On Trade

Last year, economic, legal, and geopolitical calamity lurked in the shadows of almost every trade-policy promise made by presidential candidate Donald Trump. Eight months into the Trump presidency, those problems have—thankfully—not yet materialized. Instead, Trump trade policy has been a mixture of bluster, disappointment, relief, and uncertainty. This last category warrants close attention: In the coming months, Trump’s dangerous trade ambitions could remain in check, thus keeping a global trade system alive. Or politics, legal ambiguity, and Trump’s own emotional impulses could deal that system a fatal blow.

There is no doubt that President Trump has already done serious damage to the United States’ longstanding position as a world leader on trade policy, the American political consensus in favor of trade liberalization, and Republican views of trade and globalization. His constant vituperation has offended U.S. allies and trading partners, causing them to turn to Europe, Asia, or Latin America in search of alternatives to the once-welcoming and predictable U.S. market. He has accelerated (not started) the American retreat from the World Trade Organization, further wounding a multilateral trading system that was a U.S. invention—an invention that has, contrary to popular belief, served U.S. economic and foreign-policy interests well since the 1940s.

Trump’s day-one withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership—the flawed-yet-deserving Asia-Pacific trade agreement started by President Bush and ultimately signed by President Obama—has left vacuums in both Asia-Pacific trade and international economic law. TPP was far from perfect, but it was widely supported by U.S. trade and foreign-policy experts because of its economic and geopolitical benefits. The deal contained important new rules for 21st-century issues such as e-commerce, GMOs, and state-owned enterprises. Moreover, it would have provided small but significant benefits for U.S. workers and the economy, while cementing the United States’s influence in a region increasingly covered by China’s shadow. Now, TPP parties are working to complete a “TPP-11” deal that excludes the United States, while China is negotiating its own version of the TPP—the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. And many of TPP’s novel provisions are being relitigated in contentious NAFTA renegotiations with Canada and Mexico (both TPP parties).

All of this is disappointing, but it’s probably survivable and hardly the fire and brimstone of the Trump campaign trail (hence, the relief). Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs and other forms of dangerous unilateral protectionism, but economic, legal, and political realities have intervened. For example, when Trump promised new “national security” tariffs on steel and aluminum under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the opposition from Congress, business groups, strategic allies, NGOs, and even members of Trump’s administration was unrelenting. As a result, planned tariffs have quietly been shelved (for now). Other presidential threats have similarly come and gone without major action, giving market participants some heartburn but little long-term pain. Only in the opaque area of trade remedies—antidumping, countervailing duty, and safeguard measures—has there been a marked uptick in U.S. protectionism. But this is the result of long and technical administrative proceedings initiated by U.S. industries or unions that formally petitioned the government under relevant domestic law—hardly the wave-of-the-hand actions that Trump promised.

Some measure of relief is warranted, but we’re not out of the woods just yet. Indeed, in the last eight months, Trump has publicly threatened to

• block steel and aluminum imports for national-security reasons or bring new cases against semiconductors and ships, under the aforementioned Section 232;
• withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement and the U.S.-Korea FTA;
• slap tariffs on Chinese imports under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 because of alleged Chinese intellectual-property-rights violations; and
• impose onerous new “Buy American” requirements on U.S. pipelines and government-funded infrastructure projects.

And those are just the public threats. Behind closed doors, Trump has reportedly considered enacting sweeping import restrictions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The president reportedly yelled, “I want tariffs. Bring me some tariffs!” when told by his “globalist” advisers that legal and economic realities prevent him from imposing broad-based protectionism on a whim.

None of the threats on Trump’s wish list is officially off the table, and any one of them would have serious economic consequences: Steel tariffs alone would put more than 1.3 million American jobs at risk; NAFTA withdrawal could destroy 250,000 more; and several nations have promised immediate retaliation against American goods, services, or investment in response to Trumpian protectionism. Trump’s actions would also raise major legal issues. For example, the World Trade Organization’s broad, subjective “national security” exception wasn’t intended to be used as a get-out-of-jail free-card for steel tariffs, and a dispute over a member’s right to invoke it could imperil the multilateral trading system. Meanwhile, Trump’s withdrawal from a free-trade agreement without congressional consent would raise major constitutional questions as to whether the president had that authority and what would happen to the myriad U.S. tariffs and other commitments that were embedded in legislation and passed into law. Lawsuits over these and other issues surrounding presidential trade powers would throw billions of dollars of cross-border trade and investments into legal limbo.

The president’s unpredictability, political weakness, and clear affinity for protectionism, combined with ample (though ambiguous) legal authority to act unilaterally, mean that any one of his trade threats could still materialize in the coming months. The White House’s internationalists may have won the early battles, but the war will rage for as long as Trump is president. Continued vigilance and advocacy for the benefits of freer trade remain critical.

And congressional legislation clarifying and limiting the president’s trade powers might not be a bad idea either…just in case.

Click here to read what Scott Lincicome wrote about Candidate Trump and trade last year.

Scott Lincicome is an international trade attorney, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and visiting lecturer at Duke University Law School. The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

On Taxes

At some point in his first term, President Donald Trump will likely sign legislation that cuts taxes by some amount for somebody. This modest prediction is based less on reading the political tea leaves than understanding conservative politics. If any issue made the modern Republican Party, it was tax cuts. Not surprising, then, that candidate Trump promised big cuts for individuals and businesses. And with the GOP now holding the White House and Congress, failure to deliver is almost unimaginable.

Of course it’s almost equally unimaginable that the Trump tax cuts will at all resemble the ambitious plans devised by Trump advisers during the campaign. There were two of those blueprints. The first, rolled out September 2015, proposed lowering the top personal rate to 25 percent from the current 39.6 percent, and cutting the corporate rate to 15 percent from the current 35 percent. Along with other changes, including eliminating the alternative minimum tax and estate tax, this initial plan might have lowered annual government revenue by a whopping $1 trillion a year or more (even if one assumes much faster economic growth).

This was, in other words, more a fantasy proposal cooked up by Reagan-era supply-siders than a serious effort to reform the tax code without worsening our historically high federal debt. Indeed, Trump’s sole purpose in signing on to the plan may have been to win over that very same group, still influential among base voters. Trump himself talked little about the plan while on the hustings, especially compared with immigration, trade, and The Wall.

The Trump campaign’s second bite at the apple a year later was a scaled-back plan, but still a colossal one. Instead of losing a trillion bucks a year, maybe the government would be out just a half trillion or so. Again, since the plan was unaccompanied by spending cuts elsewhere in the budget, it was more a set of glorified campaign talking points than a serious proposal. And like the first, Trump didn’t talk much about it.

So after Trump’s shock election, there really was no realistic Trump tax plan. No worries, however, since there was a House Republican tax plan all ready to go, with an enthusiastic House Speaker Paul Ryan ready to push it hard through the lower chamber. It was an ambitious proposal but one within reality, especially with a bit of fiscal tweaking. That plan called for, among other things, lowering the top personal rate to 33 percent and the corporate rate to 20 percent, immediately expensing new capital investment, and expanding the child tax credit.

And more so than the Trump campaign plans, the House plan intended to reform the tax code, not just cut taxes. For example, it eliminated all personal itemized deductions other than mortgage interest and charitable contributions. The House plan also made a stronger attempt to pay for the tax through a border-adjustment tax and limiting business-interest deductibility. All in all, the plan cost a couple of trillion dollars over a decade, not assuming economic feedback. On such a dynamic basis, according to Tax Foundation modeling, the House plan would reduce 10-year revenues by just under $200 billion.

So if Republicans really wanted to make their plan revenue neutral, it was certainly doable through relatively minor changes, such as less dramatic corporate or personal rate cuts. Yet the plan would still be a massive improvement over the status quo, both in terms of encouraging more domestic investment and providing middle-class tax relief.

With a detailed plan at the ready and Republicans running Washington, it is easy to understand why many in the GOP thought it reasonable to predict that Trump would be signing a mega tax bill by August of this year, just as Ronald Reagan did in the first year of his first term. Reagan did it from his ranch in Santa Barbara, California. Maybe Trump would repeat the feat from his Trump Tower penthouse in Manhattan.

But that did not happen. Then again, very little of Trump’s ambitious domestic agenda has happened as planned. Repeal and replace was promised by Easter, leaving plenty of time to hash out the fine details of tax reform and move legislation through the House and Senate. But the GOP health reform was a long slog consuming valuable time, attention, and political capital. Also deserving blame was Trump’s inability to focus on pushing policy priorities rather than pounding political opponents on Twitter. As of now, it seems highly unlikely that significant tax reform will occur in 2017. And 2018 looks challenging as well.

Yes, Trump has provided more distraction than leadership on this issue. And trying to pass major legislation in a midterm year only adds to the political difficulties. But the biggest problem is that there is no tax-reform plan for Republicans to push.

What happened to the ready-to-serve House plan? It suffered from not being a fantasy. It acknowledged both political and policy constraints, something the populist president almost never does. For instance: the House plan tried to pay for the tax cuts—a political necessity to placate debt-hawk Republicans. That requires making somebody somewhere unhappy. Ryan knew that without such an effort, it would be extraordinarily difficult to reduce the corporate tax rate to anywhere close to 20 percent. But while exporters supported the border tax, importers hated it, complaining that it would raise costs. Nor was the Trump White House happy about axing business-interest deductibility.

Still, as problematic as those pay-fors were, the alternatives—limiting tax breaks for mortgages, 401(k)s, and state and local taxes—are equally if not more so. The state and local tax deduction is a case in point. Pushed hard by Republican leaders as the primary revenue generator to replace border adjustment, it seems unlikely to survive criticism from blue-state Republicans. Eventual legislation is likely to be a far smaller and less comprehensive bill than first envisioned—more cut than reform—with some temporary parts designed to satisfy congressional budget rules. Indeed, Senate budget writers cleared room for just a $1.5 trillion tax cut, and even that might be overly ambitious. Expect Trump and his people to call whatever passes a “down payment” on true tax reform. Pro-growth conservatives should call it a missed opportunity.

Click here to read what James Pethokoukis  wrote about Candidate Trump and taxes last year.

James Pethokoukis is the DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also an official CNBC contributor.

‘The Wall’

“We’re going to build a wall. That wall will go up so fast, your head will spin.” Donald Trump made this promise on August 23, 2016, repeated it throughout his presidential campaign, and has reiterated it in tweets and at press conferences and rallies ever since. But the only spinning going on lately has been the president’s own efforts to assure his base that he will eventually build a wall, or a fence, or some barrier along the U.S. border with Mexico, except maybe for those areas that don’t need one or already have one. Oh, and someone will pay for it—preferably Mexico, as he promised—but if not, Congress, unless Democrats or even Republicans refuse to go along. A year after winning the presidency, Trump’s most ubiquitous pledge, The Great Wall separating the U.S. from Mexico, remains largely a figment of his imagination and evidence of his supporters’ gullibility.

No issue defined Trump’s campaign more viscerally than immigration, and on none was his position less ambiguous. Trump’s presidential record on immigration enforcement and policy, however, is decidedly more mixed. He continues to promise that construction of the wall is going to start soon: “Way ahead of schedule. Way ahead of schedule. Way, way, way ahead of schedule,” he said in February. But the cost, with estimates as high as $70 billion, and the sheer impracticality of erecting a solid barrier along 1,900 miles make little sense in light of recent trends in illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is at historically low levels today (roughly the same, in absolute numbers, as it was in the early 1970s) and has been falling more or less consistently since the peak in 2000, mostly because fewer people are crossing the border from Mexico. Apprehensions of Mexicans are at a 50-year low, as are all apprehensions along the southern border. Year-to-date in 2017, apprehensions at the Mexican border have dropped 24 percent compared with those in 2016, when a slight uptick occurred as more people tried to cross in advance of a feared Trump victory and border crackdown. The population of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. is down as well and now stands at roughly 11 million, from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007; and two-thirds of these unauthorized immigrants have lived here a decade or longer. More Mexicans—whom Trump described as “bringing drugs. . . crime. They’re rapists”—are now leaving the U.S. than arriving. In 2013, for the first time since the 1960s, Mexico fell as the top source of immigrants to the U.S., behind both China and India.

Trump’s pledge to build a wall, of course, wasn’t his only promise on immigration, but he hasn’t lived up to his own hype in other areas either, which is a good thing. He said he’d end on day one the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program that provided temporary protection from removal for young people who arrived here illegally before age 16. Instead, Trump waited until September 5 to send his beleaguered Attorney General Jeff Sessions out to announce that DACA would end in six months unless Congress acted. Trump then almost immediately backtracked in a series of tweets and offhand statements. Polls show that large majorities of Americans, including some two-thirds of Trump voters, have no interest in deporting so-called Dreamers, half of whom came before they were seven years old and 90 percent of whom are employed and paying taxes. Trump’s own misgivings and the backlash over the policy’s announcement led him into a tentative deal with Democratic leaders Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer in September to support legislation granting legal status for Dreamers who complete school, get jobs, or join the military.  Trump’s most nativist supporters have already dubbed him “Amnesty Don” for even suggesting that Dreamers should be allowed to remain and gain temporary legal status, much less earn a path toward citizenship. But whether such legislation will make it through Congress is still uncertain. Similar bills have repeatedly passed one chamber and died in the other over the past 10 years, but the potential threat that the administration might begin deporting many of the 800,000 young adults who signed up for DACA should concentrate the minds of the Republican leadership to allow legislation to move forward. One of the complications in the House is the “Hastert Rule,” named after former Speaker Dennis Hastert, an informal agreement that binds the speaker from bringing a bill to the floor unless a majority of the majority party supports it.

To be sure, Trump’s rhetoric and his appointment of hard-line immigration restrictionists to posts in his administration have led to fear among immigrants, as have the administration’s erratic, irrational enforcement policies. Previous administrations, including Barack Obama’s, gave priority to detaining and deporting aliens convicted of serious crimes, but in one of his first executive orders and Department of Homeland Security memoranda, Trump broadened the priorities for detention and removal to include anyone even suspected of committing a crime, with or without charges or conviction. As a result, arrests for immigration offenses have increased under Trump and have swept up hundreds of individuals who pose no threat to safety or security, some picked up outside their children’s schools or when seeking court orders against domestic abuse. Actual deportations, on the other hand, are down slightly in Trump’s first eight months compared with the same period in Obama’s last year. This is largely because the overloaded system isn’t equipped for mass deportation. Trump promised to rid the country of a greatly exaggerated 2 million criminal aliens and “a vast number of additional criminal illegal immigrants who have fled or evaded justice.” But his boasting that “their days on the run will soon be over” has always been aimed less at promoting sensible immigration policy than at stoking nativist anger in pursuit of his own brand of identity politics. Trump’s America will be a less welcoming place for immigrants—legal as well as illegal—if Trump gets his way on proposed legislation to reduce legal immigration by half over the next decade. But labor shortages and an aging population make it unlikely that Trump’s efforts will succeed. The simple fact is that we need more, not fewer, immigrants if the economy is to grow. Building walls and deporting workers is exactly the wrong way to go about needed immigration reform, whether Trump and his hard-core base can admit it or not.

Click here to read what Linda Chavez wrote about Candidate Trump and ‘The Wall’ last year.

Linda Chavez is the president of the Becoming American Institute and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

On Infrastructure

A massive infrastructure bill was supposed to be one of the early triumphs of President Trump’s administration. Instead, Trump’s inability to advance the ball on one of his signature issues has highlighted the lack of focus, inattention to detail, and difficulties working with Congress that are emblematic of his presidency to date.

The idea of rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, though overshadowed by daily controversies during the wild 2016 campaign, wove together several elements of the Trump phenomenon.

His experience in building projects such as luxury hotels, resorts, skyscrapers, and golf courses became central to his argument that he had the skills required to get things done in Washington. By touting the economic benefits of infrastructure during his campaign, Trump also signaled that he was an unorthodox Republican, breaking with decades of conservative critiques of Keynesian stimulus projects. Trump also spoke of infrastructure in nationalist terms, integrating it into riffs about how the United States was constantly losing to China. “They have trains that go 300 miles per hour,” he said during the campaign. “We have trains that go: Chug. Chug. Chug.”

When Trump pulled off his election-victory upset, Washington insiders quickly focused on infrastructure as one issue on which he could get a legislative win and box Democrats into a corner. After all, could Democrats really resist passing a major policy priority that had eluded them when one of their own was in the White House?

In his Inaugural Address, Trump threw a jab at Bush-era Republicanism, declaring that the U.S. “spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.” Going forward, he said, “America will start winning again, winning like never before.” He promised: “We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation.”

Now in the fall of the first year of his presidency, any effort to advance infrastructure legislation has been drowned out by daily controversies involving White House intrigue, the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election, and Trump’s raucous Twitter feed. Congress, meanwhile, spent much of the year focused on repealing and replacing Obamacare.

This isn’t to say that the Trump administration didn’t try, in fits and starts, to push infrastructure. In May, with the release of his first budget, Trump included $200 billion in funding for infrastructure as the first step in his $1 trillion infrastructure initiative. He also released a six-page fact sheet outlining his vision for infrastructure, which remains the most detailed resource on his infrastructure goals.

The document, broadly speaking, argues that current infrastructure money is spent inefficiently. It proposes greater selectivity in using federal dollars for infrastructure investments that are in the national interest and recommends giving state and local governments more leeway over their own projects. It also calls for more public-private partnerships.

Specifically, the proposal would create a nongovernment entity to manage the nation’s air-traffic-control system. It would also support private rest stops, give states the ability to work with private companies to manage their toll roads, and streamline the environmental-review process. The proposal received little attention, as it was rolled out during a week when Russia hearings took center stage in Congress and Trump was traveling in Europe and the Middle East.

Such inattention was supposed to end in early June, when White House officials announced “Infrastructure Week.” This was a carefully orchestrated campaign in which Trump was supposed to deliver speeches and lead staged events to highlight different aspects of his infrastructure initiative. But during this week, Washington was captivated by testimony of fired FBI Director James Comey, and Trump veered way off message in his speeches and on his favorite social-media platform.

He went on a Twitter tear. Trump attacked his own Justice Department for pursuing a “watered down” travel ban, took a shot at the mayor of London in the wake of a terrorist attack, unloaded on “fake news” outlets, and hit Comey as a liar. During a speech meant to make the case for both parties to get behind his infrastructure effort, Trump went off on a tangent, blasting Democrats as “obstructionists” on health care.

In truth, any hope of getting Democrats on board for the Trump infrastructure push had been fading even before this implosion. Liberals had already pressured lawmakers to pursue a policy of total resistance to Trump. But during Trump’s big policy push, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared overtly that Democrats had no appetite for his infrastructure initiative due to its reliance on privatization.

Before long, the phrase “Infrastructure Week” had become a punch line—an ironic metaphor for a presidency gone off the rails.

Trump has made little progress on infrastructure since then, beyond issuing an executive order in August aimed at making the permitting process for building roads, bridges, and pipelines more efficient. But again, this announcement was overshadowed, as it came during the same news conference in which he blamed “both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville and complained about the slippery slope of removing the Robert E. Lee statue.

On the other hand, by striking a deal with Democratic leaders on the debt ceiling and negotiating with them on immigration, Trump has revived talk about the possibility that he could be ready to compromise with them to get infrastructure legislation passed as well. It is important to note, however, that in both cases—DACA and the debt ceiling—there was a ticking-time-bomb element that forced action. No such urgency exists when it comes to infrastructure.

From the perspective of a limited-government conservative, Trump’s inability thus far to negotiate a trillion-dollar federal infrastructure package with Democrats is nothing to shed tears about. But if we’re looking at the issue through the broader lens of whether or not Trump has been able to deliver on his  ambitious campaign promises and make the transition from being a bombastic reality-television star to governing, it’s a case study in failure.

Click here to read what Philip Klein wrote about Candidate Trump and infrastructure last year.

Philip Klein is managing editor of the Washington Examiner.

On NATO

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was unsparing in his disparagement of U.S. alliances. In a word, allies were freeloaders—complacent in their reliance on the United States to provide them security, contributing nothing like their “fair share” of the cost of their defense, and lavishing the dividend on their domestic needs. Maybe that was acceptable when they were flat on their backs after a war that left the United States on top, but now that they are prospering and the United States has pressing needs of its own, it’s time for the allies to pay up. He also mused about NATO being “obsolete.”

This was alarming (to put it mildly) to most American foreign-policy specialists—to say nothing of the reaction of U.S. allies. The postwar alliance structure in Europe has been the backbone of security on a continent where the United States fought two wars. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization underpinned the postwar revival of Western Europe and subsequently, after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the demise of the Soviet Union, of Central and Eastern Europe. The relevance of the alliance has gained renewed salience with Russia’s aggression against its neighbors, first in Georgia in 2008, then in Ukraine in 2014.

At the heart of the alliance is Article 5 of the Washington Treaty of 1949—the commitment of each member to regard an armed attack on any as an attack on all. In practical terms, the meaning of Article 5 is that American power provides a security guarantee for Europe, a commitment upheld and explicitly reiterated by U.S. presidents since Harry S. Truman. The treaty is binding, yet equally in practical terms, it is the

American president whose commander-in-chief powers will dictate the response of the U.S. military to any attack—and by extension, the sincerity of his commitment determines the deterrent value of Article 5 against potential aggressors. Would a President Trump abrogate the U.S. commitment? Or hold it hostage to defense-spending increases by allies—perhaps even by demanding the payment of a much larger past-due bill, as the candidate suggested on at least one occasion?

In Asia, the biggest long-term challenge is the rise of China; the U.S. alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines (as well as the more complicated commitment enshrined in the Taiwan Relations Act) represent the underpinning of Pacific security. Would this, too, be up for grabs under Trump? Was “America First” shorthand for an isolationist retooling of U.S. relations with the rest of the world? The short answer to these questions turns out to be no. Trump has no apparent intention to do away with U.S. alliance relationships, however cumbersome and expensive he perceives them to be, and he evinces no intention to try to replace the postwar security architecture with something new and different, whatever that might be. So what happened? Were his many critics sounding the alarm therefore wrong about his intentions? Did he change his mind? Is the question of alliances now settled? Since Trump has taken office, alliance policy seems to have operated on two tracks within the U.S. government. The first track is the president’s own. He has continued to warn allies that they need to pay up—though his demands have moderated considerably, coalescing around the 2 percent of GDP that allies have pledged to spend on defense (though very few do). And although he has reaffirmed the U.S. Article 5 commitment on some occasions, on others when it would have been appropriate for him to do so, he has declined, apparently intentionally. Still, he has never repudiated the commitment. There seem to be two possibilities here: either a deliberate exercise in ambiguity, or incompetence and confusion of the kind his critics have long diagnosed.

I think the evidence points distinctly toward the former. That evidence is the second track of policy within the government. Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis—as well as officials junior to them—have been on something close to a nonstop reassurance tour of U.S. allies and partners since the beginning of the administration. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has joined the chorus since he stepped in to replace the ousted Michael Flynn. Their message has been unambiguous: The United States stands by its security and alliance commitments, and allies must contribute more to collective defense. True, some allies continue to harbor doubts centered on the persona of Trump. Yet—therefore?—many are moving to spend more on defense.

Now, the simple fact is that Trump could order his Cabinet members and senior staff to desist from repeating the first half of their message—the reassurance. Trump might have had some resignations to cope with, but it is well within his power to issue such an edict, and he hasn’t done so. The most likely reason he hasn’t is that he has concluded that too much is riding on these alliances. To continue in this speculative vein, what Trump knew to be true about U.S. allies during the campaign season was that they weren’t contributing enough; that’s a message that Washington has been sending with little effect for decades. What he didn’t know on the campaign trail and has since determined is how central these alliances are to U.S. national security. U.S. alliances aren’t quite so fragile as some feared. The case for them, competently made by the likes of Mattis, must be compelling, including to the skeptic in chief.

It’s here that we may be getting a little lesson in the cunning of history. From his skeptical premise, Trump sparked a very broad debate over alliances. Senior officials of his administration have probably devoted more time and energy to making the public case for NATO and our Pacific alliances during his first 10 months in office than their predecessors did in the previous 10 years. The latter had taken the utility of alliances to U.S. national security as a given.

All this attention has had an effect on public opinion. But the effect has not been, as many feared, a groundswell of support for isolationist or anti-alliance sentiment. Just the opposite. For the past three years, the Chicago Council Survey has asked, “How effective do you think [maintaining effective alliances is] to achieving the foreign-policy goals of the United States?” In 2015, 32 percent of all respondents responded “very effective.” In 2016, the figure was 40 percent. In 2017? Forty-nine percent. Specifically on NATO, 69 percent say the alliance is “essential” to U.S. security, a slight increase from 65 percent in 2016 and well above the 57 percent who said the same when the Chicago Council first asked the question in 2002.

For the first time in the history of the survey, a majority of Americans, 52 percent, say they would support “the use of U.S. troops…if Russia invades a NATO ally like Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia.” The Trump administration has had little to say about the Russian threat to the Baltics but a great deal to say about the danger of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile program. A year ago, 47 percent said they would favor “the use of U.S. troops…if North Korea invaded South Korea.” That was the view of 26 percent of Americans in 1990. Today, it’s what 62 percent think.

Finally, on the question of allies paying up, the survey asked which comes closer to the respondent’s views: “The United States should encourage greater allied defense spending through persuasion and diplomatic means” or “The United States should withhold its commitment to defend NATO members” until they actually spend more. Overall, 59 percent said persuasion and diplomacy; 38 percent (including 51 percent of Republicans) would put Article 5 at risk. Maybe I’m hearing things, but that sounds to me more like a warning to our allies to take seriously American insistence that they spend more on defense starting now than it does an abrogation of the commitments at the center of U.S. national-security strategy for 70 years.

Click here to read what Tod Lindberg wrote about Candidate Trump and NATO last year.

Tod Lindberg is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a member of the Chicago Council Survey’s foreign policy advisory board. 

On Asia

Despite continued Russian threats in Eastern Europe and the lurking danger of an Iranian race to a nuclear bomb, it is Asia that has vaulted to the top of the national-security agenda. Barack Obama had warned Donald Trump that North Korea would be the major national-security threat he would face, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has proved him right. Kim is on the threshold of fielding a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that can reach U.S. territory in the Pacific and even the American homeland. He is within striking distance of achieving his family’s long-held dream of possessing the ultimate weapon. Not since 1994, when Bill Clinton initially ordered and then called back an air strike on Pyongyang’s nascent nuclear facilities, has the region seemed so close to war.

Beyond the Korean peninsula, Asia has arguably been Trump’s central foreign preoccupation since his entry into politics. He talked during his campaign about a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods. And despite his noninterventionist affect, he began his transition phase by getting tough on China for its increasingly assertive actions during the Obama years, including the successful building and militarization of islands in contested waters in the South China Sea.

Then Trump retreated from his tough stance toward Beijing, initiating a period of seesawing between cooperation and confrontation and mixing together trade and economic concerns with security and diplomatic issues. His explicit linkage of the two, carefully separated by previous presidents, has been particularly unnerving to Beijing. China’s regime has warned of the risks of a larger trade war if Trump continues to threaten economic retaliation for disagreement on security issues. Of equal concern to Beijing has been his recent willingness to permit more frequent freedom-of-navigation operations by the U.S. Navy in the disputed South China Sea waters off the Spratly and Paracel Islands.

Trump’s initial hard line, including an unprecedented transition-period phone call to Taiwan’s president, put Beijing on its back foot. But his subsequent inconstancy has led to a reassertion of Chinese activism on economic and diplomatic issues. His withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and general anti-free-trade stance have allowed Chinese President Xi Jinping to claim the mantle of global economic leadership—promoting free-trade alternatives and grandiose policies such as the “Belt and Road Initiative,” in which Xi has promised more than $1 trillion of infrastructure investment to link the world in a trading network centered in China.

In contrast, Trump’s relations with America’s Asian allies, particularly Japan and South Korea, have been surprisingly smooth. Again backing down from campaign rhetoric, Trump early on reaffirmed the importance of both alliances, and buried talk of making the two pay more for hosting U.S. forces on their territory. His bond with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been particularly close, and his conversations with South Korea’s new left-leaning president, Moon Jae In, have gone better than some expected. Far from scaling back the alliances, Trump and his top officials, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis, have put them at the center of American strategy in the Pacific, especially with respect to North Korea.

It is North Korea, however, that remains the first great test of the Trump administration. Trump clearly inherited a failed policy, stretching over past Democratic and Republican administrations alike, and was doubly cursed in coming to office on the eve of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear and ICBM breakout.

Yet despite Trump’s heated rhetoric, he and his team have actually moved cautiously on North Korea. Like its predecessors, the administration has combined shows of force, such as flying B-1 bombers over the peninsula, with appeals to the United Nations for further sanctions on Pyongyang. Two new rounds of sanctions, in July and September, may indeed have been harder than those previously levied, but, just as in the past, the administration had to settle for less than it wanted. More worrying, Trump appears to be adopting the long-held goal of presidents past: North Korean denuclearization. This is a strategic mistake that threatens to lock him into an unending series of negotiations that have served over the past quarter-century to buy time for Pyongyang to develop its nuclear and missile capabilities. I believe it would be a far more realistic move for Trump to drop the chimera of denuclearization and instead tacitly acknowledge that North Korea is a nuclear-weapons-capable state. This would free up the administration to focus on the far more important job of deterring and containing a nuclear North Korea. Since Trump is almost certainly sure to avoid a preventive war to remove Kim’s nuclear weapons, given the associated military and political risks, he will be forced in the end to accept them. That then mandates a credible and comprehensive policy to restrict North Korea’s actions abroad while making clear that any nuclear use will result in a devastating counterstrike. Washington has been deterring North Korea ever since the end of the Korean War. This new approach explicitly makes deterrence the center of U.S. policy, dropping the unobtainable goal of denuclearization or the imprudent goal of normalizing relations with North Korea. To be successful, Trump will need to get the support of both Seoul and Tokyo, which is a tall order. The alternative, however, is another round of Kabuki negotiations and the diversion of U.S. attention from the far more necessary task of ensuring that Kim Jong Un is kept in his nuclear box.

Click here to read what Michael Auslin wrote about Candidate Trump and Asia last year.

Michael Auslin is the Williams-Griffis Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The End of the Asian Century (Yale).

On Israel

As a candidate, Donald Trump’s positions on Israel were a blend of incoherence and inconsistency. He was an isolationist, except he was also Israel’s biggest supporter; he would enforce the Iran deal, except he wanted to rip it up on day one; he was the most pro- Israel candidate on the stage, except that he wanted to be “the neutral guy”; he wouldn’t commit to a policy on Jerusalem, except he declared his plan to immediately move the American Embassy to Israel’s eternal and undivided capital.

Words—especially a president’s—matter, but until Trump took office, it was impossible to predict how his administration would treat the Jewish state. Some Israel advocates became convinced that Trump’s victory would lead to the fulfillment of their bucket list of Middle East dreams—in particular, resolution of the long-simmering issue involving the location of the U.S. Embassy in Israel. The Jerusalem Embassy Act, which became law in 1995, recognized that “each sovereign nation, under international law and custom, may designate its own capital” and that “since 1950, the city of Jerusalem has been the capital of the State of Israel.” It ordered that “the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999.”

And yet, despite all that, the American Embassy has remained in Tel Aviv. (Presidents were given the power to push the date back on national-security grounds.) Much like then-candidates Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Trump pledged to move the embassy if elected president. In a March 2016 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s Policy Conference, Trump said unequivocally: “We will move the American Embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.”

The American Embassy belongs in Jerusalem, and Trump’s evolution on the issue was, for the most part, encouraging. (Early on in his candidacy, he was booed at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual meeting after refusing to take a position on Jerusalem’s status.) But for Israelis, who face myriad threats on a daily basis—both physically, from their many hostile neighbors, and economically, through an international boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign—the location of the embassy ranks low on the list of urgent political matters. Even the most ardent proponents of this policy shift acknowledge it has the potential to inflame tensions in the region. Like his predecessors, Trump signed the waiver and suspended the move.

Next on the bucket list: discarding Barack Obama’s cataclysmic Iran deal. When Trump was a candidate, his intentions for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) were anything but clear. He told AIPAC, “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” But he also said, “We will enforce it like you’ve never seen a contract enforced before folks, believe me.” It’s hard to know which part of his schizophrenic speech the audience—and the country—was supposed to believe. The schizophrenia has continued during his tenure, with Trump certifying the Iran deal twice before announcing in October his decision not to recertify a third time. Despite signaling his extreme displeasure with the deal, Trump has so far opted not to terminate it. But, by refusing to recertify, he has instead left to Congress the decision whether or not to reimpose sanctions.

Most important, perhaps, to pro-Israel forces was Trump’s choice of foreign-policy team. While Jared Kushner’s lack of political experience made him an odd choice for Middle East maven—Trump exclaimed at an inauguration event: “if [he] can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can”—there is no denying that Kushner is a Zionist. Along with Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s envoy to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, Kushner visited Israel this summer to determine whether restarting peace talks was a viable course of action. The duo have articulated their desire to refrain from repeating the mistakes of previous administrations: “It is no secret that our approach to these discussions departs from some of the usual orthodoxy. … Instead of working to impose a solution from the outside, we are giving the parties space to make their own decisions about the future,” Greenblatt explained. Maybe that’s why Benjamin Netanyahu seems so elated. Bibi’s friction with Obama was well documented, and the prime minister has expressed his jubilation at the changed nature of his relationship to Washington. During the United Nations General Assembly, he tweeted: “Under your leadership, @realDonaldTrump, the alliance between the United States and Israel has never been stronger.”

During the campaign, it was hard to imagine that might be the case. Trump’s repeated use of the phrase “America First,” a classic isolationist trope with anti-Semitic overtones, was deeply concerning to pro- Israel voters. He continually insisted that foreign governments were a drain on the American economy: “I want to help all of our allies, but we are losing billions and billions of dollars. We cannot be the policemen of the world. We cannot protect countries all over the world…where they’re not paying us what we need.” According to a 2016 report from the Congressional Research Service, “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.” The report calculates that the United States has, over the years, provided Israel with more than $127 billion in bilateral assistance. If words and campaign promises meant anything to Trump, the candidate who insisted that Israel could pay “big league” would have metamorphosed into the president who ensured that it did.

But Trump’s campaign promises seem to have had no bearing on his actions. In an appropriations bill, Congress pledged an extra $75 million in aid to Israel, on top of the annual $3.1 billion already promised for this year. As part of negotiations for the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, the Israeli government promised to return any funds that surpassed the pre-negotiated aid package. In what was doubtlessly a major disappointment to Trump’s America-first base, the State Department confirmed it will not be asking the Israelis to return the additional funds.

His behavior toward Israel during his eight months in office has confirmed what was evident throughout the campaign: Donald Trump’s words and actions have, at best, a haphazard relationship to each other. So far Israel has benefited. That may not always be the case.

Click here to read what Jordan Chandler Hirsch wrote about Candidate Trump and Israel last year.

Daniella J. Greenbaum is assistant editor of Commentary.