President Donald Trump’s effort to strike deals simultaneously with China, Iran, and Russia will be rewarded with accolades if any of them succeed and with astonished recognition that miracles happen if all of them do.
But the folly of previous presidents’ dealings with these pariah states offers a condign warning. The itch of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to secure world-changing agreements blinded them to what they were really doing. The result was that their deals backfired on America, rewarding bad guys without doing anything to deflect them from their malevolent purposes.
Clinton and Obama, respectively, claimed and apparently believed that bringing China into the community of trading nations and endorsing Iran’s nuclear program while sending it hundreds of billions of dollars would bind those tyrannies into structures and moderate their conduct through the agency of self-interest.
Instead, the presidents allowed themselves to be manipulated by cynical counterparts who knew that pressure on American leaders to get a political “win” would mean they’d sacrifice the benefits and safeguards that had made the deals seem worth having in the first place.
In easing China’s entry into the World Trade Organization a generation ago, Clinton said, “All I can say to you is that everything I have learned about China as president and before and everything I have learned about human nature in over a half-century of living now convinces me that we have a far greater chance of having a positive influence on China’s actions if we welcome China into the world community instead of shutting it out.”
This was a classic statement of naivete that assumed Clinton’s own shrewd observation and cod psychology gave him better insight into an enemy’s thinking than would a hardheaded assessment of our enemy’s long-established agenda.
Having been let into the community of trading nations, the tyrants of Tiananmen Square lied, cheated, and stole their way to becoming an economic superpower (and thus also a military superpower). China did so not by becoming dependent on America and the rest of the trading world but by making Americans dependent on Chinese manufactures, both of the frivolous kind and the strategically vital kind.
Clinton said the United States would be better able to influence China positively, but it was China that influenced America negatively. Our dependence on Chinese trade makes it far harder to this day to deal with the threat they pose as they work across the diplomatic, economic, and military landscape to overtake America as the global hegemon.
Underpinning Clinton’s thinking was the false notion that trading nations don’t go to war. But, of course, they do. Germany sold steel to France before the First World War, and while it’s true that the steel manufacturers opposed war, their opposition was not strong enough to prevent Germany from proceeding toward that cataclysm.
Obama likewise thought he could change a Middle Eastern leopard’s spots, so he sought a wholesale realignment of strategic relations in that volatile region by striking a deal that was supposed to keep Iran developing nuclear power only for peaceful purposes.
The result was a deal that conferred undeserved respectability on Iran’s Islamofascist government, let it continue its nuclear weapons research, gave it $400 billion in cash, which revitalized its international terrorism, and did not even touch the mullahs’ missile program.
Obama sold the deal to Congress and the public by promising that if Iran broke its end of the bargain, it would be hit with “snap back sanctions.” In truth, however, Iran kept breaking its promises, and instead of being hit hard, it secured further concessions because Obama needed the deal more than the mullahs did. They got everything they wanted without penalty, and they put the U.S. president over a barrel because he could not admit his negotiated deal was a fraud and a failure.
If you subsidize something, you get more of it. Clinton subsidized Chinese tyranny with his trade agenda, so the world and the U.S. got more Chinese tyranny. Obama subsidized Islamist terrorists with cash and leeway to develop nuclear weapons, so the world got more Islamist terrorism with a state sponsor now just weeks away from being able to build the Bomb.
Trump wants a trade deal with China, a nuke deal with Iran, and a peace deal on Ukraine with Russia. That’s quite an agenda. It is impossible to believe that either China or Iran will be any less dishonest today than they have been with U.S. presidents for decades past.
As for Russia, Trump is already displaying the sort of weakness that produced disastrous results for Clinton and Obama. He wants a peace deal so badly that he has refused to put real pressure on President Vladimir Putin. He has not turned the screw on the Russian economy by threatening, let alone imposing, secondary sanctions on purchasers of Russian oil, notably China and India. If he did so, those nations could easily buy marginally more expensive oil from other sources, just like everyone else, and the Russian economy would be crippled.
TARIFFS: TRUMP’S CONTENT AND MESSAGING FIASCO
But Trump cannot bring himself to get tough with Russia because he wants to be acknowledged globally as a deal-maker and peacemaker. Like Clinton and Obama with China and Iran, he talks about moving Russia toward an agreement. Instead, he is moving America to where its recalcitrant opponent wants it.
Obama said a bad deal was worse than no deal, but he went ahead and made one anyway. Clinton did the same thing before him. Now, Trump is in danger of doing the same thing again — and with all three nations most hostile to America and its interests.