Trump Had It Easy the First Time

Thomas L. Friedman

I don’t know why people say that President-elect Donald Trump is going to face difficult challenges in foreign policy. All he needs to do is get Vladimir Putin to compromise on Russia’s western border. Get Volodymyr Zelenskyy to compromise on Ukraine’s eastern border. Get Benjamin Netanyahu to define Israel’s western and southern borders. Get Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to define his country’s western border — that is, stop trying to control Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Get China to define its eastern border as short of Taiwan. And get the Houthis in Yemen to define their coastal border as limited to just a few miles off shore — without the right to stop all shipping into the Red Sea.

To put it another way: If you think the only border that will preoccupy Trump when he takes office Jan. 20 is America’s southern border, you’re not paying attention. When Trump left office in 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah, one could argue that we were still in the “post-Cold War” era, dominated by increasing economic integration and Great Power peace. Russia had taken a bite out of Ukraine but never attempted to devour the whole thing. Iran and Israel were hostile but never directly attacked each other.

Israel occupied the West Bank but never had a government whose official coalition agreement included formal annexation of the whole West Bank and now has members advocating the same for the Gaza Strip. America did not care for the Houthis in Yemen, but we had never sent B-2 stealth bombers to drop some of the largest payloads in our arsenal on them.

In short, a lot of bright red lines have been crossed since Trump occupied the big White House. And restoring them, and “making America great again,” will almost certainly require more subtle and sophisticated uses of force and coercive diplomacy than the isolationist Trump ever contemplated in his first administration or suggested in his campaigns.

In Israel, where I am right now, one of the farthest-right members of Israel’s far-right government, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has not wasted any time, declaring Monday that Trump’s new presidency presents an “important opportunity” to “apply Israeli sovereignty to the settlements in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical names for areas of the West Bank. He added, “The year 2025 will, with God’s help, be the year of sovereignty” in these occupied territories.

But Trump may be much more of a wild card for Israel today than Smotrich expects. He is the first U.S. president who overtly appealed to and benefited from votes from Arab and Muslim Americans who were unhappy with unconditional U.S. support for Israel in Gaza. He also comes in with as strong an isolationist mandate as any president since the end of the Cold War. On top of that, when Trump was president before, he put out a peace plan for a two-state solution in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, albeit one that strongly favored Israel.

I was at a dinner in Haifa on Tuesday with Israeli Jews and Arabs together. The guests said that many Jewish Israelis think that because one of Trump’s sons-in-law is Jewish, he is ready to be tough with Palestinians, while many Israeli Arabs think Trump will benefit them because he is the only one tough enough to stand up to Netanyahu and because his other son-in-law has a Lebanese American father. Somebody is going to be disappointed!

As for Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy, getting Putin to agree to some kind of cease-fire/peace agreement restoring a Russian border with Ukraine may be the biggest challenge of all, Russia expert Leon Aron from the American Enterprise Institute said, because “Trump wants peace in Ukraine, and Putin wants victory.”

Putin, Aron added, cannot afford to come back to the Russian people after some 600,000 of their compatriots have been killed and wounded in Ukraine and say, “Oops, sorry, we are not going to control Ukraine after all.” Putin cannot let this war end in defeat. But Trump cannot accept a peace that looks like a defeat for the West. Then he would look like a loser.

The fact that Putin had to effectively hire 10,000 North Korean forces to help fight his reckless war in Ukraine shows two things: how afraid he is to stop without a visible victory “and how afraid he is of a societal backlash if he is forced to send into the trenches raw 18-year-old ethnic-Russian conscripts, especially from Moscow and St. Petersburg where the Russian elite lives,” said Aron, author of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War.”

“Putin is not in a position to have a forever war,” concluded Aron. “He is running out of people.” All of which is to say that if Trump is capable of sustaining Ukraine in its current battlefield position for 12 more months, he might get the deal to end the Ukraine war in a year that he promised in the campaign to deliver in a day.

A Trump administration could cause a new and very different set of red lines to be crossed if it pulls back from NATO or expresses any diminished willingness to protect longtime allies.

Japan, Poland, South Korea and Taiwan have hostile nuclear-armed neighbors and the technology and resources to build nuclear weapons themselves. “They haven’t done it because they thought they didn’t need to — because they believed that the United States had their back, even in the ultimate nightmare of a nuclear war,” said Gautam Mukunda, the noted strategy expert and Yale University lecturer. “Think about that for a second: They had such total faith in the U.S. as an ally that for decades, they have, literally, bet the existence of their country on America’s word.” He added, “Given what Trump has said about alliances, could any responsible foreign leader keep making that wager?”

They have seen what happened to Ukraine after it gave the nuclear weapons stationed there back to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. If these countries lose faith in America’s promise — or that promise is withdrawn — and they develop their own nuclear weapons, that would be the end of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that has limited the spread of nuclear weapons since World War II. That would erase the mother of all red lines.

That’s the thing about the world: It is always so much more complicated than it sounds on the campaign trail, and today more than ever. Or as boxer Mike Tyson is said to have observed, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”