Why would an American president offend allies and cozy up to adversaries?
If there was an answer in Mr. Trump’s tumultuous week on the global stage, it may be that he disregards the traditional preoccupations of American foreign policy — power and values — in favor of a more narrow worldview shaped by his experience as a businessman.
Mr. Trump’s bitter clashes with Canada and Europe over trade, as well as his solicitous courtship of North Korea’s brutal dictator, all reflect this mercantile perspective. In his transactional approach to foreign policy, considerations of financial profit or cost — often measured in ways that economists deem simplistic — can outweigh virtually any other consideration.
.. Trump, like a lot of businessmen, doesn’t pay much attention to Canada, or Europe, or Japan,” Mr. Bader said. “Businessmen pay attention to the growth markets: Vietnam, Brazil, India, China.”
.. A slick promotional video that Mr. Trump showed Mr. Kim sketched out a gleaming vision of a prosperous, nuclear-free North Korea, with swooping construction cranes and high-speed trains.
.. ”They have great beaches,” Mr. Trump said to reporters. “You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said, ‘Boy, look at the view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo behind?’ And I explained, I said, ‘You know, instead of doing that, you could have the best hotels in the world right there.’”
.. Mr. Trump considers it a prime location amid booming economies. “Think of it from a real-estate perspective,” he said.
.. “We save a fortune by not doing war games, as long as we are negotiating in good faith — which both sides are!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.
.. The president expressed particular spite at the B-52 bombers that the United States has flown over South Korea in missions from Guam.
.. a potent manifestation of the American commitment to protect its Asian allies. But to Mr. Trump, they burn a lot of fuel and serve little purpose
.. “I know a lot about airplanes,” he said. “It’s very expensive.”
.. Asked on Tuesday about his clash with Mr. Trudeau after the Group of 7 meeting in Quebec, he answered with a long list of grievances — some based on erroneous data — about the trade deficits the United States runs with Canada, Germany, and other allies.
.. “They don’t take our agricultural products, barely. They don’t take a lot of what we have and yet they send Mercedes into us. They send BMWs into us by the millions. It’s very unfair.”
.. If anything, experts said, this common history is a red flag to Mr. Trump.
.. A consistent theme of the Trump administration has been to downgrade the value of allies and alliances,”
.. “To the contrary, they tend to be judged as military free-riders or economic rivals or both. That many are assertive, independent-minded liberals that regularly challenge the president only makes it worse.”
.. In his single-minded focus on economic gain
.. “The bottom line,” said Daniel R. Russel, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs now at the Asia Society, “is that President Trump paid retail for a few warmed-over promises and appears to have given away both leverage and deterrence.”
.. “The containment doctrine has given way to the condominium doctrine.”