Trump's Instability-Stability Paradox
The unintentional consequences of a strategy of mostly walking back from the cliff
For years, the shorthand liberal fear about the president’s foreign policy has been best summed up by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 taunt that “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
The early months of the Trump administration seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears. The unhinged, “increasingly isolated”, Fox & Friends-watching commander-in-chief seemingly spent his waking hours thinking of new ways to insult Kim Jong Un, the despot of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The year 2017 ended up as the year of the Korean Missile Crisis, an international standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program punctuated not by Kennedy-esque speeches about the grave stakes of the matter but, instead, by Trumpian bon mots about not calling Kim “short and fat”.
As New Zealand-based political scientist Van Jackson writes in his excellent On the Brink, however, ascribing the advent and resolution of the Korean Missile Crisis = to personal traits of the president is short-sighted. Any American president was going to have to deal with Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
The real danger, instead, emerged from the uncertainty about how Trump would handle the crisis—whether the famously undisciplined president would say something or authorize a strike (like the trial balloon of giving Kim a “bloody nose”) that could lead to the worst-case scenario. And that worst-case scenario was pretty bad: as Jeffrey Lewis, an arms-control expert, described it in his fictional The 2020 Commission Report about the aftermath of a US-North Korean war, even a single North Korean nuclear weapon used against the United States could have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans (not counting the Koreans, Japanese, and others).
The North Korean standoff ended very differently: with three personal meetings between the two presidents (so far), an apparent fait accompli that North Korea is and will be a nuclear power, and Trump tweets pledging to enrich North Korea instead of reduce it to ashes
Jackson argues that a confluence of events brought the crisis to a peaceful end—including the replacement of a hawkish (and cultish) South Korean president by a dovish one, as well as the coincidence that the Winter Olympics were scheduled to take place in South Korea just at a crucial moment of the tensions. Both of those factors, it is true, allowed tensions to be relaxed.
But I think we also need to grapple with Trump’s “instability-stability paradox”. This is my inversion of the old “stability-instability paradox” from the Cold War. That was the idea that parity in nuclear weapons made big wars between the US and the USSR unlikely, but they paradoxically made small wars more likely because they reduced the likelihood of escalation.
The Trumpian instability-stability paradox reflects not the dictates of nuclear weapons but, rather, of Trump’s political strategy. As James Poniewozik writes in his new Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America, Trump’s media and political strategy owe a lot to how he learned to master tabloid newspaper and reality-TV conventions to keep the audience’s attention. The essence of his strategy is to gin up conflict rather than to tamp down tensions.
Well, yeah, you say. Of course the president’s a pugilistic narcissist. So what else is new?
But the point is not to diagnose or categorize the president. It’s to highlight two consequences. First, the value of the conflict is in anticipation. The more there’s an anticipation of a real fight breaking out, the more the audience is glued to the action—and the bigger the payoff of the surprise when something unexpected happens (like the president making an impromptu visit to the DMZ to shake hands with his favorite Millennial dictator).
Second, there’s no need for a final resolution. Many people have argued that the president’s habit of switching from one fight to another reflects some deeper strategy of distraction. Others suggest it reflects cognitive decline or even ADHD. But I think that Poniewozik’s reality-TV framework supplies a better answer: Trump switches the topic when the current fight gets boring. Gotta keep the eyeballs!
What does this mean for international politics? It means that there’s a difference between presidential attention to fights and administration policymaking—a much, much more profound difference than other administrations have displayed. It’s why Trump can dramatically fire John Bolton for objecting to a peace summit with the Taliban even as his administration has ratcheted up the use of force in Afghanistan. Similarly, even though the administration continues to carry out its inhumane border policy, the theme can disappear from Trump’s twitter feed for weeks at a time.
That means that the appearance of presidential tweets (or disappearance of presidential aides) may not spell new policy departures, as they would in more top-down and orderly administrations. As executive producer and star of The Trump Show, the president understands that sometimes you have to let a storyline rest.
And it also means that bellicose tweeting may be something of a bluff that matters: a bluff in a two-level game that pays off domestically as Trump performs the role of President Tough Cop even as it erodes America’s reputation internationally. (Think about Trump’s leaving the Paris Climate Talks.)
That’s the “stability” part of the diagnosis: Trumpian variability may reflect relatively constant policy tendencies that lead ultimately to the preservation of conflict that benefits him. In the long term, like a sitcom plot, Trump wants everything to return to a status quo in which he remains the center of attention—and therefore won’t take any really risky moves, like bombing Iran, just because he’s been baited by a Tweet (or an attack on a Global Hawk drone, or attacks on oil tankers, or an assault on Saudi oil facilities…).
So what about the “instability”? It’s that Trump’s recipe requires him to make every standoff seem like a looming apocalypse, no matter how minor the consequences ultimately are.
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That, in turn, means that everyone is applying some sort of a discount factor to deflate the Trumpian hype machine. But how big should that discount be? And is it constant across issues? Well, nobody knows. Just watch experts in US politics and foreign policy try to decipher what the president will do vis-a-vis Iran over the coming weeks. Frankly, if nobody around here knows what’s going on, then how in the heck are folks in Teheran supposed to figure this out?
And that’s where we get the instability. The more that Trump pushes us toward the brink before bringing us back, the more we get used to the denouement of his policy being a climbdown rather than a mushroom cloud. But when Trump tries to perform for his domestic audience, he neglects the fact that his foreign audiences—in Beijing, Pyongyang, even Brussels—are watching for very different signals and with very different stakes. And that may lead them to miscalculate badly.
That’s the real risk of Trump’s foreign policy: that his rational flair for the dramatic—a strategy that served him well in, you know, winning the presidency—may lead him into a series of conflicts that he doesn’t want. And we know he doesn’t want them because he really has passed up on a lot of chances to start them.