On our podcast this week, I told Rich Lowry I do not subscribe to the theory that President Donald Trump lacks a coherent foreign policy. To be sure, he is erratic and “transactional.” He is rash, so the means he impulsively commits often do not square up with the ends he desires — see, e.g., overkill (literally) in the operations against suspected Caribbean drug boats and disastrous planning inadequacies in Iran. He is prone to zig and zag when he gets into political hot water, when he is flattered, or when some potentially lucrative score comes into focus. See, for example, the sleazy deal to acquire Russian assets, negotiated by his conflicted emissaries — who just happen to be his private business partners — even as he was signing the Lindsey Graham bill to sanction Russia and its abettors (the very legislation he just nullified by waiver). See also the pardons he has granted to fraudsters and drug traffickers while his administration has been making a show of resolve against fraud and drug-trafficking. Nevertheless, the president has some consistent through-lines, which, far from lacking coherence, are simply dark.
We don’t like to think of American presidents as having core dispositions that are against American interests. We’d rather rationalize that a president clearly in the wrong is either confused or misled. But Trump habitually conflates America’s interests and his own preferences, even when they are patently different — and that’s narcissism, not confusion.
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