The New Yorker:

By Robin Wright

Donald Trump meets with twenty-eight of America’s closest allies this week, for a NATO summit in London, with less leverage than he’s had at any time in his Presidency. Trump is floundering as much globally as he is at home—and they all know it. His foreign policies—from North Korea and the Middle East to Venezuela—have, so far, largely flopped. Even in areas where allies support U.S. goals, many view the President as tactically reckless, rhetorically vulgar, and chronically disorganized in day-to-day diplomacy. In July, the media in London quoted cables from the British Ambassador in Washington in which he called Trump “insecure,” “incompetent,” and “inept,” and the White House “uniquely dysfunctional.”

Whatever his verbal bravado, the President is now running out of time to prove his bona fides in foreign policy to voters. “He calls himself the great dealmaker, but he hasn’t closed any deals,” David Gordon, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told me. “I give him credit for trying, but these are not real-estate deals. They need time, energy, and collaboration with other governments. He’s not good at those things.”

The diplomatic disarray was evident again on Thanksgiving, when Trump made a quick trip to Afghanistan—his first. He spent less than four hours on the ground with the troops who are fighting America’s longest war, now in its eighteenth year. In his 2016 campaign, he vowed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, but his policy has gyrated in recent months. This fall, after months of quiet diplomacy with the Taliban, through a special envoy, the President proposed sitting down with the jihadi movement at Camp David, the Presidential retreat, three days before this year’s anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Days later, he abruptly withdrew the invitation, after a U.S. soldier was killed in a car bombing in Kabul, and terminated talks. “As far as I’m concerned, they are dead,” Trump told reporters on September 9th. The decision was striking, given that fifteen other Americans had died this year during nine rounds of negotiations. In the ten days before Trump’s announcement, the U.S. had killed more than a thousand members of the Taliban.

When Trump arrived in Afghanistan last week, he reversed course again. He announced that peace talks with the Taliban had resumed—with “tremendous progress”—on terms that the Taliban had never before embraced (and that exceeded the expectations of other U.S. officials). “They didn’t want to do a ceasefire, but now they do want to do a ceasefire,” Trump said. “We’re going to stay until such time as we have a deal, or we have total victory, and they want to make a deal very badly.” Previous talks had centered on the smaller goal of reduced violence: a U.S. drawdown of troops in Afghanistan in exchange for a Taliban pledge not to support terrorist attacks on the United States. A ceasefire would be left for later talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. But Trump appears to have overstated his own diplomacy. After he left Afghanistan, the Taliban told the Washington Post that its terms had not, in fact, changed. “We are ready to talk, but we have the same stance to resume the talks from where it was suspended,” a Taliban spokesman said.

In the three years since his election, Trump has certainly redefined diplomacy. Quick-hit photo ops have replaced long-term engagement; snarky tweets have replaced the steady slog of negotiations. Decisions often seem based more on personal impulses than on historic practices. But the President’s unconventional tactics are taking a toll. His imperious rants no longer intimidate adversaries; his bullying no longer gets them to cede diplomatic turf.

“Even when Trump says he’s going to get something back on track—Afghan peace talks, last week—it turns out no one knows what he’s talking about, and nothing happens,” John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the C.I.A. who’s now at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me.

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