You can’t bargain with a compulsive deal breaker

Trump’s loss of credibility and what it costs the U.S.

There is no agreement, pledge, or promise Donald Trump won’t break. His unwillingness to constrain his whims, impulses, and narcissism produces moral outrages and an ongoing threat to our democracy. However, it also creates an insoluble problem in our foreign policy: Who would ever make a deal with him?

Trump has been a world-class deal breaker for his entire adult life:

· He broke deals with contractors and lawyers, cheating them out of payment.

· He cheated students who foolishly gave him money to attend Trump U, resulting in a multi-million-dollar settlement.

· He violated his fiduciary duty (ponder the insanity of “Trump” and “fiduciary” in the same sentence), forcing New York to shut down his foundation and exact other penalties.

· He violated his marriage vows, as Stormy Daniels testified under oath.

· He violated his presidential oath of office in allegedly attempting to extort Ukraine for personal gain and again for leading an insurrection.

· He has comically made serial promises (apparently with no intention of fulfilling them) to produce all sorts of decisions and plans in “two weeks.”

· He tore up the Iran deal.

· He flips and flops on whether he will abide by Art. V, the core provision of our most important treaty, NATO.

· He likely invented a pretext (Iran is on the verge of weaponization) to break the War Powers Resolution (requiring congressional consultation at a bare minimum) and then lied about the results (Iran program “obliterated”!).

Constant reversals, betrayals, lies, and bullying risk isolating us from valuable allies and incentivizing our enemies to resort to hard power. In Iran, Trump’s 2018 decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, followed by resorting to brute force, gives Iran an incentive to regard negotiations as useless and to instead race to make a bomb to ensure survival.

Our allies are watching as well. They see a reckless president ready to shred agreements, lie to the public, and resort to force that are more garish displays of strength than effective instruments of U.S. policy. Our European allies have learned the hard way not to trust Trump, so they are now rushing to beef up their own defenses, making them that much less likely to cooperate with the U.S. or, as they did in Afghanistan, to rush to the defense of the U.S.

As Kori Shake wrote, “When it comes to burning bridges... nothing matches the speed and destructiveness of Trump’s policies in the past few months. According to a recent survey conducted by the opinion-research firm Cluster 17 and the journal Le Grand Continent, 51 percent of Europeans ‘consider Trump to be an enemy of Europe.’”

When the U.S. president is so fundamentally untrustworthy, other parties find it challenging (if not impossible) to reach agreements, which rely on good faith. With allies, any deal comes with an asterisk—legitimate doubt as to whether Trump will live up to his end of the bargain. That makes them less likely to compromise on their interests and more wary of ceding their freedom of action. Ukraine, for example, cannot possibly rely on any promise from Trump to enforce the terms of a ceasefire; the only rational choice is to keep fighting.

Trump’s untrustworthiness also sends potential allies into the arms of our enemies. When countries in Africa, for example, see Trump renege on foreign aid, they are that much more likely to ally themselves with China, which has been seeking a toe hold in Africa for decades.

Americans understand what is going on. Even before the Iran war, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 59% of Americans believed that Trump had lost the U.S. credibility on the international stage. They are smart enough to realize, as one academic put it, that “[t]he US under Trump is fast becoming untrustworthy. American reliability must now be broadly questioned, from collective security to the rule of law.” The result of “this widespread loss of trust...will be the neutering of US soft power.”

When it comes to adversaries such as China and Russia, we wind up with a comic metaphysical puzzle: How does an untrustworthy actor who does not intend to honor the deal strike a deal with another untrustworthy partner—when both sides know the other is not going to keep the agreement? Diplomacy becomes a farce. Parties have strong reasons to resort to military power.

Trump’s dishonesty also manifests itself in claiming credit for things in which he played little or no part. “Even India, a country with which Trump has often claimed warm relations, has publicly contradicted his assertion several times that US trade policy played a role in diffusing tensions with Pakistan,” the Economic Times reported. “India’s rebuttal underscores a broader shift: traditional US allies are no longer willing to play along with Trump's tactics. This loss of diplomatic credibility suggests a weakening of America’s global standing under Trump’s renewed leadership.”

Trump’s utter lack of credibility, highlighted in his serial lies about Iran, will have long-term implications for America, far beyond this episode and even beyond the Middle East. “Trump and his team are destroying everything that makes the United States an attractive partner,” Schake points out. “If it stays on the path Trump has started down, the United States risks becoming too brutal to love but too irrelevant to fear”—and too untrustworthy to bargain with.