Donald Trump is deliberately keeping the world guessing

IT seems like a colossal backflip, but to be fair, Donald Trump did always warn us he planned to be unpredictable, writes James Morrow.

US President Donald Trump pumps his fist to the crowd of supporters as he steps off Air Force One in Florida last week. (Pic: AFP/Jim Watson)

Call it the mother of all backflips.

Donald Trump won office on a promise to make America less the world’s policeman and more that weird hermit guy who lives up the street.

Yet as he approaches the three-month probation mark in the new job, President Trump is suddenly working all the levers on the foreign affairs front: Hosting China’s Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago “winter White House”. Giving Bashar Assad a whack with the metaphorical rolled up newspaper for a sarin gas attack. Steaming the Carl Vinson carrier group towards the Korean peninsula.

And, now, dropping the so-called “Mother of All Bombs” on a network of ISIS-controlled caves and tunnels in Afghanistan.

For close Trump watchers, at first this new muscularism looked very Helen Lovejoy. His justification for his cruise missile strike on Syria, particularly his having been moved by images of the child victims of Assad’s chemical weapons, had no small hint of the reverend’s wife on The Simpson’s regular imprecation, “won’t somebody think of the children?” about it.

But the events of the past week suggest there’s also something of the Henry Kissinger going on here, too.

Kissinger, recall, was the legendary and often controversial US secretary of state and national security adviser under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who opened American relations with communist China and ran the negotiations to end the Vietnam War.

Barack Obama drew a red line on Syria, and then didn’t enforce it. (AFP/Mandel Ngan)

A great proponent of “realpolitik” — an unsentimental, self-interested rationalism in policy making — he also prized the virtue of unpredictability.

Which is something Trump has in spades.

While pledging to end Obama’s wars and saying that going anywhere near Syria would be a disaster (“we should stay the hell out of Syria”, he tweeted in June, 2013), during his campaign Trump also talked about the need for America to stop telegraphing its moves to the enemy.

Obama’s hard and fast announcement in 2011 that he would pull all American troops out of Iraq not only gave what would become ISIS a vacuum to fill, it gave them a timetable as well.

Trump would later tell the New York Times, “That’s the problem with our country. A politician would say, ‘Oh I would never go to war,’ or they’d say, ‘Oh I would go to war.’ I don’t want to say what I’d do because, again, we need unpredictability.”

Having punished Assad for violating a “red line” Obama drew but never enforced around chemical weapons and seeming to form at least a temporary alliance of convenience with China over North Korea (which has been allowed to fester for far too long by both Washington and Beijing) the previously isolationist Trump is proving both a quick study and adept at keeping the world guessing.

And although the political Left — which after eight years suddenly remembered that it’s not cool to bomb foreigners — is howling, Trump’s approval rating in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll has been ticking northward again, up to 48 per cent.

Perhaps it was not Nobel Peace Prize-winning Barack Obama’s endless interventionism the American people were tired of — it was his fecklessness.

James Morrow is Opinion Editor of the Daily Telegraph.