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I dispute that the regard other world leaders hold the POTUS reflects American standing, and think you are falling victim to the classic conflation of being popular with being influential while tethering yourself to a stunted view of who the audience that matters is.
In diplomatic contexts, a classic basis of leveraging/manipulating people is to go after those whose self-image is centered on being perceived well. If specific person(s) can convince you that your reputation depends on their approval, you will not only prioritize their interests over your own (because you will rationalize that their good opinion is your interest), but also their views over the views of other observers. Because 'they' are/should be the more important partner, 'their' opinion matters more, and 'they' can speak for the rest of the partner-population because they are more important.
Which is how you get the Europeans/Americans conflating 'Europe/America' and 'the west' and 'the world' depending on whose gravitas they want to speak with.
The issue being, of course, that the interlocuter whose good opinion you want does not represent more than themselves, and their interests are not your own, and when you start changing yourself for their regard you are giving them power over you to the detriment of not only yourself, but your own power base.
In the domestic American political context, this dynamic is analogous to the (now former) Republican elites who were more interested in Democratic-aligned media respectability than in the issues Republican voters cared about. Republican party elites who were concerned about respectability politics routinely made observable concessions on party base priorities while seeking accolades from respectable media. They did so despite even though increasing majorities of those interlocuters sympathized with, were members of, or actively cooperated with the Democratic party against the Republican party positions.
This parallel's implications should not be subtle, because they are not unique.
My 'grievance' is that you are raising a concern of a situation you were already happy with. You've already had a president who was played and flattered to- that was Barrack Obama.
In a geopolitical sense, Obama was an exceptionally vain president whose primary theme was wanting to be seen as historic and symbolic and appreciated for his ideas, and Obama's focus-zones-of-choice were those that played to glowing coverage. As Obama was more or less a Eurocentric Atlanticist by instinct, and the Europeans were very happy to flatter that, that's where he spent most of his time (and where he spent a good part of his initial retirement). In areas far more removed from American political sensibilities and where the coverage was less consistently glowing- such as Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and most of Asia- Obama was far more distant after the initial honey moon and usual requirements.
This might be fine if Obama's popularity in Europe actually translated into major policy wins in Europe, in using increased popularity to shift the Europeans in more advantageous ways, but not only did this not happen, but Obama was instead lobbied into European-favored paths to American and even his own detriment.
Not only were longstanding American grievances not resolved by the EUropeans (NATO underinvestment, growing Russian gas-dependency, increasing Chinese network/infrastructure access, asymmetric protectionism by the Europeans), but the Europeans alternatively were able to lobby the Obama administration into, among other things,
-The Russian Reset (part of the German-preference for prioritizing Russian economic engagements over more pro-US eastern european partner security concerns; the aftermath of this helped lead to the Democratic over-compensation and russia-gate scandals)
-Brexit campaign lobbying (which was not only likely detrimental to the intended effect, but cultivated a higher level of partisan-driven political influence efforts)
-The Libya intervention (which was European grudge match against a former cold war foe who actually acceded to major US demands in the previous decade)
-The Syria Red Line debacle (a product, and then consequence, of Franco-British intervention partnership)
-The Iran Deal (a Congressionally-unpassable arrangement which offered major economic opportunities for the Europeans)
-The Paris Climate Accords (another Congressionally-unpassable arrangement which furthered anticipated EU-protection policies but which contributed to American political polarization due to its adoption into EPA regulation and following court cases)
These are not things that are in and of themselves 'bad' or indefensible in why they were approached, but rather indicative of high-profile ways in which the Europeans were able to assert more influence on how the US approached certain issues than vice versa, in ways more clearly beneficial to European than American-consensus interests (not least because many were beyond any American consensus but hoping to create new fait accompli).
Sometimes this is fine, quid-pro-quos are often one-sided in isolation, but the failure-state of pursuing regard (which Obama got quite a bit of for agreeing with what the Europeans wanted) and falling to flattery (clearly the Europeans were quite convinced by Obama's high-intelligence rationales).
To return to the grievance- your complaint, even when shadowed in both-sidisms, has already come to pass. The most recent well-regarded president is a president who was so routinely flattered for his wit and charisma that it generally isn't even recognized as flattery. This has already happened. It was not an objection at the time. It is not a credible objection now.
I did not claim you did. I will now ask why you made an argument based off of your opinion, if you don't think it's well informed enough to be worth valuing.
It's the same sort of self-negation that accompanies several of your criticisms and predictions. 'Everything Trump does will be terrible and fail, unless it succeeds in which case it was/will be worthless.' 'My opinion is strong and argued at length, but I won't claim it has worth worth defending.'
Well, which is it- is your opinion strong, worthless, or both?
I am poking you in the eye on this because part of the derangement in TDS comes from the totalizing mix of simultaneously asserting 'worst thing ever' and accompanying 'can't possibly be good' when worst thing ever doesn't occur. Not only is this contradictory in its own right, but it's a form of patronizing dismissal of the opinions of others by dismissing the relevance of the not-failures others may value as successes... which goes to part of why Trump is simultaneously successful and so triggering to PMC types with TDS, because Trump champions issues that are/were dismissed as unimportant, and disregards things claimed to be important.
Hence the blunt challenge on if you think your opinion on Trump foreign affairs is worth valuing. If you do, it's fine to say so and we can go into challenging that basis- but if you don't, but you are making strong claims anyway, that is itself unsound / not logical / the D in TDS.
And I shall probably not, since I just lost a bloody lot of effort trying to put together an effort response, including a post on issues with your previous post. That was lost for good, but here is try two for your question on overestimating Europe's importance.
/// Trump's Effectiveness Abroad ///
On Trump's effectiveness abroad, the short version is that unless you have a second language skill I'm not aware of, your impression of how effective Trump was and how he was perceived is shaped by the Atlanticist-dominated media coverage of international relations, i.e. Western European and State Department liberal types (many of whom are reading western european media company coverage) who are the prime targets of TDS. This is not an unbiased or objective audience. Outside of Europe, Trump's reception was 'normal.' Lower general opinion than Obama, who was and cultivated a rockstar popularity, but Obama was also rarely willing to press issues at the cost of his popularity.
Trump acceptance in turn followed from that he was generally willing to let partners focus on what they wanted without 'usual' levels of US interference (read: Trump was willing to buck the local ambassador and not make issues of things the local embassy might ask for government pressure on), as long as he got some signature concession. Mexico got substantial lack of pushback on its internal reform priorities (including rolling back the Mexican oil industry liberalization) after it supported NAFTA renegotiation and did Remain in Mexico, Japan got to play a leading role in the Quad and facilitation in Philippine influence and access after its own trade agreement, Korea got to pursue sunshine policy 2.0 with American facilitation (including the Trump-KJU summit, which was a South Korean success that tends to get ignored), and the Israeli-Arab normalization had a bunch of different angles of who got what for what.
When you (sarcastically) claim you are accused of not having a high enough opinion of Trump, this is true, but not because you should have a high opinion of him. Trump's effectiveness abroad was quote / unquote 'normal.' It was not terrible, it was within historical norms. Trump was a transactional president who did far less to meddle in some places than other presidents have in the past, and while that may seem a low bar to clear that is a still a bar many American presidents failed at.
/// The Europe Exception ///
The only place Trump was particularly 'bad' at was Europe, which is also by design the part of the world with the most reverse media influence back to the US (because when your national security for 50 years depends on American opinion, you invest in shaping American opinion).
There's plenty to be said about the extension of US politics into European political thought (such as how BLM protests of the Obama administration were echoed in European countries without the issues), and how the Obama administration tried to subvert Trump (at the same time the Obama administration was locking in the Russia-gate narrative domestically, Obama in his farewells to Merkel more or less encouraged her to consider herself the leader of the free world- imagine what your perspective is if the American president says 'don't trust my successor' even as American intelligence leaks are insinuating a Russian stooge), but the crux of the policy differences between Trump and Europe was the already emerging breakdown of the strategic logic of the cold war-originated alliance.
During the Cold War, the US granted European countries systemic economic advantages vis-a-vis US industry in exchange for strategic deference. Sometimes this was for things like the Marshal Plan, but it was also done to help other parts of the US alliance, such as trading concessions to American markets for letting Korea get access to European markets. The EU, when it was forming in its current form in the late 1990s/early 200s, inherited many of these concessions, even as EU collective bargaining had an often explicit purpose of improving European negotiating positions against the US.
This was because European and American competition is an explicit policy consideration of the relationship. Again, the stated purpose of the EU common market is to get better deals (for Europe) at the expense of others (the US). A united European polity was considered a way for the Europeans to compete with the US in the post-cold war, and there's no shortage of international relations scholarship about how European rule-making would restrain and shape others (including the US) to European benefit. European centralization and unification has been a common idea and explicit goal of many relevant European elites involved in EU politics. However, during the post-9-11 Iraq War, the Bush Administration broke the back on European solidarity when the Franco-German attempt at a pan-European objection to the Iraq War (in part because of their particular bilateral interests in Iraq) was undercut by the UK and coalition of the willing who supported the US invasion of Iraq. While this broke the attempt at a European common position, you will also note that this effort was breaking the core logic of the alliance- an inherited economic incentive for Europe, but not a deferential strategic asset for the Americans.
This was the start of the 'modern' call for European strategic autonomy from the US- the notion that an autonomous Europe is needed to not get into American wars 'it' didn't want to get involved with. Given that the coalition of the willing and American coalitions in general are voluntary, the primary way to advance European strategic autonomy and not get involved in an American conflict was to... not spend more on NATO, which would bring into conflict with Russia, at a time that the Franco-German consensus was that Russia was a critical economic partner and also a counter-balance to American influence in Europe (and also extending that peace dividend could help prop up the post-financial crisis challenges to the governments).
The Trump-Europe issue, for all its messiness and propaganda, basically revolves around the context that a critical mass of the European elites wanted the benefits of an inherited economic-concessions-for-military-deference bargain, except to cut out the military or deference requirement and disagreement of who the threat actually was.
If this doesn't seem unreasonable, consider why typically states pay mercenaries, and not the other way around.
Put another way- in so much that trade concessions are a form of payment for future services, the Americans are not the mercenary in the US-Euro security relationship: the Europeans are.
/// How Much Would You Pay For European Allies? ///
The strategic value issue, in turn- the 'why is Europe important to the US'- is that Europe simply can't offer much value as a military asset, even if it wanted to.
Europe is a critical enabler for the US to fight against Russia, but the primary reason (besides morality) to fight Russia is if you are allied with the Europeans who Russia's revanchism threatens. There are separate issues of what Russia would do to prolong conflict with the US for ideological/revanchist/other mockable reasons if the US did pull out of Europe, but fundamentally there is no need to fight the Russians over Europe if you don't consider Europe worth fighting for. Europe helping the US ability to fight Russia is an advantage for the Europeans, not the Americans, and in so much that there is a cost saving here, it is enjoyed by the Europeans, not the US, who would be avoiding far greater costs by simply not being obliged to fight.
The challenger the Americans care about, on the other hand, is China. This is one of the few bipartisan consensus points for the US over the last 25 years. Russia can break itself and half of Europe apart, and the US would be fine. China is the only power with the mass and industrial capacity and- critically- naval potential to threaten not only the American ability to go where it chooses, but to reach back to the US.
The things is, all the reasons that applied to the Europeans not wanting to align with Trump against Russia apply even more so to China. China is not a military threat to Europe per see. Unlike Russia, there are not territorial conflicts or near-term revanchism. China is a major potential market (that Germany is hooked on), China is a major potential investor (that post-financial crisis Europe is struggling to find sources of). China is a very clear advocate for a multipolar world order, and while China would prefer to be the biggest pole it's also not exactly going to be competing for Europe, so a Chinese multipolar order has overlap with a European multipolar order.
When the Europeans say they don't want to get roped into an American conflict, the American conflict they're thinking of is typically going to be the US-China conflict.
And here the value of the Europeans as military allies is dismal. Not only has NATO underinvestment crippled European military in general, but the Europeans haven't had the right kind of capabilities. A US-China war is functionally a naval war, and the European armies undercut by decades of underinvestment are far easier to fix than navies with the same restraints. There's a reason when there's talk of European Indo-Pacific power, they are talking about small islands on the wrong sides of the Pacific.
Now, this doesn't mean that the Europeans can't contribute anything to the US in a china conflict. However, the most valuable things the Europeans bring to the table is not their military support, but other things. Like... money and trade flows.
Which is the conflict that the US and Europeans have over NATO costs. And trade relations. And which the Europeans with significant China exposure threaten to lose quite a bit of if they side with the US over China in a US-China conflict. And which competes with the strategic logic of who is paying who for their geopolitical support.
Good post, pokes in the eye notwithstanding. There is a lot to think about. You have not convinced me that Trump was or will be a good president, but I do see what you are getting at about my overvaluing Europe, and I will try to adjust my position going forward.
This was much better than "Trump is Naruto and we should worship him," though I still disagree about "TDS," though maybe that's term slippage.
So assuming a second Trump term, do you expect him to actually be good on foreign policy? What is he going to do about Ukraine, about Israel, about Iran, and about China?
In many ways I am more pessimistic about the international environment than most people, and while I am optimistic in some respects (particularly on Western versus PRC/RUS/IRN axis competition) my position could boil down to 'I don't think anyone can be expected to do 'good' on foreign policy over the next years/decades,' because drones.
What many posters in this forum think AI may imply in the medium to long term in terms of major upheaval and disruption, I view drones implying in the short and medium term. I believe that drone warfare has hit a tipping point where we are already seeing a transition in the balance of power between offensive and defense in favor of the strategic defense, and that this has major implications for all forms of expeditionary and aggressive warfare, i.e. what the US is already built to do, and what revaunchist powers like Russia and China have aspired to be able to do. Drone technology is emerging in a way that is providing a historically unparalleled ability to debilitate state resources, and that is going to fundamentally change how nations approach military defense (and offense) in the next 30 years compared to the last 300.
This is a bit conceptual, so I am going to try and break it down a bit.
In the field of military history, there's two related and distinct concepts you may or may not have heard of: a military revolution, and a revolution of military affairs.
Military revolutions are major changes in tactics and strategies that are driven by emerging technologies. This is things like how guns changed reliance on bows and arrows and melee, how rapid reload / sustained fire weapons changed Napoleonic armies to trench warfare, how tanks and motorized vehicles changed trench warfare to maneuver warfare, and so on.
Military revolutions are, by their nature, often very bloody because they represent periods where new optimizations can have disproportionate effect, and rebalance the balance of offense vs defense in ways that make previous strategies or paradigms unworkable. For example- the AK-47 represented a modest military revolution because the ability to mass produce cheap, reliable, and effective light infantry weapons that could be distributed to guerilla groups made colonial empires fundamentally unviable. Empires could not justify the cost-benefit of maintaining colonial holding by force, and so the strategy of the post-WW2 era gradually became to disengage from colonial empires.
A Revolution in Military Affairs is worse / bloodier / more significant.
A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is not just a change in tactics, but when technological or organizational changes irrevocably change how warfare itself is pursued- particularly by changing the relationship between the populace and how war is conducted. These can be technological changes, but they can also be organizational or social changes.
The exact criteria and lists may differ, but five examples include rise of the seventeenth-century state system (where permanent standing armies were maintained by the state rather than reliance on ad-hoc raisings of mass armies or fuedal forces), the French revolution (where nationalism changed the relationship that the populace had with the state and the execution of warfare), the industrial revolution (where military-industrial capacity not only became critical for arming mass armies with advanced capabilities but could be used to bolster other forces by sparing surplus capacity at a scale never previously done), World War I (where machine guns, trench warfare, and special weapons like gas led to historically unprecedented killing potential with demographic-levels of impact), and superpower nuclear competition (where the conduct and selection of wars to fight over sharply veered away from ever-larger conflicts to avoiding total wars of annihalation between not only nuclear states, but other states in general).
RMAs are rarer but more significant than MRs because of the social change dynamic at play. Going beyond changes in tactics, the changes in how organizations or polities pursue these new paradigms often lead to disproportionate, and thus self-feeding, effects where actors pursue not just the technology to use in the old way, but pursue the new social and institutional evolutions that further propel the technology. For example, the rise of precision bombing from the US gulf war has changed how countriess across the globe approach airpower- no one builds for carpet bombing fleets anymore, and instead precision fires or precision-missiles in lieu of precision-bombers dominate.
My view is that weaponized drones represent both a military revolution (they are effective weapons changing tactics and strategies, as seen with how the Russia-Ukraine War has adopted to both sides using them and trying to counter their use), and a revolution in military affairs.
The Ukraine War in particular, but also the Iranian use of drones in their proxy conflicts, have demonstrated how societies themselves can basically grass-roots up militarily significant contributions from common commercial product. Weaponing small commercial-off-the-shelf drones with what amounts to hobby-shop equipment is what allows a 1,000 dollar drone project to destroy a 100,000,000 dollar piece of military equipment at a 100,000-to-1 cost ratio.
Which is another way of saying, for the cost of one modern fighter jet, you could conceivably invest in more drones-that-can-kill-parked-fighter jets than there are fighter jets in the world. That is something that no state in the modern world can afford to brute-force through, and in the current era counter-UAS is hard but drone warfare is easy. Typically far less cost-effective than the drone-to-aircraft example, but still easy and still cost effective.
What makes it a RMA and not just a MR, however, is the accessibility to non-advanced economies and non-state actors.
The Ukraine War has demonstrated how you can have a distributed practically grass-roots drone warfare program put together in a matter of months across a coherent society even when being directly attacked by an existential invasion threat. The Iranians and IRGC have demonstrated how proxy drone warfare can be deliberately proliferated across sectarian group alliances to have impacts across entire geopolitical regions, to a point where quasi-stat / substate actors like the Houthis can produce their own drones despite being under regional blockades and air power. Terrorist groups like ISIS and criminal groups around the world have demonstrated how even non-state actors can access and utilize customized drones for operations.
What this means is that drones represent one of the biggest challenges to state military capacity in history. What the AK-47 did to the viability of colonial empires, drones may do to the entire concept of expeditionary organized armies, where any state that tries to organize a military to take unwilling territory by force will face cost-disproportionate losses that wreck the cost-benefit justifications for going to war in the first place.
This also means that states will have exceptional incentives to develop security states able to detect, trace, and go after drone use. Partly for normal law enforcement, but partly to mitigate the risks of asymetric wariors / insurgents moving in to start attacking high-cost targets in core regions. This will likely lead to vastly expanded / normalized security state technologies to track people and computers and drones, far beyond the sort of counter-terrorism authorities introduced in 9-11. These means to mitigate UAS threats can, in turn, counter the ability of other states to penetrate protected population centers that would normally be done for prepatory operations.
This, in turn, means that various forms of military conquest / forced entry into unwelcome areas is going to be less possible than ever. No one looks at the Russian experience in Ukraine and thinks 'I want to win like that,' and drone proxy warfare will likely make that increasingly a norm rather than exception. Any state that tries to force itself into another state is risking itself to proxy support for the invaded by any number of states with their own attack UAS capability, quite possibly AI-trained to recognize the military equipment being used to invade. There are some contexts where proxy resupply may be impossible- I think Taiwan is credibly screwed due to blockade vulnerabilities- but in general I am not concerned about China invading or establishing puppet states from asia to africa.
The flip side, though, is that I am concerned on the ability of the US to maintain air bases or war stocks in foreign countries where the local government/people don't want it to be there. I don't think the US could have maintained the Iraq or Afghan occupations for as long as it did if the US had invaded in 2023 rather than 2003. Not unless it was willing to make some significantly different decisions regarding partition or siding with ethnic majorities. This will credibly not only apply to the specific territories where a small state might welcome a US presence, but also to the neighbors who might host / turn a blind eye to anti-US militant activity crossing borders. (An example here would be how the Houthis in western Yemen were able to use UAVs against the UAE all the way across eastern Yemen.)
In other words, the drone revolution- both as a military revolution and revolution in military affairs- cuts both ways. It will drastically increase the cost of American adversaries trying to pursue revanchist invasions. It will also drastically increase the cost of American expeditionary adventures abroad, or even to US opponents in any given conflict who can send asymmetric forces to attack distant airbases elsewhere. It is going to lead to a lot of blood in parts of the world where things aren't so clear cut, whether it's already ongoing conflicts, sectarian divisions where both sides can credibly reach drone capabilities, and/or efforts by geopolitical actors to create drone-empowered insurgencies where they don't already exist. Costs and casualties will climb.
If you noticed that there was no reference to political candidates in this, that was the point- this is a foreign policy problem driven by dynamics beyond any candidate's ability to prevent. No matter what a candidate does, great harm and damages will occur around the world regardless- and thus everyone will 'fail.' Anyone with an interest in saying 'they didn't succeed' will have more than enough to fill the confirmation bias regardless of how well they do relatively, and there is unlikely to be any credible or plausible metric of what 'success' looks like going forward.
Unironically, if he does 'nothing'- does not start a conflict, does not join a conflict, does not participate in a conflict- that could be a better action (or inaction) than doing anything 'about' them.
Americans often have a bias for action- 'don't just stand there, do something'- that would typically be associated with being proactive and more impactful policies, but in the context of the drone RMA represents a major risk. If you forward deploy extremely expensive forces, you are putting them in range of drone users, and if you actually commit those forces to a conflict then you are giving those opponents the reason / basis to actually act against them. This would be the case if, say, the US joined Israeli airstrikes on Iran- Iran would seek to retaliate with its drones, and there are American logistic bases in Kuwait right across the water.
In this sort of context, the better posture / strategy is to not be participating, but being ready to, to establish a deterrence factor that allows you more limited but below-threshold actions. Those American bases in Kuwait may not be able to support attacks against Iran, but maybe they can shoot down Iranian drones sent against Israel, which is a desirable effect in and of itself. In the meantime Iran knows that if they tried to attack those Kuwaiti bases, then while they might do damage they would receive far more damage than they currently are as the US would enter its own 'use it or lose it' dynamic and would utililze what it could as much as it could before drones rendered it unable to. In this way, the US preserves its ability to maintain a beneficial effect (mitigating Iranian attacks on Israel) for a longer period, and at a lower cost (which is what allows it to persist for longer).
This is where a non-interventionist instinct is a directionally correct strategic bias vis-a-vis a more interventionist impulse. Instinct alone is not sufficient- there are going to be costs and risk taking regardless, there is more to a neutral jing strategy than doing literally nothing, and there are contexts where the general trends would not apply. I am not making a general claim that any war the US enters in will lead to it being dogpiled across the world and all bases destroyed by drone swarms. But erring on the side of caution by expecting clear interests and clear partner buy-in is going to be an increasing positive as potential costs raise.
/
To return to your question, you ask 'what would trump do about -topics-', but my response is that it's more important what he is NOT likely to do- try to get directly involved.
Unlike the foreign policy establishment opponents broadly aligned against him, Trump is not likely to embrace an R2P intervention (which would expose a US presence to proxy militants supported by hostile competitors), or maintain an indefinite exposure to asymmetric drone attacks (the Iraq/Syria presence, which he was thwarted in his withdrawal from in his first term), or stay to assume the costs of fighting for a country that doesn't want to fight for itself (the Afghanistan context). He is unlikely to prioritize the harmony and good regard of host partners over systemic cost trends and risks. He is unlikely to expand US commitments or exposures to new areas or partners without clear interests and gains for doing so. He is likely to engage in limited tit-for-tat strikes or counterstrikes that will lead people to accuse him of failing or falling into that escalation spiral, but tit for tat is probably the best response possible and a more stable strategic equilibrium than outright ignorring proxy attacks.
This will almost certainly come at the opportunity cost of things he could do more of but isn't inclined towards. People who think the US should intervene for the right thing are probably going to be disappointed by a lack of interventions in general. Anyone whose self-image of what it means to be an American on the world stage may cringe at the missed opportunities, the tolerance for the intolerable foreign leaders, and so on.
But- per my thoughts on drones- this is a feature, not a bug. The expectations Americans have of relatively low-cost/low-casualty wars are not keeping up with technological reality. The Gulf War standard of conflict success is gone and is not coming back any time soon. The best bet the US has for maximizing effects and minimizing costs is to help those who are willing to fight (and pay) for themselves, rather than assuming the burdens of fighting (and paying the costs) for them.
This, however, is not going to come easy, and it's certainly not going to be held in high regard by partners who prefer the US operate under a different paradigm (and assume the costs of doing so).
This might also have to include that Iraq population grows faster than USA and USA continuing waging culture war on its men, rather than technology. Gulf War was unique in that pretty much everyone was against Iraq
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