Trump, long erratic on the world stage, reaches a new level

Without question, Trump has enjoyed some substantial second-term foreign policy victories. European allies are now on track to spend far more for their own defense than they imagined a year ago, something several presidents have demanded but Trump forced.

He has intervened to help defuse a number of long-running regional conflicts, even if some of his claimed successes prove temporary. His biggest achievement to date, winning the freedom of the 20 living hostages held by Hamas and a fragile ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, required forceful and skillful handling of his reluctant Israeli counterpart.

But if anyone expected Trump to grow into the kind of global statesman that most of his predecessors sought to be remembered as, they have been sorely disappointed.

Never known for consistency or niceties, Trump has only grown more capricious in his conduct of foreign policy, a tendency on full display as he begins a swing through Asia to confront a combative China and allies uncertain of what he wants or how to deal with him.

“The president has an instinctual feel for countries’ vulnerabilities and pressure points,” said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security and a former adviser to Sen. John McCain. “This sometimes produces leverage he uses to productive ends, which we saw in Europe and Gaza and the Iran strike. But it also has downsides.”

Not long after a fruitful meeting with Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, Trump shut down trade talks in a pique Friday because he did not like a Canadian television advertisement that featured the true voice of President Ronald Reagan, from a 38-year-old radio speech, warning of the long-term costs of tariffs. On Saturday, he went further, slapping additional 10% tariffs on Canadian goods — a move that could cost American consumers billions, simply because Trump was unhappy with the ad, which was created by the Ontario government.

He reacted with fury, threats and sky-high new tariffs this month when China announced new limits on U.S. access to much-needed rare earth minerals, but then lowered the temperature as he headed to Malaysia on Friday night, telling reporters on Air Force One that both he and President Xi Jinping of China would have to make concessions this week to reach a trade deal. On Sunday, his negotiators announced progress.

After campaigning on a platform of avoiding foreign entanglements, he dispatched a virtual armada to the Caribbean to put pressure on Venezuela and apparently seek the ouster of President Nicolás Maduro. He continues to turn up the military heat, dispatching an aircraft carrier to the region in recent days and striking at least 10 boats that he claimed, without disclosing evidence, were carrying drugs. Most legal experts say the summary killings of civilians — at least 43 are now dead — are without legal justification, but Trump refuses to provide Congress or the public a clear statement of his goal.

And he has so whipsawed on Ukraine that European officials have repeatedly raced to Washington to understand whether Trump is siding with President Vladimir Putin of Russia or with Ukraine.

More than nine months into his second term, the only thing predictable about Trump’s handling of global affairs is that it will be an unpredictable mix of instinct, grievance and ego. And there is little evidence that his tantrums, swerves and reversals are strategic and thought-out, as his supporters sometimes insist, rather than the products of impulsivity, mood and circumstance.

Either way, foreign leaders and ambassadors know to remain wary at all times, with one saying the other day that he enters the Oval Office with the kind of caution needed if there were sticks of unexploded dynamite under the couch cushions.

As he prepares to meet a new Japanese leader and Xi — and after he made a strange, public plea to the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, to meet him, even though his last diplomacy was followed by a surge in the size of the North’s nuclear arsenal — Trump is at something of a turning point. Can he build on the foreign policy successes he has had, or will his mercurial nature continue to generate confusion and conflict, rather than results?

Less than two weeks ago, he stood in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and, in a diversion from an hourlong speech celebrating the hostage release, urged that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be pardoned in an ongoing criminal case. And he has not dwelled on his decision to impose 50% tariffs on Brazil because it was, in his words, conducting a “witch hunt” by putting former president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump friend, on trial, charging him with trying to stage a coup to prevent the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office in 2022.

Then there are the strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which seem likely to accelerate once the Gerald R. Ford carrier group is on station off Venezuela in a few weeks, a move ordered Friday.

But while the Pentagon amasses firepower — roughly a seventh of the Navy’s active fleet will be near Venezuela when the Ford arrives — the White House will not declare what its strategic objectives are in the buildup. Officials publicly say the operation is to stop the flow of cocaine and fentanyl, but U.S. officials privately concede they are part of a larger drive to oust Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader.

And then there is Ukraine, where Trump has swerved from repeating Russian talking points to floating the idea of giving Ukraine powerful Tomahawk missiles, only to change his mind.

In July, just before meeting Putin in Alaska, Trump agreed with his European allies that the most vital step was to obtain a ceasefire, so that the guns would be quiet while negotiations finally took place. But as soon as he got to the American air base in Anchorage, he said he and the Russian leader had agreed that what was needed was a full peace agreement. Ceasefires can be broken, he explained. Only a full peace accord would suffice.

European leaders rushed to Washington, gathering around the president in the Oval Office to get him back on track.

When there was no follow-on negotiation for a peace accord, Trump declared that he thought it possible Ukraine could gain back all the land it lost to Russia after the 2022 invasion, arguing that the Russians were in “BIG economic trouble” and could not fight. Then he said he was nearly persuaded to give Tomahawks to Ukraine that could reach deep inside Russia.

But a well-timed phone call from Putin convinced him that this would lead to escalation with the Russians, and he backed off. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Washington last week, Trump insisted that a ceasefire — what he rejected two months before — was the only option, freezing the fighting at current lines.

“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said, referring to the parts of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine that Russia now occupies. In private, he warned Zelenskyy that “your country will be destroyed” over time by Russia, according to a senior Ukrainian official — the opposite of what he had said a few weeks before.

The meeting with Putin that the president said would happen in Budapest in a few weeks disappeared, leading the president to impose his first sanctions on Russian oil exports. White House officials hailed it as a significant moment: It was the first time Trump had added to the thousands of sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But they declined to say what had changed since the spring, when Trump exempted Russia from most of his tariffs.

“The driving force of this roller coaster,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, “is the president’s desire to be seen as the one who ends the war. He doesn’t care how it ends, or with what consequences. Only that it ends and supports his claim to a Nobel Peace Prize.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.