Three years into President Trump’s first term, he has yet to suffer any foreign policy failures, nor have there been any significant setbacks or even substantial disappointments.
It’s all good — at least that’s how Trump sees it.
When he grades himself, Trump invariably gives himself an A or A-plus for his handling of North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, China, or Russia.
Where others, including many in his party, see disaster, Trump sees only triumph.
Syria is the latest case in point.
Abandoning America’s Kurdish allies and ordering U.S. troops to beat a hasty uninvited retreat into Iraq was denounced as “a grave mistake” by Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell.
“What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a bloodstain in the annals of American history,” said Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney. South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted Trump’s precipitous pullout from Syria would be “the biggest mistake of his presidency.”
But when Trump addressed the nation from the White House, he was ebullient, chalking up another remarkable success due solely to his unconventional “tough love” approach.
“This was an outcome created by us, the United States, and nobody else,” he said, later adding, “And now people are saying, ‘Wow, what a great outcome. Congratulations.'”
While retired military commanders are predicting a resurgence of the Islamic State and a loss of U.S. credibility on the world stage, Trump doesn’t think so.
“The same people that I watched and read giving me and the United States advice,” Trump said, “are the ones that got us into the Middle East mess but never had the vision or the courage to get us out.”
Trump’s unshakable confidence in his judgments and his indefatigable optimism that everything will work out for the best often put him at odds with his intelligence community and experts with years of experience working on thorny foreign policy issues.
“I’m sort of an island of one,” Trump said in remarks at the Values Voter Summit earlier this month in Washington.
Whether he’s looking at the collapse of nuclear negotiations with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un or Iran’s shootdown of an American drone and subsequent attack on Saudi facilities, Trump sees only an upside, something his critics often deride as delusional.
But Trump’s penchant for upbeat pronouncements in the face of obvious setbacks has roots in his previous life as a combative New York real estate developer, where he built his success on unabashed self-promotion.
By the same token, Trump’s transactional brand of foreign policy is primarily predicated on the notion that adversaries and allies alike can be motivated by what Trump believes is in their own best interest.
In other words, how Trump would act if he were their shoes.
So Trump ignores advice that North Korea will likely never give up its nuclear arsenal. Or that punishing Iran with increasingly tougher sanctions will only push the hardliners to seek nuclear weapons faster. Trump believes he can sell both the Iranians and the North Koreans on a brighter future by dangling economic carrots while at the same time wielding the sanctions stick.
“We have tremendous economic power,” Trump said regarding his dealing with Turkey. “Our economic power [is] much more powerful, in certain ways, than playing with guns,” he says, explaining his aversion to the use of military force.
The common thread — whether it’s trusting Turkey and Russia to handle ISIS in Syria or assuming North Korea will live up to its vague pledge to denuclearize or believing the Taliban will negotiate with an Afghan government it views as an American puppet — is wishful thinking.
Many have pointed to the early influence of Norman Vincent Peale, whose Manhattan church Trump’s family attended and who officiated at Trump’s first wedding.
“Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade,” Peale wrote in his classic book, The Power of Positive Thinking. “Your mind will seek to develop the picture.”
If you believe something is a success, and say it’s a success, it will be.
That’s Trump to a T.
But even some of Trump’s critics concede his instincts might be right, even when his methods are unnerving.
Graham, the same senator who said Trump was making the biggest mistake of his presidency, later embraced parts of Trump’s Syria plan.
“If we can create a sustainable Safe Zone that protects Turkey’s national security interests and prevents the ethnic cleansing of our Kurdish allies – that will be historic progress,” Graham said in a statement issued after Trump’s Wednesday victory lap speech. “By continuing to maintain control of the oil fields in Syria, we will deny Assad and Iran a monetary windfall. By increasing production of the oil fields, we will be helping our Syrian Democratic Forces allies who fought so bravely to destroy the ISIS Caliphate.”
Pessimists will dismiss that rosy scenario as wishful thinking.
The great advantage of being a pessimist is that you go through life either being proven right or pleasantly surprised.
Here’s hoping for pleasantly surprised.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
