Trump Keeps Davos Man off Balance

[Levan Ramishvili]

Trump Keeps Davos Man off Balance

He offers threats to Putin, flexibility for Xi and even an olive branch for Iran.

By 

Walter Russell Mead

Donald Trump is an American president like no other, and his political resurrection hasn’t shaken up only American politics. Mr. Trump is trying to remake the world, and in the first week of his presidency, he is having an outsize impact.

Even Davos Man gets it. After the World Economic Forum’s founder Klaus Schwab thanked the American president for agreeing to address the group by video, participants—who in other years might have booed, laughed or stalked out in ostentatious protest at Mr. Trump’s uncompromising exposition of his views—sat silently and respectfully as the president attacked almost everything that Davos Man holds dear.

In the live video address, Mr. Trump doubled down on his campaign rhetoric about putting America first, vowed to turbocharge the American economy through deregulation and tax cuts, and promised to deploy the full might of American economic and technological prowess to secure American primacy on the global scene. But when it came to great power competition and America’s role in the world, the president’s other moves last week flipped the script.

The smart money at Davos expected Mr. Trump to come out breathing fire and fury against Iran, challenging China and conciliating Russia. Not for the first time, the smart money was wrong. Vladimir Putin was the target of Mr. Trump’s most pointed threats. Xi Jinping’s China was offered an opportunity to work with rather than against the U.S. Iran was extended something like an olive branch.

While holding out the vision of a compromise peace in Ukraine that would satisfy some of Russia’s aspirations, Mr. Trump threatened Mr. Putin with everything from relentless sanctions to an energy price war that would gut Russia’s economy and make continuing the war with Ukraine impossible. He appeared to offer China a better deal on tariffs if Beijing helped persuade Russia to limit its demands on Kyiv, and he called on Saudi Arabia to increase production and thus drive oil prices low enough to make it economically impossible for Russia to sustain the war.

Since his first term, Mr. Trump has focused his criticism of what some call the “rules-based world order,” which his predecessors laboriously built over the decades since World War II. While the U.S. foreign-policy establishment largely believes that the order supports and upholds American power globally, from Mr. Trump’s perspective, the old order constrains and limits him.

Mr. Trump believes in power rather than rules when it comes to settling international disputes. When Colombia refused to accept military deportation flights from the U.S. on Sunday, Mr. Trump unleashed a blizzard of political and economic threats that pushed Bogotá into receiving them. The existing institutions of the international system—ranging from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization—would never have delivered a result this fast or this dramatic.

That worries countries such as Denmark, where observers are beginning to suspect they should take Mr. Trump’s demands about Greenland seriously. Without the stability that the old rules-based order sought to promote, there is no telling what will happen next. Mr. Trump believes that uncertainty increases his leverage, and he intends to exploit it as far as he can.

Important questions about the new Trump agenda remain unanswered. One involves the conflict between restraint and expansion at the heart of the Trump vision. The president has been staffing key Pentagon posts with neo-isolationist advocates of a more restrained foreign policy. Yet his foreign-policy agenda is ambitious. Besides territorial expansion to Greenland, Panama and perhaps beyond, he clearly sees himself as the top dog when dealing with Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin. Any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine must meet his idea of a proper compromise. He appears uninterested in giving China’s ambitions free rein in East and South Asia. He would certainly not welcome a world in which China’s navy could block American access to key minerals or markets around the world. Nor would he accept the news that China had gained the ability to destroy American communications satellites in outer space.

Yet power and prestige are zero-sum. The power that an expansionist, rising and expanding America would inevitably acquire will be seen in Beijing and Moscow, and not only there, as a threat. The ever-closer link between technological leadership and strategic military power that characterizes our era ensures that economic competition among the great powers will exacerbate their strategic rivalries.

Managing the conflict between an American agenda of recovery, expansion and growth and neo-imperial Russia’s dreams of renewed great power status and Mr. Xi’s China Dream would tax the talents of a Talleyrand. We shall soon see what Mr. Trump and his chief diplomat Marco Rubio make of it.