 Hey, we're back. We're live with Global Connections here on a given Wednesday. And we have our old friend, Carlos Suarez, a professor of international relations and a fact that shared the international relations department at university, university Dodd. University Dodd. What's the name of your school, Carlos? University of the Americas in English is good enough. Okay, that's good enough, good enough. And in fact, you know, when I think about it, Global Connections is Carlos's original creation. We invented that term, or he invented that term how many years ago, Carlos? It's great to have you on the show. Great, and thank you, Jay, I'm delighted to join you. As always, a great conversation. And you know, we live in interesting times that we have to stop and reflect about it, try to analyze, and that's what these shows allow us to do, to dig a little beyond the headlines, right? Yes, absolutely. Connecting the dots around the world, especially from Mexico City. And the subject we talked about, we are going to talk about today, is American foreign policy. A Trump doctrine, if you can find one. So what, why do you say Trump doctrine at all, Carlos? And how confused and incoherent is any such doctrine? Well, very confusing, very incoherent. And well, really the reason we ask is because when we study, and I'm a professor here of international relations, remind our audience, I'm in Puebla, just to the east of Mexico City, Puebla. Thank you. But at any rate, as we look back at, let's say, post-World War II, we've had several presidencies, U.S. presidencies that have often been characterized as having a doctrine, really like a clear, strategic focus, a purpose, something that you can describe. Truman had a doctrine after World War II that was aimed at containing communism, obviously the growing threat there. Reagan, fast forward a few terms there, he came to have a version of a doctrine that sort of was rolling back communism, a little bit more interventionist, Bush doctrine, preemptive strike, sort of go it alone, unilateralism. Right now, there's been some ongoing dialogue among sort of the foreign policy community. Is there a Trump doctrine? Or even more generally, two and a half years now into this presidency, how do we explain it or understand it or make sense of it? The short answer, it's not easy. And in fact, when we look at Trump himself, understanding his foreign policy is a challenge. After all, he's never written or spoken much about the subject most of his life. He was a private businessman, a TV show personality. But of course, foreign policy is not only made by individuals, it's made by a team, advisors, other key people. We'll talk a little bit more about that today. The key person is John Bolton, of course, the national security advisor. But more to the point, some have tried to say, well, if there is a Trump doctrine, is it this make America great or is it this America first or maybe critics will call it America alone? When we look around the world, what we can do is take a snapshot of what have been the policies, the approaches. And let me ask if we can pull up our first graphic. We have a picture here of the Trump foreign policy that just quickly illustrates his actions. Now, short version is again, he came to office and the first actions were to pull out, pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, pull out of the Iran nuclear deal. A pretty aggressive, rather unilateral approach as well. But many, we can't talk about all of these, but in general a very assertive foreign policy. And one, in some ways driven by a lot of domestic interests, a desire to satisfy some of his supporters, if you will, building a wall to limit immigration, et cetera. The Muslim ban, very controversial. But in the end, let's be very clear, on one hand he represents a sort of nationalism, maybe a nationalist conservatism, kind of pull back. And we have to appreciate that in the big scheme of American foreign policy, isolationism, even elements of nationalism have always been there. There have been strong tendencies between internationalism and isolationism. Today we could say we're in a period of relative, somewhat more relative retrenchment, that is isolationism on one hand, maybe not by design, but by reality, because of the approach of Trump. He is alienated and taken on a lot of traditional allies. You spoke earlier about having talks with the Belgian consul there about European affairs and the short answer, well, he will eventually pass and the Europeans kind of looking the long term. The reality is he's there now and he is making some tough choices that are gonna be with us even long before he's gone. And maybe what many international observers are saying, the US has lost a lot of credibility, leadership role that will not be easy to replace whoever succeeds Trump, whether in 2020 or four years later, the damage of US image and credibility abroad is significant and hard to measure, but it is real. But back to this question of what is the thing we might call a worldview. Again, he has just broken all the norms in every way. We have this new concept now, we talk about Twitter diplomacy. That didn't exist before Trump, but now you have to read what he's saying. In the morning, he might say something rather dramatic outlandish by the afternoon. He's spinning a different story, but certainly now we have to be watching and observing and reading what his Twitter feed says to make sense of his view. But back to maybe, let me bring up the next picture. We have an example of Trump, he's not comfortable in multilateral settings. He's not comfortable going off to these meetings. Last year, this picture came out after a summit meeting of the G7, I think it was in Munich, Germany perhaps. And you can just see the body language. There he is sitting like an angry young boy being scolded at by the Doyen, the Dean, Angela Merkel of Germany. He's got his deputy right next to him, John Bolton, the national security advisor, holding his briefing papers with Trump. What does the body language tell us? It's obviously, he's frustrated, angry, not being cooperative, but then let's take for a moment his TV personality background. I mean, as critical as we may be of him and his foreign policy and his personal agenda, there is no question that he is a genius at marketing and sort of the image and sort of that kind of aspect of it. If we can turn to the next picture, I have a picture of him last year, the first of two summit meetings with the North Korean leader. We've often seen reference to how he seems to like a lot of these dictators, so whether it's a little Kim in North Korea or Duterte in the Philippines or Turkey's Erdogan. He's something about authoritarian leaders that he seems to really enjoy the limelight. And with Kim, a lot of fanfare, a lot of fluff, a lot of image, not a lot of substance. One meeting that, okay, they've met. The second meeting that I have more recent one in Vietnam, they both went home or actually the US pulled out and broke off the negotiations. And where are we now? Good luck making sense of that. Finally, one last picture I want to turn to very quickly, which is the case of Russia because we have a puzzle of your government, I'm sorry, Trump's bromance is affinity for Russia. Here's a strange bulletin board that shows the two together and it's got Russian writing on the top and on the bottom, it tells us, let's make the world a great again together. Obviously, this is a tongue in tongue and cheek joke, but you saw the body language as well at the Helsinki summit where he met with Putin, came out and literally made an astonishing statement that he did not believe his intelligence community's assessments about the Russia interference in the US elections. And he had every reason to believe Putin's and didn't provide any, well, and that he didn't allow even his translators or anybody in the discussion. So it just leaves us with this uncertain strategy approach. Does he have a doctrine? Again, no, not really unless you call chaos uncertainty and unpredictability doctrine, not quite. Is it America first? Let's assume there is chaos here because there's no consistency, not from minute to minute or day to day. And these things don't get written down, they just get twittered out or impromptu rose garden kind of statements without press conferences or questions from reporters. We haven't had a press conference since March 11th, it's a long time already. Gee, that's two months. And let's assume it's a chaos policy. Question I would ask you, Carlos, is where does a chaos policy get? Can you have, you teach international relations? You're in a school of international relations. Can you have, can this country afford to have a chaos policy? Well, not without costs, no, not without costs because clearly it leaves just a continued uncertainty and unpredictability. And if you could imagine, you're trying to, I don't know, prepare for a negotiation for a meeting, what do you do? How do you prepare? I mean, what are the talking points? We've heard again and again on Trump when he goes on these meetings, he just wings it. He's sort of just, he's got this gut feeling and he's gonna look them in the eye. Well, too much of what happens in the world is very complex and requires somebody to know the background, the details, the context. Even just the foreign policy community, we're getting an understanding that US foreign policy is not made by an individual, but it's a pretty large bureaucracy, many interests, private interests as well. It's just remarkable how today we don't have any clear picture, the diplomatic community has been severely curtailed. I'm sitting here in Mexico today and I can tell you two and a half years into the presidency, we do not have a US ambassador in Mexico. Oh, wow. And this is true of a number of other countries too, major players, there's no ambassador to the United Nations after the last one had resigned. We have an acting defense secretary in the US, there's no secretary of homeland security since the departure most recently of the secretary. So there are a lot of missing pieces and puzzles and that's not how a large power should run. Well, it accentuates the chaos, doesn't it? I mean, for example, if you don't appoint anybody as the actual United Nations representative, then you don't have to go to Congress to get confirmation of anybody. And so if you don't have anybody, you become the representative. If you have somebody who's acting, you have total control of that person, there's no confirmation. Bottom line is this is a sole proprietorship government. Bottom line is that he is calling the shots and he is speaking for every department, every office in every context. And this means that if it's chaos, the chaos is complete, am I right? Yeah, that's correct, absolutely. And I think it underscores something I've long believed and more and more we're coming to accept that Trump never came to office expecting to win and certainly wasn't prepared to govern, didn't have teams in place and doesn't even understand the basic process of governance and when we're dealing with foreign affairs or in policy, it gets more complex, more messy. Diplomacy is a lot about image and signals and building confidence and trust. And when you throw all that out and just have chaos, it just, your head spins. You just don't know how to make sense of it. For many people, so I go back to read his book, The Art of the Deal to learn how he sees the world or make sure if you meet him that everything is presented in very brief simplistic visuals and that his name is prominent in big bold letters. That's not how you should run a foreign policy or bilateral meetings with anybody, multilateral. So it's a mess. But going back to how do we make sense of him, it's hard because he doesn't represent sort of the classic realist perspective, although he has elements of realism, one of the approaches very, very common in understanding world politics. The world is a dark and pessimistic place. He certainly doesn't harbor a lot of liberal international elements. If anything, he disdains everything, anything that has to do with multilateral, almost anything that was done before him, he's got to reverse just in principle, not without carefully thinking it out. And we've just got a world of tremendous chaos. Now, having said all that, I wanna just say, it's interesting that we can turn to who are his key advisors and players because in the understanding of foreign policy, that's what it takes. Who are the people either talking to him, who are the people briefing him? I have one last picture I'll show and it's the number fifth one where we have a picture of his core advisor, John Bolton, and he came into office this past year, is the newly appointed national security advisor, a very crucial role. The person who literally is just a stone's throw down the hall in the West Wing, who briefs him, who prepares him. And if we look carefully at this man, John Bolton, he does have a world view. As best we can tell, it's a pretty bleak and harsh one, perhaps closest to the classic Thomas Hobbes view of the world, nasty, brutish and short. But it is a dark view, maybe paralleling some of what we saw under George W. Bush, a Dick Cheney's worldview, very pessimistic. And in the case of Bolton, he's got a long record of things he said, particularly before he came back into government as a Fox News commentator. But it's one thing to be a commentator and talk hard and talk tough about the world. It's another thing to be sitting at the table across from Kim Jong-un or other leaders and having to somehow articulate a foreign policy. And he's a hawk. He's a hawk. His statement suggests that he's looking for war. It's very troublesome in our time. Absolutely. And we see right now some hot spots that are getting more tense. The situation in Iran is rapidly moving to create more tension. And he suddenly showed up in neighboring Iraq and he's been rattling that saber quite a bit. And so it is a view that's very aggressive. It's very unilateral. It's very militant. And all of those are worrisome because if you govern by that view and you take impulsive actions without a lot of understanding the implications, you run into some problems, I guess. Dick Cheney had this worldview of somehow spreading democracy in Iraq. And look what happened there. And it has a great picture. Look what happened there, here. Carlos, we're going to take a short break, if you don't mind, to come back. And I would like to discuss with you after we come back what the risks are in each one of these different theaters. They're different, but they're somehow similar also. Carlos Juarez from the University of the Americas in Crablao, Mexico, we'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Lauren Pair, a host here at Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Aloha, this is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at 3, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation, and world, and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're gonna learn a lot, you're gonna come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, my name is Andrew Lening. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on ThinkTech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your coworkers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We wanna teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because security matters, Aloha. All right, we're back, we're live with Global Connections here on a given Wednesday and Carlos Suarez and WebLoss Mexico. Carlos, you've talked about a number of, what do you wanna call it, points of tension. And my little list is we have points of tension with China, even this week with Iran, with North Korea. I consider what's going on in Venezuela, certainly a point of tension. You can say that the whole border issue on the Southern American border is a point of tension. In Africa, where Trump is building a huge drone facility for who knows what, so lots of points of tension. So my question to you is, what are the relative risks of these? We have, what, two years to go, two years to go, a year and a half to go. And I worry about getting through his term, hopefully it's a limited term, one term, without some kind of international conflagration. What do you think? Yeah, boy, I mean, if you do look at those many, many hotspots, it's a daunting, rather stark possibility that any of them could turn into a massive, just mess. And of course we have this long history in the US of criticism that often faced with a lot of problems back home, leaders might be incentivized to wag the dog, sort of create a little external crisis to divert attention. Let's hope that doesn't play out. But if you can imagine, I mean, all the pressure coming on the president now following this Mueller report, the intransigence, now what they're calling executive decree or no, what they call it executive orders to not comply, all the pressure, in other words, happening here at home. And then you wake up every morning, and here's a president that we're told probably doesn't read or get his intelligence briefing in great detail. So he doesn't really know all the details. Somebody does, hopefully Bolton is at least reading it, but that's scary in and of itself. Any of these issues could flare up in a way that can produce some very, very troubling situation. Beginning just with the ongoing crisis here with Mexico, Central America. I mean, that has not played out its full story yet. It remains still a tug of war. The wall, I mean, that hasn't been in the headlines this week or last, but he's obsessed with this idea of just sealing the border. The problem with that migration and these kind of issues, they don't get solved easily. They require a concerted effort, many multi-levels. Obviously working closely with Mexico, with its neighbors to the South. This could find itself with some incident flaring up and becoming even nastier, but I would turn as well to Venezuela. Here's a case where we have seen, and even Bolton, the National Security Advisor has been very aggressive in saying, this is our background. The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well, and he has even articulated a view that he might invoke the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. For the listeners, the Monroe Doctrine relates back to James Monroe in the 1830s, the 40s when the US basically carved out Latin America, the Americas, as our sphere of influence. Europeans, not allowed. And the Roosevelt Corollary. That was a very smooth, don't you think? Monroe made it specific that existing European colonies here in the Americas would be left alone. That was okay. He wasn't diminishing them in any way, but he said new ones wouldn't be tolerated. And you know that the remarkable thing about the Monroe Doctrine is until now it has stuck. Until now, there have been no additional European colonies. And as far as I know, South America has remained consistent with the Monroe Doctrine. Now 200 years after the fact, that's quite impressive. But I would suggest to you, Carlos, now with Venezuela, it's coming apart because the Russians and the Chinese are in there and Trump can't stop them. Isn't stopping them, yeah. And but the challenge there is that by reasserting this and reaffirming that this is the US's territory, it also makes the case that, well, that means Russia can do what it wishes in its region of the world. And frankly, Iran, why doesn't it have a powerful vested interest in the Middle East in a way that we don't belong there? So it gets harder to sustain an argument that this is ours and stay away, particularly in this globally interdependent world. The Chinese and the Russians have on one hand economic reasons to want to support it. So like, because they're owed a lot of money, but there's the geopolitical angle too. They don't want to see the US come out winning. I would add to that as certainly as I'm here in Latin America and Mexico, Latin Americans, they don't see the Monroe Doctrine or the Roswell Corollary as very positive things. It's basically helped justify a long history of intervention. And so while Americans may wrestle with, gosh, you know, if Venezuela will be intervening or what? For Latin Americans, it's like, more here we go again. And there's no surprise. And even today, as the opposition leader, Guaido, he had an effort, what a week or a little 10 days ago to try to bring about a change. Many believe very much that the US is behind the scenes doing everything it can and that he only could have done that if he had some signal from the US that we'll back you, we'll be there to help you. So there's a lot of that maneuver going on. But having said that, let me turn to a couple of other of the regions where we just, again, we see continued uncertainty and chaos, the challenge with Europe, having already, you know, sort of signaled the US's on and off again support for NATO alliance, its criticism of the European Union in general. It's, you know, the Brexit drama that while it's off the back burner today, it's gonna continue to come back to us. The US has, again, I think alienated and frustrated a lot of the Europeans to the point where they realize that, you know, he too shall pass. Let's just hope it's sooner than later and that he doesn't wreck the world before that happens. But just as Latin Americans shake their head about this man, I'm constantly asking, you know, how do people, how does he have such a large support of people that will vote for him no matter what? And again, the answer is complex itself. A lot of it has to do with this divide in the globalization era between the winners and losers. And there are many, understandably, who have lost out and who feel a disconnect between the elites and the establishment and whatnot. But again, back with Europe, I think sadly, we have a world in which the US, which helped to establish the world order after World War II, which helped work closely with those European allies is today a country, I think increasingly seen as less dependable and reliable, will that, you know, be overcome? I mean, there are some who will, the older generations, maybe who understand the longer history, but younger populations who don't read books in history and don't know that may not be able to appreciate the, you know, the importance of the role of the US in rebuilding war Europe and the alliance systems that we've had in place for so long. You point out a tremendous risk and a trend that's very unsettling. But, you know, that somewhere in there, Carlos, is the world economy. And, you know, the stock market in the US and other places went down 500 points yesterday. I don't know what it's like today, but it raises the risk that whatever Trump's machinations or lack of policy are, domestically and internationally, one of these days, the economy that he boasts about is gonna disappear and that's gonna have an effect, you know, still, the US is an important factor in the world economy. That's gonna have an effect on the world economy. And if the world economy changes, this non-doctrine, this non-doctrine, non-policy policy that he has will have even greater effect. Do you have any thoughts about that? I mean, would a world economic decline have an accelerating effect on the problems we're talking about? Well, yes, and I suppose, you know, as always happens in economic downturn, somebody's gotta be blamed for it. Now he would blame the Democrats and Obama and whoever else, but I also think that a downturn would probably begin to erode some of his, you know, maybe the more limited weaker support, the hardliners, the base support may not change. But I think the trouble here is that in past, maybe you look at 10, 11 years ago, we had a big financial crisis in the global economy. The United States in many ways stepped up in that leadership role and then helped to address the crisis. I don't see that happening right now. I don't see, you know, Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury, somehow carrying on a bold initiative to save the world economy, you know, I guess I would be surprised to do that. And I just, you know, we've seen again and again that Trump doesn't really have a good understanding of basic economics, let alone complex international economics. Mnuchin is sad. Last question, last question. We have a couple of minutes left. Is this, you know, you have a good perspective. You can look at this from, you know, from Mexico and you can see it maybe more clearly than many people. And I wonder what your advice would be to Donald Trump going forward for the rest of his, at least this term of his presidency about organizing the experts that can really help him about formulating some kind of doctrine, some kind of policy that would be consistent and would avoid these hot spots and risks we've been talking about. What was your, what is your advice to him, Carlos? Oh, I was hoping you wouldn't ask that. Well, you know, given what we know of him so far, I don't think he's likely to change or overnight become suddenly somebody willing to look at the full range of options. Perhaps, you know, to put yourself in his mindset, he's got to see something that makes him come out winning, makes the US come out winning. So it's got to be finding that convergence. What can he do that's gonna save the US that he can take credit for, but will also, you know, help address whatever might be falling apart in the global economy. But boy, you know, try to give him a lesson that, hey, we need allies, we need, you know, we need global cooperation for certain things. It's a tough, tough challenge. I'm glad I don't have to do that. I wish somebody could. I don't see that in the cards. I think we're stuck with this rather impulsive and disjointed and impetuous leader who is driven by just the here, immediate now and the image and it's not a pretty picture. Now, we have muddled our way through two and a half years, maybe looking at it that way and other 18 months ain't that much more, but anything could happen. And we just touched on the fact that we have a lot of hotspots that could, any one of those could flare up. And just as you've mentioned yesterday's stock market, I mean, the international financial system often can be very, very immediate and profound and how it shocks. And if we don't have a concerted effort, the Europe, the US and other major players working together, it could only get worse. And so I'm a bit pessimistic about how Trump can be the leader of that. I just hope he doesn't damage it more that it's gonna require more to be fixed once he is gone. But like you said, I think with your earlier guest, the Belgian ambassador, I'm sorry, consul there, like many Europeans, I mean, let's just hope we can write him out and then, you know, see a reverse, maybe not even reverse, but a correction that's badly needed. The US needs to be a global leader, even if it's a modest one, but we don't see that today. One thing is clear, you know, that comes out of all of this. And that's this, you know, we have a reality show going on in Washington every day with all of these reality show type issues gets you all excited. But we, all of us, and especially the electorate, we have to look and see what he's doing on the international front. We have to see how these hotspots that he creates and has created and will create will affect our future, our leadership in the world and the defense of our nation from outside. And so it's not a matter of focusing on all these hearings in Congress to the exclusion of looking at international things. I think we have to watch that too. And we have to factor that into any voting we do about the Republicans and about Trump. Carlos, we're out of time. I really enjoy these discussions. Let's look forward to doing it again two weeks hence. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Aloha. Aloha.