Brookings experts on Trump’s UNGA speech

Far from making the United States a “stronger, safer, and a richer country” throwback, unbound sovereignty hurts United States, as well as the well-being of its people and of people around the world. President Trump’s speech reflects a misguided dismissal of global governance and international rules. It’s a stunning break from U.S. foreign policy that for nearly a century has sought to foster institutions and rules to mitigate violent conflict, destructive economic competition, human rights abuses and authoritarianism, and environmental destruction—all in order to protect U.S. interests. While Washington has pursued problematic policies in the past, a core concept underpinning U.S. foreign policy had been a recognition that inward-looking and self-regarding approaches are counterproductive. Far from making America great, President Trump’s 2018 U.N. speech undermined U.S. interests and U.S. leadership.

President Trump's speech was an ode to sovereignty, celebrating different traditions and cultures, and suggesting that global governance is oppressive to free people. However, Europeans will certainly see the irony in the proclaimed "respect for the rights of neighbors," as they have been submitted to strong interventionism and intrusion on their sovereignty on part of the United States, which has imposed secondary sanctions against their companies willing to trade with Iran. How ironic is the praise of sovereignty when the Trump administration is seeking regime change in Iran. How ironic at a time when Europeans are frantically trying to regain sovereignty—for example, by setting up a Special Purpose Vehicle for regaining the right to trade with Iran.

The contradiction between this statement and Trump's subsequent criticism of Iran, China, and Venezuela is jarring. A nice sound-bite but clearly empty rhetoric.

This is a direct attack on the universality of human rights and an invitation to governments, including autocrats, to block international monitoring and criticism of their violations. To see how countries like China are taking advantage of U.S. unilateralism and withdrawal, see my new paper. It also attempts to shield against any external criticism of U.S. transgressions. As seen in other parts of the speech, Trump then violates his own dictum by criticizing Iran, Venezuela, and Syria for their egregious actions against their own people.

The multilateral system was shaped by U.S. values. Protection of human rights and promotion of democratic governance are part of the foundation of the U.N., seen as intrinsic to achieving justice, peace, and freedom. The United States has been a historic defender of these values in the multilateral system. The abdication of this role weakens the system's ability to solve the very transnational problems for which it was designed. To make matters worse, it is happening just as peace, justice, and democratic governance (as Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals) were acknowledged and agreed in 2015 by all nations to be core to the development of all countries.

President Trump's tone on North Korea is a 180-degree turn from the aggressiveness of last year's speech, when he said the United States would "totally destroy" North Korea and derisively called Kim Jong-un "Rocket Man." This is a decidedly conciliatory tone, reflecting Trump's apparent desire to keep engaging with Kim, but Trump's continued use of the phrase "the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," North Korea's preferred formulation, shows how much Kim has shaped the language of negotiations to his advantage.

Kim Jong-un has taken some moves toward satisfying elements of the Singapore statement in June 2018, but President Trump is overselling Kim's actions. North Korea has toned down its rhetoric, refrained from missile and nuclear testing, and emphasized its desire for economic development, but reports indicate that it continues to advance nuclear weapons capabilities. Moreover, there are no credible signs that Kim is interested in FFVD—final, fully verified denuclearization. It's also notable how Trump-centric these comments are this year. Last year, in addition to the nuclear issue, he denounced North Korea's human rights violations, nonproliferation, the Japanese abductees issue, the murder of the American student Otto Warmbier, and the regime's use of chemical weapons to kill Kim's half-brother at a Malaysia airport.

President Trump continues to "thank" or compliment Kim, suggesting that he has personalized this issue and is deeply invested in a "win" on North Korea. If anything, South Korean President Moon has done the most legwork to keep the engagement momentum going.

One presidential trip to the Middle East can hardly be credited for such an achievement. Rather, U.S. efforts to counter terrorism financing far pre-date President Trump. And in fact, this is exactly the type of U.S.-led international regime that Trump distained elsewhere in his speech. Now, he appears to claim credit for it.

Although some of the anti-money laundering laws that the United States has supported have turned out to unhelpfully limit governmental policies and even be counterproductive, without U.S. leadership, the United States and the world have had a harder time tracking terrorist money and attempting to constrain its financial pipelines.

This assertion that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are seeking to alleviate humanitarian suffering and facilitate an end to the conflict in Yemen mirrors a controversial certification that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo submitted to Congress earlier this month in order to prevent a new statutory requirement enacted by Congress from cutting off certain U.S. support to the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen. Outside experts have questioned the accuracy of these assertions, particularly in relation to Saudi and UAE efforts to reduce civilian casualties resulting from their military operations. Recent media reports have also indicated that State Department experts opposed certification on similar grounds but were ultimately overruled.

Trump’s willingness to reiterate these controversial assertions underscores the importance his administration places on relations with Saudi Arabia, which has championed the Yemen campaign. While U.S. officials may be pressuring Saudi Arabia and the UAE behind the scenes, the Trump administration appears unwilling to risk any sort of public confrontation—even where doing so requires steps that put its credibility with Congress at risk. For its part, Congress has become increasingly concerned with the Yemen conflict's humanitarian toll and proven more willing to sets limits on what support may be provided. Thus, additional restrictions may be enacted that hinge less on officials' judgment and more on objective criteria subject to verification.

The United States needs to hold these allies to their pledge to mitigate what is now perhaps the world's worst humanitarian crisis. In addition, it must press the UAE and Saudi Arabia to support a negotiated settlement rather than continue their counterproductive war in Yemen.

The president offered no support for the United Nations effort to end the war in Yemen. The horrific humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen is primarily the product of Saudi Arabia’s poorly planned intervention in the country; an intervention that is the signature initiative of Muhammad bin Salman.

Trump made no mention of the bitter dispute between the Saudis and Qatar that has torn the Gulf Cooperation Council apart and makes his pursuit of a strategic alliance illusory. Nor did he acknowledge that his visit to Riyadh last year gave the Saudis the blank check that prompted the blockade of Doha. The solution to the inter-Gulf conflict is essential to developing a unified approach to regional stability, but President Trump at the General Assembly was in denial that the problem exists. Without American leadership, the Qatari dispute will continue to play out across the region, forcing our allies to choose sides.

Rumors that a Middle East security alliance would be rolled out have been swirling for a while, but the rollout has been postponed. It’s hard to imagine a functioning, broadly construed, and formal alliance in the region, where interests—even among the countries listed here—diverge so strongly. Alliances depend on countries coming to each others’ aid even when that is not in their own direct interest to do so, and in the confidence each country has that the others will indeed follow through. Alliances in the Middle East have been tried in the past—all the way to the Baghdad Pact of the 1950s—but if anything, their chances of success are lower today, unless their aims are very focused and limited, more akin to ad hoc coalitions than alliances.

The impetus for regional cooperation and an American role in it is laudable, but it requires the myriad diplomatic efforts that only a sustained U.S. engagement can provide, building such ad hoc coalitions and sustaining them, not broad formal alliances with little chance of success.

This is a real victory for the United States but it is incomplete. Rather than "driven out," the Islamic State is "driven underground"—they can (and will) reappear if pressure lets up.

This statement is patently untrue, and Trump has surely been briefed otherwise. Both the Pentagon and the U.N. have estimated that there are still about 30,000 ISIS militants inside Syria and Iraq. Although the Islamic State no longer governs much territory, its “bloodthirsty killers” have by no means been driven from all the provinces they once controlled.

This is a reference to airstrikes that the Trump administration launched in April 2017 and April 2018 in response to prior Assad regime deployments of chemical weapons, and its repeated threats to pursue additional military action if the Assad regime makes use of chemical weapons again. Threatening such actions before the United Nations is particularly notable because Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter is generally seen as prohibiting the use of force against other states, except in self-defense or where authorized by the U.N. Security Council. While several U.N. member states expressed support for the Trump administration’s prior Syria strikes as a matter of policy, many others (including Russia) argued that they were in violation of international law.

For its part, the Trump administration has not yet attempted to reconcile its actions with the U.N. Charter or otherwise justify them under international law. That said, the legal opinion that the Trump administration ultimately released justifying its actions under domestic U.S. law does identify support for international legal restrictions on the use of chemical weapons as a relevant factor. France, which also participated in the April 2018 airstrikes, has followed suit. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, has advanced a novel theory asserting that its actions were lawful as a form of humanitarian intervention under international law.

The vast majority of Syrians who fled to neighboring countries in search of safety reside outside of refugee camps, largely in urban areas. In Turkey, that figure is as high as 90 percent. As a new Global Compact on Refugees is rolled out around the world beginning later this year, local authorities in frontline states should be viewed as essential stakeholders.

Most refugees do stay close to home. Fewer than 1 percent have the opportunity to be resettled in a third country—*any* third country, including the United States. That was true before President Trump's dramatic cuts to the U.S. refugee resettlement program.

Refugees who are prioritized for resettlement are the most vulnerable—unaccompanied minors, women and girls at risk, survivors of torture, and those with special medical needs among them.

Providing assistance to refugees *where they are* is important. But it does not obviate the need for a robust U.S. refugee resettlement program, which among other things demonstrates solidarity with, and alleviates pressures on, states that already host large numbers of people fleeing violence.

This statement is an implicit rebuke of Angela Merkel and others in Europe who have tried to encourage external migration into the European Union.

The absence of Russia in this discussion of Syria is striking. Russia has been every bit as important to propping up Bashar Assad as Iran.

The windfall is the release of the Iranian funds frozen in the United States, and returned to Iran as part of the nuclear deal. No precise number for this "windfall" is available, but in the past President Trump has mentioned $150 billion, which is a sizable sum (one-third of Iran's GDP and three times its oil revenues at the time) and probably a gross exaggeration. The figure mentioned most by Obama administration officials was $50 billion, which is much closer to the truth.

The claim of a 40 percent increase in Iran's military budget is also an overstatement. According to figures published by the Stockholm Institute for Peace, Iran’s military expenditures increased from $12.3 billion in 2016 to $14.5 billion in 2017, up by 18.6 percent. Interestingly, Iran’s own budget numbers show an increase of 39.7 percent in defense expenditures for these years. But this increase is in nominal terms and does not take into account that prices in 2017 were 10 to 15 percent higher than in 2016. Thus in real terms, the increase is closer to the Stockholm Institute estimates.

It is worth noting that Iran’s defense expenditures may be higher because Iran’s military has its own economic operations that generate revenue. But even counting the off-budget expenditures, Iran’s defense budget is far lower than the $69.4 billion defense budget of Saudi Arabia, Iran’s main regional competitor, with one-third of Iran’s population.

Trump's re-imposition of sanctions on Iran has had a severe impact on Iran's economy. On a tactical basis, U.S. measures are highly successful: International firms are running for the exits to avoid U.S. penalties and the value of Iran's currency has plummeted. But tactics aren't strategy, and Trump's speech as well as his recent Iran-related tweets leave real ambiguity about his end game and the means of achieving it. If the Trump administration is serious about negotiating a treaty relationship with Tehran, the White House needs to articulate a viable strategy for engaging with Iran around a vast and complicated array of issues. Pressure in and of itself won't generate a durable negotiating track or a bargain that is broader and more advantageous to Washington than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. And if the point of pressure is regime change, it's unlikely to work out; dissatisfaction alone rarely produced democratic transitions, and an authoriarian regime that sees its existence threatened by economic pressure may only turn inward and more antagonistic toward the region and its own citizens.

With his call on countries to reduce their imports of Iranian oil "substantially," the president appears to be softening the administration's stance as the November deadline for sanctions targeting Iran's oil revenues nears. Since Trump's May decision to walk away from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a number of senior administration officials have insisted that they intend to reduce Iran's exports to zero by November. This represented a much more intense application of these measures as compared to their original implementation by the Obama administration, which sought "significant" reductions of approximately 20 percent. Several importers, including South Korea and Japan, appear to be on track to meet Trump's demands.

However, Iran's top importers—China and India—can't afford to zero out their imports from Iran, and they have a strategic interest in ensuring diverse sources of energy supplies that entails a continuing relationship with Tehran. Trump's seeming mollification of his subordinates' efforts to press for zero Iranian oil exports suggests an awareness of these realities. His modulated rhetoric may also reflect an appreciation of the prospect that cutting off all of Iran's oil supplies (2.2 thousand barrels per day at the time of the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal) could nudge oil prices higher and impact the U.S. economy as well as the domestic political mood on the eve of midterm elections in the United States.

The Trump administration may be asking, but the president's decision to walk away from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran has alienated the other parties to that agreement, including Russia, China, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, as well as the European Union. In many cases, their companies have complied with newly reimposed U.S. sanctions, but the prospects of generating cooperation from their governments on isolating Iran are essentially nil. This is one of several places on Iran where Trump's tactics run directly counter his intended outcome.

President Trump celebrated his shift of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. While there can and should be zero questioning of the Jewish people’s deep and historic ties to the ancient city, the United States can and should have also recognized the Palestinian people’s deep and historic ties to the city as well. Trump’s Jerusalem announcement, as I wrote in December, was certain to spark instability—and it did. It sparked Gaza’s great return march, which has led to thousands of Palestinian casualties and led to the severe degradation of the U.S.-Palestinian relationship. As a result, ironically, Israel may now have better relations with the Palestinian leadership than the United States!

Don’t hold your breath. King Abdullah’s recent statement that he has “no idea” what’s in the plan suggests there has been little movement on this front. The “deal of the century” has clearly taken a back seat.

Trump is correct that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and that this fact is, in fact, obvious. When foreign leaders address the Israeli parliament they do not do it in Beer Sheva, Eilat, or Tel Aviv; they come to the Knesset in Jerusalem. Even President Sadat of Egypt did so in Jerusalem. Indeed, there is something absurd about countries’ refusal to recognize even West Jerusalem as Israeli, a statement, in effect, that they do not accept the outcome of the 1948 war (after which West Jerusalem became Israeli). It has nothing to do with 1967 (when East Jerusalem was captured), or the occupation of the West Bank. Indeed, Trump’s speech on Jerusalem was carefully worded and delivered; it was not a typical Trump speech. It did not mention a “united Jerusalem” and even explicitly left open the option for borders to be delineated later on, in peace talks.

Where Trump is simply wrong is that this move will advance peace; it has in fact stalled his peace effort. He could have mentioned East Jerusalem in that speech and made clear that the United States hopes to have an embassy to Palestine there. He could have made clear that this move did not prejudice the status of the holy sites in the city in any way. Instead, it was seen by all as a huge symbolic prize to the Israelis at the expense of the Palestinians, even of non-Palestinian Muslims. It was a valid message delivered in a deeply harmful way.

In order ensure fair and reciprocal trade relations between Africa and the United States, President Trump should shift away from a country-specific approach of trade agreements with Africa. Instead, he should adopt a continental one through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Such an approach will be more beneficial for both American corporations and African countries, as the continent is poised to become home to $6.7 trillion of combined consumer and business spending and 1.7 billion people by 2030. Launched in March 2018, the AfCFTA is a groundbreaking achievement in African trade and regional integration, which will open up trade across the continent, as well as accelerate industrialization, economic diversification, industrialization, and development. With a continental approach, both African and American corporations and citizens will benefit from reduced cost of doing business, economies of scale, lower tariffs, and increased commercial transaction. For this to happen, the AfCFTA still needs to be implemented. The challenge to scale up and speed up successful implementation of the AfCFTA lies with the governments. As I discussed in my book, "Innovating Development Strategies in Africa: The Role of International, Regional, and National Actors," leaders should favor innovations that facilitate effective delivery and socioeconomic transformations in the long run.

China’s accession to the World Trade Organization certainly harmed U.S. manufacturing, but a “before” and “after” statistic about jobs does not establish that it was China’s accession that was principally responsible for job losses. It is strange that Trump's team employed such a crude statistic, especially when several prominent studies that isolate the "China factor" and its effect on U.S. jobs are readily available and offer easily citable statistics.

China's current account surplus is down to 1 percent of GDP, so China is not the problem for global imbalances. Furthermore, tariffs are not an effective tool to address the U.S. trade deficit because they reduce both imports and exports. When the United States limited imports in the 1930s and the 1970s, in both cases the U.S. trade deficit increased because exports fell more than imports.

President Trump continues to praise Xi and attack China in the same breath, but his efforts are unlikely to dramatically restore U.S. manufacturing employment, especially as manufacturers consider nearby alternatives to China like Cambodia and Vietnam. Jobs, however, may not be the point. Indeed, as some in the administration have suggested, the trade war with China may be motivated by a desire to force supply chains out of China to other countries as a way of reducing U.S. asymmetric dependence on China’s nodal role in electronics and other supply chains.

In measuring the effectiveness of his China trade policy based on the U.S.-China trade balance, President Trump is setting himself up for failure. Under President Trump, the United States is on track to set a new record this year for the largest trade deficit in the history of U.S.-China relations.

This description of the ICC's structure and jurisdiction is deliberately misleading. Both ICC judges and prosecutors are elected and subject to removal by ICC member states. The ICC's jurisdiction is limited to four categories of offenses—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression—and can only reach crimes committed on the territory or by nationals of ICC member states absent a U.N. Security Council referral. Even then, a case is inadmissible where national authorities who are able and willing to carry out fair proceedings are addressing the matter.

This does not mean, however, that the ICC poses no legal risk to the United States. ICC judges are currently weighing whether to authorize an investigation into the conflict in Afghanistan, which joined the ICC in 2003. If approved, this investigation may even extend to the U.S. rendition, detention, and interrogation of terrorism suspects within ICC member states such as Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.

Trump’s decision to attack the ICC instead of frankly addressing these concerns likely reflects the influence of his National Security Advisor John Bolton, who is a noted ICC skeptic and made similar remarks in a speech earlier this month. Such rhetoric aligns with Trump’s broader theme of sovereignty and may speak to his domestic political base, but is unlikely to persuade U.N. member states who have acceded to the ICC’s jurisdiction and are more familiar with its operations.

Only a couple of hours after president Trump's speech, French President Emmanuel Macron took the stage, offered a strong rebuttal to Trumpism, and called for a renewed multilateralism. Among the numerous striking points of disagreement between the two leaders: the U.N. Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court (as well as UNESCO and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, both mentioned by the French), which the two leaders view through completely different lenses. These two narratives are starting to draw the contours of two camps within the West.

This reaffirms National Security Advisor John Bolton's extremist view that the International Criminal Court is illegitimate. The ICC is a fact of international law and practice, and has protections for national sovereignty and due process. The United States has no reason to fear it if it carries out fair investigations of allegations of war crimes committed by its citizens. Bolton's threat to sanction and prosecute ICC judges, staff, and anyone cooperating with them to investigate U.S. citizens is beyond the pale.

This includes Saudi Arabia, which is otherwise singled out for high praise elsewhere in the speech.

President Trump has made similar statements via his Twitter account, but seeing a threat like this in front of the U.N. General Assembly is shocking. President Trump's policy to severely curtail oil exports from Iran is an important driver of today's high oil prices. OPEC (apart from Iran) and Russia have already increased production in response, and there are limits to how much more they could do. I don't know whether this bluster is for a U.S. domestic audience, showing that President Trump cares about rising gasoline prices, or whether the president believes he can force OPEC to produce more. But it demonstrates a misunderstanding of oil market conditions.

It is not clear which OPEC nations the president has in mind when he speaks of the United States defending them "for nothing." I can only think of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE that could remotely fit this description. But, I bet that most people in these countries would beg to differ from the president regarding "taking advantage” of the United States. Iraq is still recovering from the devastation caused by the U.S. invasion in 2003, and the latter two spend large sums every year on purchasing military hardware from the United States.

Blaming OPEC for rising prices is probably intended to deflect criticism from President Trump’s Iran sanctions, which are expected to take 1 to 2 million barrels per day of Iranian oil out of a very tight market. As a cartel with voluntary membership, OPEC has little power over its members’ production. In any case, OPEC countries, including Saudi Arabia, are producing close to their production capacities and cannot do much more to reduce prices.

While touting Saudi Arabia’s “bold reforms,” the president savaged OPEC for ripping off the world with high oil prices. Of course, Saudi Arabia is the leader of OPEC. The contradiction is apparently lost in the White House. While decrying the “horrible” oil prices the Saudis have helped set, President Trump implied they don’t spend enough on defense. But Saudi Arabia is the third-largest military spender in the world and is pouring billions of dollars into the quagmire in Yemen.

The Middle East often seems like the only place where the Trump administration has clung to old partnerships rather than strained them. Elsewhere in this speech, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE are praised, and the administration has indeed conistently sided with them in regional affairs. To these partners, this seems like a welcome correction from the Obama years; rather than what they saw as an aloof Obama—above the fray of their quarrels (with Iran in particular)—they got a partisan Trump, who’s on their side.

Yet in this passage, "America First" is back. Here is the classic Trump admonition for allies (and non-allies) in OPEC

In energy, and in the politically-explosive issue of gas prices in the United States, Trump's two inclinations in the Middle East come to a head.

There is barely any positive mention of European allies—apart from Poland, which gets special treatment. But Germany has to face yet again a new sharp criticism, echoing President Trump's criticism of Nord Stream 2 at the NATO summit. Also absent from the speech is any discussion of the challenges of climate change, however central they appear in other countries' UNGA speeches.

This is an exaggeration—only 20 percent of Germany's energy mix comes from gas, most of which is from Russia—but President Trump is nonetheless right to criticize Germany for an energy policy that sacrifices the security and interests of fellow NATO and EU members to its east in exchange for cheaper energy prices.

This and the unqualified invocation of the Monroe Doctrine (below) suggest an openness to a “spheres of influence” model of world order. Since 1945, the United States has generally supported the independence of our friends and allies from expansionist foreign powers around the world, rejecting such an order on the basis that it will be unstable and lead to conflict.

In 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry told Latin American diplomats that "the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over." In contrast, Trump administration officials, like former National Security Council Senior Director Craig Deare and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, had endorsed it, especially within the context of great power competition with China. Trump’s decision to bring up the Monroe Doctrine before the General Assembly escalated that language and was a mistake—it legitimizes the idea that great powers like China and Russia might claim "spheres of influence," all while failing to charm Latin Americans, deter foreign powers, or bolster American values. Americans have legitimate reasons to be wary of Chinese influence in Latin America, but bringing those concerns up in such a clumsy fashion at the U.N. General Assembly is counterproductive.

Such assertions are akin to seeking to wish away China's expanding influence in Latin America by arguing that Chinese activism is not allowed under the Monroe Doctrine. The contrast between President Trump's public shaming and President Xi's proffers of "assistance" will come into sharper contrast when Xi visits the region around the time of the G-20 in Argentina in late November.

Trump's invocation of the Monroe Doctrine will be received in the Latin America region as a naked reassertion of U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere at a time when Latin America has become deeply intertwined in the global economic system. A more explicit warning to China, Russia, and Iran to disengage from both licit and illicit activities in Venezuela, for example, (and the United States for that matter) would have been better.

The Trump administration has adopted inhumane immigration policies. The barbaric policy of separating migrant children from their parents is not only destructive, but counterproductive. The separation trauma severely undermines the children’s healthy development and can produce long-term emotional and cognitive damage, including adult attachment disorders, depression, and even proclivity to criminality. Escaping from chronic crime-related trauma is what motivates many Central American families to seek asylum in the United States, not something the U.S. government should compound.

In his speech, President Trump again vilified illegal immigration by linking it to criminality and negative economic effects. But there is no evidence that undocumented residents are the dominant factor behind violent crimes in the United States. The vast majority of violent crimes, including murders, are committed by native-born Americans. Multiple criminological studies show that foreign-born individuals commit much lower levels of crime than do the native-born.

The Global Compact on Migration is a non-binding political declaration—a statement of principles. The final draft text, which is expected to be adopted in December, "reaffirms the sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law." It would not take migration policy decisions out of the hands of U.S. officials.

This statement is absolutely true and it's nice to hear a U.S. president saying it, but it does contradict the president's earlier assertion that "the United States will not tell you how to live or work or worship."

President Trump says that the United States is the biggest donor of foreign aid. Although true in absolute terms, it is absolutely false in terms of our economy. In fact, we give only about 0.18 percent of our gross national income (GNI) in development assistance, which is 3 to 4 times less than some of our allies: 0.70 percent for the United Kingdom, 0.66 percent for Germany, 0.43 percent for France, 0.29 percent for Italy, and 0.26 percent for Canada. (See a map view here.) Trump also says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will conduct a review based on how much the governments of receiving countries respect us. Instead, review should be on: 1) our values (alleviating disasters, feeding the poor, restoring human rights), and 2) our national security interests, not whether a country gives us a pretty smile. Further, because much of our aid bolsters the residents of receiving countries, not their governments, cutting aid is often of no consequence to the governments.

Actually, the United States received more than 150 offers of unsolicited aid from countries after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It also received at least 30 offers of aid after the BP oil spill. In both cases, the U.S. government was slow to accept and process such offers. As a consequence, some of the in-kind donations were ultimately wasted and unusable.

But that belies the faulty logic of this statement. The United States does not give foreign assistance because it expects assistance in return. From the Marshall Plan to the current day, the United States has been the leader in providing overseas aid because it directly supports U.S. interests and security, and as importantly, because it reflects our highest values and principles as a nation. The quid pro quo implied here reveals how this president views foreign aid primarily through a transactional lens, rather than a robust pillar of U.S. foreign policy alongside diplomacy and defense.

Transactional aid is President Trump’s doctrine when it comes to foreign assistance. He has been consistent in his skepticism about the effectiveness of aid. Given that skepticism, he is prone to see aid primarily as a bargaining chip to advance his own political interests or to get countries to do what he wants.

Yet the trouble that the administration has encountered in trying to develop a policy that codifies this sentiment reveals its arbitrariness, its inherent contradictions, and the dangers it poses. Defining “friend” is tricky and arbitrary. President Trump himself emphasizes the sovereignty of nations to act in their own interests; for any nation, those interests will align with the United States only part of the time. And withdrawing such aid offers the opportunity for China or others to step into the leadership vacuum.

It's more straightforward—and ultimately more useful—to stay focused on maximizing the effectiveness of U.S. aid and leverage the relationships that result from success.

Recall that President Trump has requested steep cuts to the State Department/USAID budget for the past two years; Congress has simply overruled him. Two things to note here: 1) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is heading up this review; Trump didn’t mention USAID head Mark Green, and 2) When Pompeo took over at the State Department, I wondered whether he would work to secure the budgetary resources of his new agency, even if solely for his own prestige. But the review and the clear expectation of cuts in the next paragraph means that Pompeo won State/USAID just a temporary reprieve from Office of Budget and Management Director Mick Mulvaney’s massive cuts, not a full pardon.

Recent history begs to differ, and suggests instead that resurgent nationalisms will yield greater disorder and violence.