VISITING THE Oval Office on March 12th, Micheal Martin, Ireland’s prime minister, was not about to risk the kind of mauling inflicted there a couple of weeks earlier by Donald Trump and his vice-president, J. D. Vance, on Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. Rather than publicly challenging Mr Trump’s broadsides against the European Union or questioning his plan to seize Gaza and expel its Palestinian inhabitants, Mr Martin ducked or fawned. There couldn’t have been much more substance in their private meeting, which lasted just ten minutes.
It is hard to think of a time when there was a wider gulf between what Western officials really think about the American president and his policies and what they are willing to say. A growing list of diplomats have muzzled themselves to avoid enraging Mr Trump. David Lammy, now Britain’s foreign secretary, no doubt meant it when he previously called Mr Trump a “tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”; with Mr Trump’s election to a second term, Mr Lammy meekly told the BBC that his brickbats were “old news”. Kevin Rudd, Australia’s ambassador in Washington, saved his job by deleting old social-media posts calling Mr Trump the “most destructive president in history” and “a village idiot”.
This mix of self-censorship and flattery extends to stifled discussions about major policy issues, either due to foreign leaders holding their tongues or Mr Trump not listening. Visiting the White House on February 7th, Ishiba Shigeru, the prime minister of Japan, lauded Mr Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, but reportedly largely avoided discussing the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement, the Ukraine war or Mr Trump’s appalling proposal to take Gaza. When asked by a reporter at the White House on February 27th about Mr Trump’s persistent demands to annex Canada, Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, feebly replied, “I think you’re trying to find a divide that doesn’t exist.”
These kinds of muffled conversations are the consequence of a profoundly self-defeating approach by the Trump administration. It has walled itself off from an important resource for successful foreign policy: the opportunity to learn from advice from democratic allies.
In contrast, normal American administrations have often benefited from candid advice from their democratic allies. Consider the Korean war, where the American-led United Nations war effort was fortified by troops from such NATO allies as Belgium, Britain, Canada, France and the Netherlands. As Thomas Risse-Kappen, a political scientist, has shown, the Europeans and Canadians argued for limiting the conflict to the Korean peninsula and not escalating to fight China, pushing back against hawkish Republicans in Congress and the bellicose General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander of the UN forces. Canada unsuccessfully urged America not to cross the 38th parallel into North Korea, an escalatory step that helped to prod China into the conflict.
The allies repeatedly urged the Americans to avoid using nuclear weapons in the Korean war. In November 1950, when Harry Truman rashly told a press conference that his administration was giving “active consideration” to using atomic bombs, it caused shock across Europe and beyond. Australia’s foreign minister, Sir Percy Spender, cautioned that such a weapon should be used “only after fullest consultation”. Clement Attlee, Britain’s prime minister, immediately asked to meet Truman, racing to the White House in December 1950. According to British documents, Attlee got a verbal assurance that America would not consider using “the atomic weapon” without consulting Britain and Canada. (In the secret joint communiqué summarising their talks, Truman was less forthcoming, saying that he hoped that the bomb would never become necessary and that he would keep Attlee “at all times informed of developments” that might change that.)
On that same trip, Attlee warned Truman about the dangers of conflict with China. Unlike America, Britain had quickly given diplomatic recognition to the newly established People’s Republic of China in January 1950. As the historian William Stueck writes, the British prime minister “exposed Truman to fresh thinking”. Attlee argued that rather than understanding China as a subservient Soviet satellite, they should try to divide the two giant communist powers—a premonition of Richard Nixon’s historic opening to China in 1971-72.
During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 Britain stoutly supported America while secretly offering useful counsel for finding a diplomatic solution. In the panicky early days of the crisis, John F. Kennedy did not reach out to American allies, although he did factor in their anticipated views. During the second week of the crisis, though, Kennedy spoke numerous times by telephone to Harold Macmillan, Britain’s prime minister, and had several meetings and many phone calls with the British ambassador in Washington. Macmillan cautioned against invading Cuba, which might have triggered a nuclear conflagration. Although Kennedy had many hawkish advisers, the British leader warned him that the crisis might spiral out of control and encouraged negotiations with the Soviet Union—bolstering Kennedy’s resolve to reach a face-saving deal that avoided nuclear annihilation.
In Vietnam, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations would have done well to listen more to Charles de Gaulle, France’s president. Starting in the early 1960s, when there was scant American domestic opposition to the Vietnam war, de Gaulle—a career military man who had led the Free French during the second world war—became an early critic of the deepening American commitment. Having done his utmost to retake French Indochina after the second world war, the general had learned painful lessons from France’s futile, bloody colonial war there, as well as in Algeria. As David Halberstam wrote in “The Best and the Brightest”, de Gaulle “had been through the whole bitter thing before, had seen what it had done to France”. He expected that American troops in Vietnam would fare no better than the French soldiers before them; in an era of decolonisation, even a superpower could not defeat nationalism.
To be sure, America has never approached its allies entirely with sweet reason. The hegemon sometimes slapped wayward NATO allies into line, as when Truman insisted in 1948 that the Dutch give up on their vicious imperialist war in Indonesia, or when Dwight Eisenhower demanded that Britain and France withdraw their troops from Egypt in the Suez crisis in 1956. And of course, America has had plenty of squalid and uninstructive partners, such as Suharto’s dictatorship in Indonesia, the apartheid regime in South Africa, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and a long series of military dictators in Pakistan.
Nonetheless, forthright advice remains a particular benefit of alliances among democratic countries, which have shared norms of consultation and disputation. As the cold-war historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued, “influence, in democratic alliances, flows in multiple directions: it does not simply reflect who has predominant power and who does not.”
Yet Mr Trump, with his authoritarian instincts, is shattering that enduring historical advantage of American diplomacy, along with the Western alliance painstakingly constructed after the second world war. He heaps scorn on democratic politicians, preferring autocrats such as Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister. He disdains alliances as constraints on American power, and he resents foreigners who try to educate or dispute him, as Mr Zelensky dared to do. “I alone can fix it,” boasted Mr Trump in 2016. Under him, America is flying blindly into the storms. ■
Gary Bass is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at Princeton University.