Donald Trump’s foreign policy looks more normal than promised

THE salvoes of cruise missiles Bill Clinton launched in August 1998, against a suspected chemical-weapons factory in Sudan and an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, were considered by many American lawmakers to be ineffectual, or worse. Mr Clinton had admitted canoodling with Monica Lewinsky three days earlier—had he taken his cue from a recent Hollywood film, “Wag the Dog”, in which a fictional president invents a war to shift attention from a sex scandal? By contrast, the strikes Donald Trump launched on the Shayrat air base in Syria on April 6th, which were of similarly limited size and ambition—designed to make a point, not war—have been feted, on the left and right, as a well-judged action by a commander-in-chief who may be starting to find his feet. Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump’s defeated Democratic rival, said she would have acted similarly. “Donald Trump became president!” said Fareed Zakaria, a liberal pundit, on CNN.

The contrasting responses to these strikes, almost two decades apart, illustrate the extent to which foreign policy is often judged more on its domestic political context than its prospects of success. Mr Clinton’s point, that the Islamist rulers in Kabul and Khartoum should stop succouring Osama bin Laden, and Mr Trump’s, that Bashar al-Assad should stop gassing his fellow Syrians, both justified military action. Visibly upset by television images of dead Syrian children, Mr Trump explained his salvo in a tone of admirable moral outrage. “Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,” he said. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” Yet Mr Trump’s raid had two additional things going for it.

First, the modest military action Mr Clinton preferred doesn’t look so bad compared with what followed. After George W. Bush’s costly wars, then Barack Obama’s failure to enforce a “red-line” warning against Mr Assad’s chemical weapons use, many Americans want to bloody the Syrian dictator’s nose, but not war. Second, there is indeed evidence that Mr Trump is adopting a more conventional foreign policy. And almost everyone who applauded his missile strike is desperately keen, given the president’s erstwhile indifference to America’s international standing and inattention to geopolitics, to encourage that orthodox drift. For the same reasons, however, they are liable to be disappointed.

A call from HR

The growing orthodoxy can be mainly attributed to the influence of Mr Trump’s impressive national-security team. At the National Security Council, H.R. McMaster has been cleaning shop following the enforced exit of his short-lived predecessor, Michael Flynn. A respected Russia analyst, Fiona Hill, has been hired. Mr McMaster’s deputy, K.T. McFarland, a former Fox News talking-head with scant qualifications for such an important role, is being eased off to an untaxing ambassadorship. James Mattis, the defence secretary, and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, are supportive of these changes; like Mr McMaster, they are experienced managers, with orthodox views and to varying degrees project an aura of authority, despite the fact that almost none of their subordinates, the political appointees upon whom cabinet chiefs depend, have been appointed.

Their efforts have also been assisted by reality, which has tended to make Mr Trump’s erstwhile foreign-policy impulses appear untenable. Having argued that America’s interests were best served by leaving Mr Assad in place—and, for the same reason, having warned Barack Obama back in 2013 not to launch the missile strike that he now blames him for not launching—Mr Trump found the televised images of the Syrian dictator’s attack on Khan Sheikhoun too repugnant to ignore. Having refused to criticise Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, whose authoritarian leadership Mr Trump admires, he is now digesting reports that the Russians had warning of the attack, then bombed the hospital to which its victims had been sent in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

These pressures—able cabinet chiefs and a world less amenable to major foreign-policy revisions than Mr Trump supposed—will endure. So the drift to orthodoxy will probably continue, but with two equally important caveats. First, Mr Trump’s willingness to take and abruptly abandon radical positions, like the clubhouse commander-in-chief he resembles in all ways except one (he actually is the commander-in-chief), will still impinge on American foreign policy. An almost untrammelled preserve of the presidency, it tends to reflect the character of its incumbent more than any other branch of policymaking: under Mr Clinton, foreign policy was ingenious, but sometimes too tactical; under Mr Bush, it was well-meaning, but arrogant and rash; under Mr Obama, it was intellectually coherent, yet at times inflexible. Mr Trump’s foreign policy is also shaping up in his image. Well-judged though the missile strike was, it is astonishing that he could have conducted such a momentous policy about-turn in a matter of hours on the strength of a news report.

Mr Trump’s able lieutenants will not be able to compensate fully for such presidential foibles—as has been apparent in the confused messages coming out of the administration on what the strike augurs for Mr Trump’s Syria policy and use of force. Mr Tillerson, having at first cautioned against thinking it augured anything, declared on April 10th that Mr Trump’s America would henceforth be an avenging angel for human rights: “We rededicate ourselves to holding to account any and all who commit crimes against the innocents anywhere in the world.” Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, seconded that: “If you gas a baby, if you put a barrel bomb into innocent people, I think you will see a response from this president.” That did not sound very “America First”, the principle of narrow national interest Mr Trump preaches. Sure enough, Mr Spicer, who has had a middling week—to emphasise Mr Assad’s heinousness, he said that even Hitler didn’t “sink to using chemical weapons”, a bizarre claim—later issued a retraction. “Nothing has changed in our posture,” he clarified. “The president retains the option to act in Syria against the Assad regime whenever it is in the national interest”. Mr Trump, in short, reserves the right to do something, or nothing.

The second big caveat to Mr Trump’s acceptance of reality concerns two areas where his views are both fixed and outside the bipartisan consensus that has generally defined foreign policy since the second world war. One is immigration, especially of Muslims, which Mr Trump wants to curb. The other, probably more important, is America’s terms of trade, which Mr Trump believes are grossly unfair. Here, too, there has been tentative reassurance. His immigration curbs have been blocked by the courts. The meeting Mr Trump held with Xi Jinping on April 6th and 7th appears to have been civil and anodyne. But it would be unwise to bank on Mr Trump jettisoning the only political views he has consistently held over decades. In the end, the couple of areas where the president has firm views seem likely to matter more than the many areas where he has none.