Donald Trump has proved in 18 months that he can disrupt the global status quo, for better (Iran) and worse (trade). The question as he brawls with his G-7 allies after their annual summit and now meets with adversary Kim Jong Un is whether the President knows that disruption isn’t enough. Sooner or later he has to contribute to a better world order instead of merely blowing up the old one.
Unlike most of the U.S.-Europe foreign-policy elite, we think the world needed some shaking up. Barack Obama saw America as an overstretched power that needed restraining for the world’s good. He thought the U.S. was better off with its interests tied down like Gulliver in Lilliput in a multinational web of collective security. As the U.S. retreated, regional powers like China and Russia and rogues like Iran, North Korea and Islamic State asserted themselves; the world became more dangerous.
Mr. Trump sometimes campaigned like an isolationist but he also asserted a more muscular defense of U.S. interests, and he has followed up as President. The Iran deal offered the illusion of containing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions while facilitating its imperialism. The Paris accord punished the U.S. economy far more than China’s with little benefit to the climate. He withdrew from both. Mr. Trump’s demand that NATO partners spend more on defense has achieved more in a year than the previous two Presidents did in 16.
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Far more troubling is Mr. Trump’s willy-nilly challenge to global trading rules. His withdrawal from the Pacific trade deal was strategic folly if his main priority is changing China’s behavior. His steel and aluminum tariffs punish friends who could forge an alliance against Chinese mercantilism. Blowing up Nafta would cause widespread economic damage with no compensating benefits.
If Mr. Trump has some grand trade strategy, it isn’t apparent. On Saturday he tossed out on his own at a postsummit press conference the idea of “no tariffs” across the G-7, which would be a constructive goal. But he has no process or plans to negotiate it, and he accompanied the idea with a new threat to cut off access to the entire U.S. market and impose tariffs on European cars.
Amid all of his bluster and threats, no one believes Mr. Trump’s zero-tariff proposal is serious. His desire for a bilateral trade deal with Japan is also going nowhere because Prime Minister Shinzo Abe doesn’t believe Mr. Trump’s promises. The results so far haven’t been better trade deals, as Mr. Trump asserts. They’ve been rancor and the biggest threat to world commerce since World War II.
Now comes the summit Tuesday with Kim Jong Un, another example of Mr. Trump’s disruptive impulses at work. The risk of giving the North Korean dictator equal status on the world stage is obvious, but then nothing else across three Presidencies has contained the North’s nuclear threat.
Mr. Trump said Saturday he’ll be able to size up Kim’s sincerity “within the first minute,” and he probably believes it. On the other hand, he is already playing down this first meeting and says the main result may be establishing a personal relationship with Kim.
The problem is that personal relationships rarely count for more than national interests, and Kim’s main interest is in his regime’s (and his own) survival. Nuclear weapons are the means of that survival and have brought him to this summit—diplomatic recognition his father and grandfather never achieved. He will be loath to give up that security.
Mr. Trump’s temptation will be to make a version of the same mistake Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did to trade easing sanctions and other concessions for the mere promise of future denuclearization. Both Presidents also hoped, as Mr. Trump does now, for a historic nonproliferation achievement. But the North reneged as it played for time to research and develop a nuclear threat that will soon be able to reach the U.S. mainland.
Perhaps Kim has had a revelation and wants his nation to join the rest of the modern world. But the test of that commitment should be an immediate declaration of all of his nuclear and missile facilities for inspection by American experts. The dismantling can be done in stages, but the transparency and verification must be immediate and complete. Mr. Trump’s instinctive judgment about Kim’s character and intentions isn’t enough.
Mr. Trump takes pride in shaking up the world’s elites, but as President he’ll be judged not on how much of Mr. Obama’s legacy he dismantles but on how much of his own he builds. Sooner or later he’ll have to show results that advance U.S. interests.