Mr Trump’s telephone conversations with world leaders are indicative of his style, not substance.
Donald Trump’s phone calls with world leaders, screams a headline in the New York Times are “upsetting decades of diplomacy.” An already excited commentariat — around the world — is aghast at the fantastic manner in which the new US president-elect has been conducting the sublime act of statesmanship that is a telephone conversation. Just after some experts assessed that his fantastic phone call with the Pakistani prime minister might be unwelcome in India, their were jolted into assessing that Beijing would be upset (okay, make that apoplectic) after he announced that he spoke with the Taiwanese president. He even reportedly spoke to Rodrigo Duterte, the foul-mouthed president of the Philippines who had recently made a great show of insulting Barack Obama and kowtowing to Beijing. Oh yes, Mr Trump has violated the norms of the subtle, contrived and staid world of international diplomacy.
That is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is it much of a bad thing as far as US foreign policy towards Pakistan, China and the Philippines is concerned.
Mr Trump’s remarks to Nawaz Sharif appear more like the polite comments tourists make to their hosts regardless of the reality they observe. If he really meant what he said, then Pakistanis need to be worried right after they get over the surprise and puzzlement. Whoever believes that India should be concerned, less consider them unwelcome, is living in the 1990s. Analysts who believe that New Delhi is vying with Islamabad to court Washington’s favour must enlarge their frame of reference to the Indo-Pacific region, and set their watches to the present.
What about China? Hasn’t Mr Trump provoked the People’s Republic of China by exposing Beijing’s most dearly held—and most forcefully enforced—myth that the Republic of China on Taiwan does not exist as a normal state? Yes, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Perhaps due to the Western perception of its supposed exoticness, Beijing has usually had its way by pressing foreign governments to ‘respect its sensitivities’ over the Taiwan, the Dalai Lama, Xinjiang and the various territorial disputes it has with its neighbours. When the United States yields to this coercion, the rest of the world follows. If the United States were to be less inclined to ‘respect China’s sensitivities’, others are more likely to follow suit.
Beijing is quite likely to retaliate, but then, it has taken sharp foreign policy positions over the past decade without provocation. Let Beijing decide how long it wishes to play tit-for-tat with a much more powerful adversary. It remains to be seen if Mr Trump has the stomach for such a game.
It makes good sense for Mr Trump to reach out to Mr Duterte: at worst, it will confuse the Philippines establishment as it explores alignments with China and Russia. At best, it can cause Mr Duterte to execute a wild swing back towards Washington. To argue that Mr Trump must shun or punish Mr Duterte merely because the latter insulted President Obama would be to trade in foreign policy realism for soap opera sentimentalism. There is no evidence that the latter outperforms the former as a basis for pursuing a state’s interests.
For all his bluster, Mr Trump is out of his depth on matters of statecraft. He’s likely to learn on the job. Regardless of the value judgements we place on their content, it would be incorrect to take the fantastic man’s telephone conversations as indicators of his future administration’s real foreign policy positions.
