front--lashes out against his real and perceived enemies, there are ample grounds to wonder whether he can really fulfill his decades-long exhortation for American retrenchment.

There can be no doubting that Trump himself remains undaunted by the serial controversies that have engulfed his administration. Trump, who has never been shy about touting his accomplishments, offered his own assessment of his record this past November in an interview published in the new book by Corey R. Lewandowski and David N. Bossie, Trump's Enemies. In it, Trump suggested that even Reagan, the most hallowed figure in the modern Republican pantheon, was already eclipsed by him, the sun around which all members of the GOP must now orbit. According to Trump, "the amazing thing is that you have certain people who are conservative Republicans that if my name weren't Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I'm the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away." A more qualified verdict was rendered by Henry Kissinger during an interview with Edward Luce of the Financial Times:

I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn't necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident. Does Trump indeed mark the end of an era? Or will he prove a transitory figure who created a mere interregnum in...

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