In a closed emergency session, other NATO leaders said: “We have to ask our parliaments. We have a process; we can’t just tell you we’re going to spend more, we have a legal process,” CBS News reported.
At this point in the meeting, Trump turned to the Turkish president and said: “Except for Erdogan over here. He does things the right way,” and actually fist-bumped him.
CBS News described it as “a startling gesture of support for the increasingly authoritarian leader … a universal sign of ‘way to go, good job.’”
European NATO leaders and a good many others appear more than a little worried by President Trump’s fondness for dictators. Whether fist-bumping Erdogan, vocally admiring Philippine strongman Duterte, hanging out with King Jong-un in Singapore, or siding with Putin over his own intelligence agencies, Trump seems to both admire and get on better with the world’s most ruthless dictators than he does with his own democratic allies.
After all, this was the same President Trump who refused to utter a word of criticism against Putin just weeks after branding Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “dishonest and weak”.
This behavior, along with Trump’s apparent ignorance and disregard for American laws and institutions (given his attempted interference with the Justice Department and his failure to distance his position from his family’s business interests, among other things) has left many observers bewildered.
Some speculate whether Trump’s past business dealings in Russia involve money launderers and other unsavory actors, which he fears might be exposed if he fails to please the Russians. Others rather grimly wonder whether he has some secret agenda to destroy Western alliances and the international order as we know it.
Alternately, some worry he has no plan at all, and that all his shenanigans constitute the random behavior of what many families might call “the crazy uncle” – with the key difference being this crazy uncle won an election to lead the world’s most powerful state.
Without completely ruling out any of the above explanations, there is a much simpler reason for Trump’s behavior. He is not a politician.
Politicians have training and experience with their own country’s laws and institutions and with international norms and procedures. They know how to build consensus amongst actors with different agendas, how to compromise and how to subtly influence people in order to advance their own preferences. They know how to function within a maze of various constraints and institutions.
Trump, by contrast, simply finds institutions, norms, procedures, laws, compromises, and any kind of constraints frustrating. He is the pampered child of an extraordinarily wealthy family who used his inheritance to make himself a renowned businessman and the CEO of numerous corporations.
CEOs in the business world are essentially dictators – their underlings must follow orders or be fired. The only thing that counts for CEOs is the annual approval of their companies’ shareholders, which we might liken to the approval ratings of Trump’s voters come the next election (and even political dictators pay attention to the preferences of certain key constituencies).
The business world also operates by a largely amoral code: the only thing that matters is increasing the corporation’s wealth and power. While some businesses try to achieve this by appearing to be “virtuous corporate citizens” (with even oil and gas companies buying glossy advertisements in airplane magazines about how they research alternative energies), businesses push for as little regulation and constraint on their power as they can get away with.
So too with Trump, the businessman who catapulted himself into the world’s most powerful political office.
Trump likes to see himself as America’s CEO. The power of the US presidency comes with countless constraints and strings attached, however, due to the robust democratic institutions built up over the last two hundred and fifty years.
Trump therefore envies the dictators and political strongmen who can act with less regard for such constraints. He admires their apparent strength and decisiveness, without even an inkling of understanding of how such dictators destroy their countries’ power and wealth and their people’s wellbeing.
Because dictatorships use hard power and coercion more than soft power and attraction to pursue their interests, their regimes almost always turn out to be much more brittle. By failing to understand this, Trump alienates allies abroad, provides succor to America’s enemies, and eviscerates the very foundations of American power in the world.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
