A Weekend of Bad Bargaining Takes

The rationalizations will only get dumber.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

I see that the “going for Greenland would actually be a good idea!” takes have been multiplying across the interwebs. So too are the mainstream media’s more measured equivalent, the “could Trump actually do this?” takes and “what’s at the root of this?” kind of takes.

Jamelle Bouie has had enough, arguing that, “opponents of trump also have to resist the temptation of intellectualizing his outbursts or attributing them to some recognizable goal.” Similarly, the Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait argues that much of the “debate” over these topics boils down to conservative rationalizations for Trump’s prattle:

This is a now-familiar ritual in the Trump era. First, Trump says or does something so outrageous that any critic who dreamed it up beforehand would have been mocked as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Then his defenders either pretend it didn’t happen, accuse the Democrats of having done the same thing, or reimagine Trump’s position as something defensible.

Trump’s cascade of threats has been too loud and insistent for No. 1. Even the most strained historical reading yields little suitable material for a whataboutist defense, making No. 2 a heavy lift. (Joe Biden’s litany of gaffes lacks any military threats against American allies.) This leaves conservatives with no choice but door No. 3: casting Trump’s trolling as a clever geopolitical stratagem.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has some sympathy to this notion of dismissing the MAGA rationalizations. I have argued ad nauseum that Trump’s outbursts are far more likely to represent poor impulse control and temper tantrums rather than a thought-out strategy. I have further argued that even if one thinks of Trump as pursuing a madman strategy, it is going to yield, “flashy but token” concessions and risk wider wars.

There is also the opportunity costs of deliberating this crap. For one thing, the loose talk about Greenland crowds out debate over Trump 2.0’s likely use of military force in Central America. Or, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained to CNN, Trump’s rhetoric about Canada becoming the 51st state distracts from Trump’s threats to impose tariffs against the Great White North.

That said, I cannot entirely agree with Bouie and Chait, for two reasons. First, as I have said repeatedly in this space, I do think Trump possesses a reasonably coherent worldview. It is a simplistic, blinkered, 19th century worldview, but it exists.

Second, and more importantly, it is not just MAGA apparatchiks on social media who are sanewashing Trump. There are incoming Trump officials and foreign leaders who are sanewashing his comments to articulate their own foreign policy positions. And those efforts cannot and should not be ignored, because they have more immediate real-world consequences. I heartily endorse pushing back on those arguments.

Let me give just two recent examples of Trump rationalizations that merit a response. First, there is U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy. In a long Financial Times story on how to deal with president Donald Trump, Lammy served up the following:

David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, says that while Trump’s rhetoric can be “destabilising”, it is often very different from his actions. He contrasts the vocal criticism of European Nato members with his decision to deploy more American troops to Europe during his first presidency.

Lammy says there are advantages to Trump’s approach, particularly when dealing with autocrats. “Experience demonstrates that Donald Trump’s intensity of rhetoric, and his desire to pursue foreign policy through a lens of ‘peace through strength’ and through a degree of unpredictability, is one of his signatures,” Lammy says.

Now to be fair, Lammy is correct to observe that Trump often backs down from his angry rhetoric. That said, I would very much like Lammy to list even one example of Trump dealing with an autocrat and, through destabilizing rhetoric, getting what he wants. Go ahead. I’ll wait….

Oh, it turns out that there is no empirical example of this?! Well, shuck my corn! I can’t say that I’m surprised. As I wrote in Foreign Policy, “Trump’s madman schtick worked better with U.S. allies than adversaries. The former group of countries, rattled by his threats to withdraw from long-standing alliances and trade treaties, at least made some public displays of fealty. Trump, however, was too busy trying to ingratiate himself with the autocratic rulers of China and Russia to act crazy in front of them.” And as I told NPR’s Scott Neuman, “The strong conceptual mistake that Trump made in his first term and he's going to make in his second term is his belief that because he can bully allies, he will be able to extract similar concessions from the Chinas and Russias of the world.”

If Lammy is saying what he is saying to flatter Trump, far be it for me to tell him what is in the U.K.’s national interest. As a matter of whether what Lammy is saying is factually correct, however, I reserve the right to call BS.

On to incoming Trump officials. Michael Waltz, who will be Trump’s national security advisor as of January 20th, gave an interview to Breitbart that seemed mostly designed to put out some social media contretemps about whether Trump would clean house at the White House. But there was this bit on Iran:

“A lot of” the NSC action this next few years he said would be undoing the damage of the Biden years and returning “to what’s working” including “a return to maximum pressure on Iran” which he said “was absolutely working and will drive them towards a better deal if that’s the direction he wants to go” and a “return to deterrence with Russia.”

Again, I would very much like to know from Waltz what, exactly, “absolutely working” means. I fully acknowledge that Trump’s maximum pressure campaign hit the Iranian economy hard. But as I explained in a 2022 International Affairs paper, “How Not to Sanction,” the Iran case was a perfect example of what not to do in economic statecraft:

The sanctions did not achieve stated US intentions. The most obvious example of failure was Iran's decision to restart its nuclear programme. Tehran had complied with the JCPOA since its adoption on 18 October 2015. In May 2019, however, Iran breached the accords by exceeding limits on heavy water and enriched uranium stockpiles. Two months later it announced that it would exceed the 3.67 per cent uranium-235 enrichment limit and go up to 4.5 per cent. Two months after that, Iran stated that limitations on research and development of advanced centrifuges would no longer be respected. By January 2020, Iran announced that it would no longer be bound by any operational limitations of the JCPOA. Estimates of how long it would take for Iran to build a nuclear bomb fell from a year under the 2015 deal to a few weeks in 2021.

The Trump administration believed that the sanctions would also prevent Iran from pursuing its revisionist activities in the greater Middle East. Again, however, there is no evidence that the sanctions constrained Iranian behaviour. The re-imposition of sanctions failed to prevent Iran's proxies from increasing their influence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The 2019 terrorist attack on Saudi Aramco appears to have originated in Tehran. Iran was also suspected to be behind attacks on oil tankers and US drones in the Persian Gulf in June 2019. Houthi rebels in Yemen, aligned with Iran, continued to launch missiles into Saudi Arabia. Iran's proxies in Iraq stepped up their tempo of rocket attacks and roadside bombs directed against US forces in that country. Analysts further conclude that Iran has built up the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the region.

The sanctions were also widely judged to be a failure once Iran restarted its nuclear programme. By 2021, Israeli officials who had supported the US exit from the JCPOA admitted their error. Former Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya'alon acknowledged on the record that ‘looking at the policy on Iran in the last decade, the main mistake was the withdrawal from the agreement’. US proponents of JCPOA withdrawal also acknowledged, as one of them put it, that ‘it is true that Trump's gamble did not pay off’.

Maximum pressure failed as a tool of coercion, containment, and deterrence. Ironically, after four years of what MAGA folks consider to be Biden’s appeasement of Iran, that country looks much weaker than it did in 2021.¹

There are two possible takeaways from this cornucopia of bad bargaining takes. It is possible that policymakers are simply shoveling a bunch of manure to media outlets to serve a variety of political purposes. Or it is possible that they do not understand how bargaining and coercion actually work.

I suppose we will see which is true over the next four years.

1. That is mostly due to factors having little to do with the United States except as providing a backstop to Israel.