The art of dealing with Donald Trump

So far Scott Morrison has managed Donald Trump well — but he should tread warily now.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison holds a bilateral meeting with US President Donald Trumpat the G7 Summit in August Picture: Adam Taylor/PMO

Donald Trump was right to cancel the bizarre peace negotiations he was going to hold with the Afghan Taliban at Camp David the week before the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. It’s much less clear that the US President was right to sack John Bolton, his peppery national security adviser.

To recall, those terror attacks were carried out by al-Qa’ida, which had been given shelter, support and logistical help by the Taliban, who then ruled Afghanistan.

It has been widely observed that you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends, but there is absolutely no sign the Taliban has moderated its extreme Islamist and pro-terrorist attitude and activities in any way.

Not only that, the outlines of the deal US special negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad, under the auspices of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, had negotiated with the Taliban were terrible. Under the deal, the US would withdraw 5000 of its 14,000 troops in Afghanistan. The Taliban would give precisely nothing in return — no ceasefire, even temporary, no road map for peace.

The only concession was that, as part of a vague “national dialogue”, it might at some future point start to have talks with the Afghan government.

Bolton, by all accounts, was furiously opposed to the Camp David gathering and to the terms of the peace deal itself.

You can see how the Camp David event would have appealed to Trump. It could have been unveiled as a diplomatic breakthrough. Trump could have sold it, in the way he sells his meetings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, as a unique achievement only he could have brought about.

Trump is agile, flexible, opportunistic and unpredictable. That gives him a lot of advantages as a negotiator and a political player. But it can have its downside.

And despite Trump’s unpredictability, which can be a formidable strategic asset, there is also a pattern in his diplomatic showmanship. He escalates, then negotiates, then announces a pizzazz of a deal in a media blitz. The escalation gives him extra negotiating coin and he spends it on getting recalcitrant actors around the table and hopefully winning concessions. Thus in Afghanistan a troop surge was supposed to lead to a breakthrough in negotiations with the Taliban.

Trump has achieved some good things in national security, but this pattern — escalate, then negotiate, then a pizzazz deal announcement — has not delivered any serious sustainable victory in any of the US’s conflicts.

That is not to say they were all worthless or that Trump has produced notably worse results than his predecessors.

It is probably not the case that Bolton alone stopped the Camp David meeting from going ahead. For here is another quality of Trump’s that gets way too little attention or analysis. He is pretty prudent. He talks sometimes wildly but his use of military force is extremely cautious and rare. So too, in the end, is his commitment to strategic adversaries who become dialogue partners but don’t finally deliver on their end of the bargain. Trump is prudent even in his use of his own domestic political capital; that is, his standing with his base.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton, accompanied by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

A friendly associate of the President once put it to me this way: “Trump doesn’t like to put his hand in his pocket and pay for military conflicts.” That prudence itself is a serious part of Trump’s make-up and it is a positive quality.

A lot of Trump’s basic political instincts are pretty sound. Turning the instincts into usable policies has been a huge challenge. It is not helped by Trump’s extraordinarily rapid turnover of senior cabinet and sub-cabinet officials. Every president, not just Trump, ultim­ately says to contrarian advisers: if you’re so smart, how come I’m president and not you.

To some extent, Trump has used the “escalate, then negotiate, then announce in the media” pattern with friends as well as adversaries. Canada and Mexico are the classic cases. On the adversary front, Trump has tried the escalate-negotiate-announce pattern with North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and even Venezuela.

The same pattern applies to his dealings with China, but the China question is sui generis. How has Trump gone in other big escalate-then-negotiate gambits, and what role did Bolton play and what does his departure mean?

Trump’s pattern works best when he is dealing with democracies and with friends of the US. Democracies are governed by the rule of law, they tend to observe the terms of agreements they make and they have a desire to keep a good relationship with the US. So when they do a deal with Trump, they tend to keep to its terms.

Trump renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. He didn’t change NAFTA all that much but he did get some concessions and he did get a greater ability to resist the importation of Chinese goods through Mexico. It’s fair to chalk that up as a reasonable achievement for Trump.

The proposed Afghanistan deal was a shocker, a true shocker. But Trump’s initial instinct on coming to office — that the US had over-invested in conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and needed to pull back, spend less money on it and stop the loss of US service personnel — was sound. But that reasonable instinct can be turned into policy in a host of different ways. In Afghanistan, the US could just withdraw all its troops without any deal with the Taliban and leave the Afghan government to do its best. Or it could withdraw after a deal with the Taliban. Or it could work out what is the lowest troop level it can sustain that will keep the Afghan government in place and allow it a fighting chance to survive against the Taliban.

Afghanistan has been a horrible quagmire and it is not surprising that Trump and a lot of other Americans want to leave. If you read the Bob Woodward books about the Obama presidency you see a growing frustration on Barack Obama’s part that he can never hand Afghanistan back to the Afghan government because it is never strong enough to assert control without a US presence.

But this, sadly, is in the nature of the Afghan conflict. Members of the Taliban are drawn from the southern Pashtun ethnic group that borders Pakistan. They have received enormous support and strategic direction from Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency.

They will never be defeated, or converted to peace through non-violent power sharing, while they enjoy this level of Pakistani support. No US president has been able to solve the conundrum of Pakistan. Islamabad has now placed a big strategic bet on China, which puts it even further beyond the reach of US strategic influence.

There is a serious school of Indian strategic thinking that believes the government of Narendra Modi decided to consolidate its control over Kashmir, effectively abolishing the state government and asserting strong military rule, because it expected the Taliban to be triumphant in Afghanistan after a US withdrawal and then its allied forces would turn their attention to Kashmir.

The deal proposed for Camp David would have accelerated a Taliban victory. Much worse even than that, it sidelined and humiliated the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani. If the US is to withdraw from a long-term commitment it owes its allies at least the best chance possible to fight and survive. When the Soviets withdrew troops from Afghanistan, their Najibullah client government proved remarkably resilient. The Soviets supplied $US3bn a year in direct aid and kept the Afghan air force in working shape. Najibullah’s forces were motivated to fight against the mujaheddin because they knew they, their families and their supporters would be slaughtered if they lost. When the Soviets withdrew aid, the Najibullah government did lose and mujaheddin murdered the lot of them and many others.

A Taliban victory in Afghanistan is directly against the US national interest. It would also be a humanitarian tragedy for Afghan civilians. Yet Trump and others call the commitments in Afghanistan “forever wars” that just drag on forever. It may be that a reduced US troop commitment, a new approach to giving Afghanistan its own air force, and continued aid is the least worst option. Its price is continued fighting and an inability to declare the conflict definitively over. It provides no media hoopla moment.

A worse option is unilateral US withdrawal but undertaken gradually with continuing US aid and equipment for the Afghan government. An even worse option is US withdrawal accompanied by a big hoopla agreement with the Taliban, which empowers the Taliban diplomatically and politically.

A worse option even than that is total defeat by the Taliban. But the second worst option, the hoopla agreement, could easily lead to the worst option.

Bolton’s weakness was that he was far too fond of the use of US force, though much more prudent about it in office than when advocating it as a commentator. And he was far too inclined to make regime change a formal US policy objective in too many countries. One of Bolton’s great strengths, however, was that he understood neither the Taliban nor North Korea would ever give up their core strategic aims. Any deal they make with Trump is pretty well worthless. Bolton’s other strength was that he was a strong personality of deep conviction. He had enough independent capital, was enough of a figure independent of his relationship with Trump, that he was prepared to offer Trump advice he didn’t like.

Here are three weakness in Trump’s approach, to measure against his strengths. One, he is addicted to the media-hoopla moment when he announces a deal. Two, he thinks the power of his personality can change the behaviour of dictatorships with clear strategic goals. And three, as he has become more self-confident in the presidency he has less interest in having advisers and key officials who have the strength of personality and independent standing to give him advice he may not like to hear, such as Bolton.

These three weaknesses are common among political leaders in today’s media-dominated, plastic, amnesiac political culture.

Bolton was opposed to Trump’s desire to embark on new negotiations with the Iranians. It is difficult to imagine Trump getting Iran to agree to a seriously improved new deal. He would have been more likely to get such a deal with Bolton in the administration, because the Iranians were scared of Bolton. Trump’s move earlier this year to first order and then abort a limited military strike on Iran, in retaliation for its shooting down a US drone, was a sign of prudence. Maybe it was right not to go through with the strike. But to order it, then abort it, signals weakness to the Iranians.

On Russia, Trump’s instinct to try to draw Moscow away from Beijing is not unreasonable. But he has got nothing from Vladimir Putin. Partly prompted by congress, he has imposed tougher sanctions on Russia than Obama did, notwithstanding his pretty revolting cooing about the Russian dictator. Similarly, Trump has got absolutely nothing of substance from Kim, not one tiny speck of denuclearisation. And here Trump has given up a lot. He now puts Kim under no pressure over repeated short-term missile launches, which allow the North Koreans to develop greater nuclear weapons delivery capability.

Similarly, sanctions are very weak now from China and Russia, which feel no pressure over North Korea. And there has been damage to the US-South Korea alliance. Here again, Bolton was a powerful administration figure in preventing Trump giving even more to the North Koreans in exchange for nothing.

On Venezuela, Bolton may have seriously miscalculated, convincing Trump to embrace attempted regime change without being able to pull it off. America’s adversaries know Trump would love a media-hoopla moment to announce a strategic breakthrough before the next election. That means an increased prospect of the US doing bad deals. Trump was right to resist needless use of force but in losing Bolton he lost something every leader needs: the guy who will tell you when you’re going to make a mistake.

Scott Morrison has so far managed Trump well. The key is to keep it personal and keep it fairly simple. We want enhanced US military commitment and we have a good story to tell. Josh Frydenberg’s joint statement with three other G20 finance ministers telling Trump to re-embrace multilateralism seems dubious. Telling Trump to abandon his lifelong views on trade and the worthlessness of multilateral initiatives is pointless, but if you must do it, at least do it bilaterally, with his senior officials, behind closed doors. The best hope is Trump doesn’t notice the statement at all. If he does notice, Australia will have earned some hostility from him for no benefit. It’s the art of the deal.