Tim Stanley: US taps into new alliances to reach foreign policy goals

President Donald Trump speaks at an event to promote his tax cut package. Photo / AP

Opinion

Two deals, two different takes. On Monday, South Korea's President said Donald Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for getting North Korea to consider giving up its nukes. Trump says that's a good deal.

A few hours later, Israel's prime minister produced intelligence suggesting that Iran is breaking its agreement to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. Trump says that's a bad deal. A little peace won is followed by a little more conflict — like some toxic yin and yang.

The world regards Trump's foreign policy with alarm, as if he is making things up as he goes along. I'm most struck by the continuity of themes. Iran and North Korea were both identified by George W Bush as part of his Axis of Evil back in 2002 — and Bush, Barack Obama and Trump have all tried to bring the rogue states to heel. The difference in Trump's case is the willingness of rising regional powers to work with him. There's a new sense of movement in world politics that he is canny enough to exploit.

Obama and Trump were both elected on platforms of extracting America from conflict zones, running against candidates of perpetual war. There was a more populist tint to Obama's White House than is often acknowledged: he, like Trump, expelled illegal immigrants and restricted migration from Muslim-dominated countries. Unlike Trump, he U-turned on a promise to rethink free trade and dithered and flipped when it came to using the military.

The Iran nuclear deal was Obama's biggest overseas legacy, an attempt to regularise a rogue regime through bribery — but Trump has committed himself to tearing it up. Benjamin Netanyahu's press conference, in which he tried to convince us of Iran's duplicity with some late 1990s PowerPoint, won't have persuaded most signatories that they need to scrap the deal entirely, but it's given Trump material to work with.

If Trump, like Obama, favours jaw-jaw over war-war, why won't he back the Iran deal? Because he is very close to Israel; there's evidence other than Netanyahu's that it isn't working; and Iran is spreading its tentacles throughout the Middle East — Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. But also because Trump governs in a subtly different set of conditions from his predecessors.

Trump did not drag the Koreans to the table: they walked there, hand in hand, because they wanted to. Times have changed. The new South Korean government is more amenable to dialogue; North Korea finally has a working nuclear programme and can negotiate from strength.

America's influence is declining in relation to emerging players, and so it increasingly works with what other powers are willing to do, rather than the other way around. In the Middle East, one of the key anti-Iranian states is Israel. Another is Saudi Arabia, where change proceeds at a dizzying pace. Last Sunday, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, is said to have told American Jewish leaders that the Palestinians need to swallow US demands in the Middle East peace process. This from a country that doesn't yet formally acknowledge Israel's right to exist.

Like Kim, the Crown Prince is inheriting a 20th century regime that he knows has to adapt to survive, leading to a complex game of give-and-take.

So, even if Trump appears to be choreographing change in East Asia or the Middle East, he is in fact taking advantage of what the local potentates are up to — and in some cases simply giving them what they want. Stability in exchange for the protection of US interests. There are moral consequences. A settlement in North Korea will abandon that tyranny's dissidents; arms sales to Saudi Arabia enable its horrific war in Yemen. But Trump never promised us a rose garden. The long-term goal is to let the world run itself.

Sixty-five years after the Korean War ended, the US still has 28,500 troops in South Korea and runs a trade deficit with the nation of about $17 billion

One can hardly blame Trump for seeking to close the chapter on historical commitments that cost so much money and lives and are yet to bring peace.

One can only hope that, in building new alliances, he doesn't end up creating his own legacy of war for a future President to inherit.

- Telegraph Group