The W word

America nearing the end of President Donald Trump’s first year in office finds itself spiraling into metanarrative. Our national conversations don’t focus on what’s happening in the country and in the world but on what the president did or didn’t say about any of it, and the reaction to the reaction.

Headlines, commentators, and lunchtime conversations center on the latest outrage, and we find ourselves lurching from outrage, to outrage over the outrage, to outrage fatigue. Lost are actual events and a world of chaos where old orders are collapsing.

Leave the country for a week or more, even to travel close by to Europe as I did, and you discover that politics and world events are rolling along without Trump, for better and for worse.

You know what they say about self-absorption: The more self-absorbed we become, the less there is to find absorbing. Europeans looking to America are struck with our self-importance, at a time when they more and more find less and less to say about America. A plain fact: The less the United States engages overseas, really engages, the less relevant those who live overseas will find U.S. policy. On this latest trip, instead of being asked about Trump and American politics, I had to do the asking.

The less the United States engages overseas, the less relevant those who live overseas will find U.S. policy.

Here is what I heard, multiple times in different ways: We expected Trump as president to be controversial, to run against the grain. What we did not expect was a weak president.

“The weakness he projects is our bigger worry,” said one European legal expert in Vienna. “A weak America is a danger to the world.”

Trump’s June speech at NATO headquarters in Brussels is one case in point. Europeans expected him to scold NATO allies on their defense spending (in itself a misleading criticism), but they did not expect him to fail to reaffirm Article 5, the mutual defense clause that’s at the heart of NATO’s existence. Even the president’s national security officials were surprised: Statements about Article 5 were in the speech they approved, not the speech the president gave.

Trump’s NATO posture leaves our allies unsure on one of the most basic and guiding tenets of U.S. defense policy. Unsure at a time when Russia encroaches on the doors of NATO’s eastern flank—in Ukraine, at the Baltics, and in Turkey. And in view of ongoing irregular warfare threats: The only time NATO has invoked Article 5 was after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

On other areas of U.S. interest, Trump also veers oddly ambiguous. He committed ground and air forces to the fight against ISIS in Iraq, but stood down while Iranian forces gained control in areas liberated from ISIS. He has not directed U.S. aid to help rebuild communities devastated by ISIS, communities the United States has now fought over twice.

Trump committed the United States to supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria, who oppose Bashar al-Assad’s government, yet he backed away from a previous pledge to oppose Assad, deferring to the Russians. Like Obama before him, Trump seems uninterested in the high-stakes maneuvering currently underway in the Middle East, where Russia is gathering force and even now overseas is seen as the new protector of Christians and other minorities there.

Trump took a stand against the Iran nuclear deal, but has made little effort on the ground to prevent Iran’s ayatollahs from opening a zone of control stretching from Tehran across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. Nor has he taken steps against the other impending threat: a Saudi-Turkey axis. Each threatens the non-Muslim populations of the Middle East, and each threatens Israel.

“Presidential power is the power to persuade,” argued Richard Neustadt, perhaps the leading expert on the modern presidency (and author of the classic Presidential Power). Trump’s ability to influence others has long been underestimated, but his skills increasingly appear limited to the pulpit, not the table where transactions and bargains are struck, where real progress can be made. Lacking those powers of persuasion is becoming more than a liability. It translates into its own version of weakness, weakness that has the potential to endanger our allies and further threaten our own national security.