Almost a year into the Trump presidency, this administration’s foreign policy could be best described as confused. Reports suggest that the president is in a constant state of displeasure with his subordinates in the foreign-service establishment, and the feeling is mutual. On issues ranging from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s conflicts in Yemen and Qatar to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula, the president and the administration he leads frequently contradict one another. Trump’s reckless antagonism toward strategic competitors like China strikes a perplexing contrast with his conciliatory appeals toward Russia. And no one in the White House seems to know what the trade deficit is.
This chaotic approach to the pursuit of American interests abroad can lead observers to overlook or even ignore altogether the strides this administration is making to correct the foreign-policy mistakes of past administrations. The Trump administration’s welcome shifts are most evident in a review of its approach to containing two of the three remaining members of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”—North Korea and Iran.
On Monday, the president announced that North Korea would again be formally designated a state sponsor of terrorism. President Bush removed Pyongyang from that list in 2008, not because North Korea ceased to sponsor terrorism abroad, but as a reward for verifiably halting some of its nuclear activities. This was an illusory foreign policy success for an administration that was bereft of them at the time, and it perverted the intention of the list of state terror sponsors.
Almost a decade later, the error of this decision is self-evident. North Korea’s suspension of nuclear activities was only a ploy to extract concessions from the West. It is today on the cusp of achieving a reliable and deliverable nuclear deterrent. More important, the DPRK never stopped sponsoring terrorism. In February, Pyongyang deployed VX nerve agent—a compound the United Nations classifies as a weapon of mass destruction—on foreign soil to assassinate Kim Jong-un’s half-brother. This was the first overt act of foreign terrorism linked to North Korea in decades, but its covert support for bad actors abroad has remained steadfast.
Pyongyang has exported conventional weapons and nuclear and missile technology to other U.S.-designated state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran and Syria, and terrorist groups including Hamas and Hezbollah. It helped to construct a nuclear reactor in Syria, which Israel thankfully destroyed just a few years before the region in which it was built fell into the hands of the Islamic State. Pyongyang was blamed for a number of high-profile cyber-attacks, as well as attacks that went overlooked. In 2009, for example, the DPRK was accused of being responsible for 35 separate attacks on South Korean and American infrastructure. Perhaps most important, as the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea’s Joshua Stanton complained, America’s standard for defining a state sponsor of terror were rendered “vague and inconsistent” by North Korea’s expulsion from that list. Pyongyang’s relisting has restored some consistency to its North Korea policy.
Since Trump has taken office, the administration has been busily restoring sanctions on the Iranian regime that were relieved as a result of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the Iran nuclear deal. President Trump’s decision to punt the Iran deal back to Congress is likely to preserve the deal while avoiding responsibility for that outcome. Yet his administration’s outward determination to abrogate the agreement has allowed it the freedom to call balls and strikes when it comes to the Islamic Republic, even if that angers America’s “partners” in Tehran.
Take, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department’s most recent sanctions on Iran. On Monday, Treasury singled out a network of Iranians believed to be responsible for counterfeiting hundreds of millions in Yemeni bank notes for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Qods Force. The scheme allegedly circumvented European sanctions and allowed the IRGC to support what Secretary Steven Mnuchin called “destabilizing activities” in Europe and the Gulf States. Trump declared the IRGC a terrorist network last month, providing the Treasury with all the authority it needed to take action against this plot.
This is not the first time Iran has been implicated in currency counterfeiting. In 2010, U.S. military officials seized at least $4.3 million in counterfeit American dollars in Iraq. Some of it, officials said, was crude and easily detected while many of these $100 notes were printed on special presses using sophisticated ink and paper—a revelation that indicated some level of complicity by or cooperation with the Iranian government or its regional proxies. The sudden influx of false notes was believed to be part of a campaign by Iran to influence forthcoming elections in Iraq, which was apparently successful. Within days of those elections, three of the country’s four major political alliances sent delegations to Iran for political guidance. The head of Iraq’s secular, anti-Iranian bloc noted at the time that America’s silence was deafening. Now, with a new round of Iraqi elections scheduled to take place next year and amid increasing sectarian divisions and Iranian interference, the United States is abandoning its self-defeating neutrality. Try as we might, the U.S. cannot pretend it has no stake in Iraq’s political evolution.
Donald Trump’s flatterers like to reinforce this administration’s image as a group of outsiders “draining the swamp” of its corrupt professional class. That’s a self-serving narrative that confounds the diplomatic class and has led to a confused foreign policy. At the same time, though, declaring North Korea and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps supporters of terrorism is a decision that seems obvious only to those who are not steeped in granular diplomatic contrivances. In May, I noted that no American governmental institution would benefit more from an outsider-led shakeup than the diplomatic corps. The Trump administration’s actions over the last 48 hours show how true that was.
