In a flurry of Thursday morning tweets, President Trump promised that when it came to a new trade deal with China, “no final deal will be made until my friend President Xi, and I, meet in the near future to discuss and agree on some of the long standing and more difficult points.”
….meeting with their top leaders and representatives today in the Oval Office. No final deal will be made until my friend President Xi, and I, meet in the near future to discuss and agree on some of the long standing and more difficult points. Very comprehensive transaction….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 31, 2019
This model of equating foreign policy with personal relationships, particularly claims of friendship, is one that he clearly favors.
With Russia, Trump has made a point of sitting down one-on-one to speak with President Vladimir Putin, taking Putin’s side, even against U.S. intelligence and national interests, and championing his personal relationship with Russia’s strongman leader as if it were a brilliant policy move.
Likewise, Trump has centered his attempts to pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons as a triumph of personal relationships. He waxes poetic about personal letters exchanged and even went so far to characterize his relationship with Kim Jong Un as falling “in love.”
Although the president’s job is, in part, to build strong and lasting relations with other world leaders, those relations should be professional rather than personal. Indeed, that the president would refer to adversarial foreign leaders as “friends,” never mind that his own advisers have identified them as threats, is alarming and points to a lack of understanding of volatile foreign relations.
Moreover, strong ties to the U.S. government, rather than a single president, should be the goal. A personal friendship is not likely to be a foundation a future administration can build off of. Those long-lasting relations rely on institutional channels, such as special envoys and negotiations, preferably with a bipartisan team.
Unfortunately, those are the very avenues of relationship-building that Trump has eschewed.
With Putin, he has side-stepped aides, even cutting out interpreters and keeping the content of meetings confidential from other members of the government.
In talks with North Korea, Trump has seemingly ignored that Kim’s regime refused to meet with Stephen Biegun (the special envoy he appointed), repeatedly canceled official meetings, and refused to engage in good faith with negotiators. Instead, Trump has announced another in-person meeting, completely skipping the normal diplomatic process.
As his most recent tweets demonstrate, Trump is taking the same approach with ongoing trade talks with China, saying that no deal is even possible without his personal involvement. That undercuts the authority of U.S. negotiations and brings the relationship between Trump and Xi into the deal itself hinging on a fanciful idea of friendship.
Although Trump is right that there is the potential for personal connections to yield agreement where political pressure might not work, in the end, linking a country’s foreign policy to the relationships fostered with one president, is short-sighted.
Bilateral relations between the U.S. and Russia, China, and even rogue states like North Korea will continue well beyond the presidency of Donald Trump. Those long-term policy goals and establishment of clear bilateral communications between governments must supersede a vain desire to demonstrate personal deal-making prowess when it comes to foreign policy.
