The No Impulse Control Doctrine
So now we’re pretending that Trump has a worked-out policy or plan or organizing principle or something, and that the word for it is “flexibility.”
As he confronted a series of international challenges from the Middle East to Asia last week, President Trump made certain that nothing was certain about his foreign policy. To the extent that a Trump Doctrine is emerging, it seems to be this: don’t get roped in by doctrine.
Please. Laziness isn’t a “doctrine.” Empty-headedness isn’t a doctrine. Toddler-level impulsiveness isn’t a doctrine. Being totally random isn’t a doctrine. Breaking all the rules and stamping all over the porcelain isn’t a doctrine.
“Our decisions,” Mr. Trump said in the Saturday address, “will be guided by our values and our goals — and we will reject the path of inflexible ideology that too often leads to unintended consequences.”
That concept, flexibility, seems key to understanding Mr. Trump. He hates to be boxed in, as he mused in the Rose Garden last week while contemplating the first new military operation of his presidency with geopolitical consequences.
“I like to think of myself as a very flexible person,” he told reporters. “I don’t have to have one specific way.” He made clear he cherished unpredictability. “I don’t like to say where I’m going and what I’m doing,” he said.
He’s not making a serious argument there. He’s explaining how awesome he is. What he means by not having to have “one specific way” (such an elegant way to put it) is that he doesn’t want to do the work of figuring out what he thinks and what that tells him he should do. It’s so much easier to just do what you feel like in the moment and then praise yourself to an admiring world for being so “flexible.”
That flexibility was a hallmark of his rise in real estate, and if critics preferred the word erratic, it did not bother Mr. Trump — it has since worked well enough to vault him to the White House. But now that he is commander in chief of the world’s most powerful nation, leaders around the world are trying to detect a method to the man.
Well quite. He’s erratic, which is to say random. That’s because he’s lazy, ignorant, and thick. That’s all. Let’s don’t complicate it or big it up with talk of doctrine.
“There is no emerging doctrine for Trump foreign policy in a classical sense,” said Kathleen H. Hicks, a former Pentagon official who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There are, however, clear emerging characteristics consistent with the attributes of the man himself: unpredictable, instinctual and undisciplined.”
There you go. That’s what I’m saying.
Because there’s even less thought involved than there is in “inflexible” ideology, rash stupidity also “too often leads to unintended consequences.”
Nope. No “doctrine ” here. No “movement” either. Nearly any analysis along these lines is going to be over-analysis. There’s no there there.
“we will reject the path of inflexible ideology that too often leads to unintended consequences.”
As if random, arbitrary emotional reactions will not lead to unintended consequenecs
More and more stuff appears on the Net all the time that indicates that Trump is pretty well illiterate. It’s a bit of a worry in this day and age.
I have a fair bit to do with people who for one reason or another, and despite all the efforts of the New South Wales Education Department , missed out on a lot of basic schooling and have a hard time reading stuff. But they do a very good job both coping with it, and an even better one concealing it.
But if one button is labelled ‘Moscow’ and the one next to it ‘Beijing’ and the POTUS has to select the right one to press, but can’t read, who will supervise his choice? And will that supervisor be a family member, and possibly also illiterate?
It is hardly an academic question. Could be an Armageddonemic one though.
And look how far it has got him so far – why mess with success? (Well, yes, there is the minor detail that Unpredictable, Instinctual, and Undisciplined now have Great Power, without having assumed the “great responsibility” component – or even the “modicum of understanding” bit.)
Strip away all the specious game-theory rationalisations for it, and “unpredictable” is just a euphemism for “unreliable”
To have an ‘inflexible ideology,’ you’d have to be able to remember what you’ve said.
Does anyone know if Trump follows horoscopes? Obviously it wouldn’t be one he reads, but maybe one that is read to him? Does Fox have any resident astrologers?
The Cold War was scary, however there was some comfort in the assumption that there were, more or less, rational agents on both sides. Trump must scare the bejeezus out of the Russians and Chinese.
RJW, he scares the crap out of anybody with an i.q. larger than their shoe size; not because he’s unpredictable but because he is so utterly predictable. It isn’t as though he hasn’t signposted his desire for war against….well….anybody who upsets him, and look how quick he’s been in trying to massively increase military spending and to have vast amounts more nuclear toys than anybody else. As any child – even one in an adult’s body – will tell you, there’s no point in having toys and not playing with them.
Yes, he’s a scary bastard all right.
Acolyte,
I was a teenager during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US president, a patrician with an outwardly calm and measured approach to strategic issues, nearly got us all incinerated. Now we have Trump.
Trump reminds me of the captain in the movie, ‘The Bedford Incident’. A hyper-aggressive US destroyer captain shadowing a Soviet sub pushes his crew to the breaking point until one of them pushes the button.
So, can we conclude that Bigfoot is not scared of Trump? Of course, that assumes we know Bigfoot’s IQ, and that seems to be a data point we haven’t collected.
iknklast, Bigfoot does pose a problem here simply because it would need an IQ larger than the lowest-scoring qualifying human, what with it having such a massive shoe size. For example, I’m a UK size 11, so an IQ of 12 would mean I have the wits to be scared of what Trump looks almost certain to at least attempt: Bigfoot’s shoe size is as yet unverified, but would certainly be double that of mine, meaning that it would need an IQ of at least 23 to feel the same level of alarm.
Now there’s one for the philosophers to think on :-)