Anne Applebaum on Trump's, uh, competence in diplomacy

Anne Applebaum in this interview gives a sensible view of the current European reaction to Trump 2.0.¹

Simon Rosenberg: Tell me what you what's your assessment of what we know about what happened in NATO in the last couple days trump has been. I mean, for me one of the most interesting things about the Iran story is that Trump [is that] he's sort of on two sides of this, right?

On the one side, he wants to decapitate the [Iranian] regime. And then he's got his Russian friends who are allied with Iran and Iran is helping them in the war in Ukraine. And it seemed in the last few days that he's been struggling to kind of put all these pieces together. And I just wondered what your assessment of all that is.

Anne Applebaum: my assessment is something I've said before but it's worth constantly repeating. Because people have trouble believing it. I don't think that Trump has any strategy at all. In other words, he doesn't have a geopolitical theory that he's working from. He doesn't really understand the connections between Iran and Russia and China and why they matter.

He doesn't have an endgame in Iran that he has a real plan to achieve. Any decision that he makes is one that is affected by his perception of how to be the winner in that particular moment. He lives in a in a kind of eternal present, where he always is in combat against somebody. Whether it's the Iranians or whether it's the CNN or whether it's a judge or whether it's some other critic - and he always needs to somehow emerge as the winner.

And that seems to be, if you watch him over time and you watch him step by step, that is the best determinant of how he'll act. And so, looking for a grand strategy or an explanation of why he likes Putin, but doesn't like Putin's allies, but is sometimes on one side or the other, you will misunderstand him. And I find that actually rational people often resist this interpretation of Trump.

Applebaum has made it clear that she’s is speaking for herself as a historian and political analyst. But she has been married for decades to Radosław Sikorski, the current Polish Foreign Minister. So she has something of a privileged perspective in that way.

Because people - especially Europeans - I've said this to Europeans and I find they react by saying "We just can't believe that's how the American president acts. That can't be the explanation. There must be 3-D chess, right? There must be a grand strategy behind it."

I always say, of course there are people around Trump who have strategies. And there are people who wanted him to achieve things. And he's clearly influenced sometimes by one person or another, one group or another, but I don't think he himself has thought this through.

I mean, that he was attacking Iran who is Putin's ally and Putin is his friend. I doubt very much that that pattern of associations went through his head.

This is very well said. Trump has no strategic sense of foreign policy, at least not in any normal sense of the word. I call his perspective Old Right isolationism because of his combination of contempt for alliances and an instinctive hardcore nationalist militarism.

The guy thinks that tariffs are taxes that other countries pay to the United States government. At least that’s how he normally describes it when he’s talking about it. They are actually paid by importers who then pass all or most of the tariff cost on to consumers. It’s the importers and their customers who pay additional taxes to the US government, not the exporting country.

That’s his favorite foreign policy idea. And he has that completely garbled.

In addition to his lack of any strategic sense, he obviously has an extremely limited understanding of how diplomacy in general works. There is an enormous amount of misdirection and deceit in normal diplomacy. But a President needs to have some understanding of the ways foreign countries will read his public statements and Truth Social rants.

Not declaring your bottom line to the opposite party in a negotiation is one thing. Not having any sense of how the rest of the world interprets in the normal language of diplomacy what a US President is trying to convey is a very different thing.

Applebaum gives some further examples of how clueless Trump is on some major issues:

I really can't stress this enough. I mean, Trump doesn't know anything about Putin. He doesn't know what it means that he has KGB training, or that he's attempting to manipulate him. You know, Putin clearly sees Trump as a kind of mark and reckons that talking to him is you know he can he can he can manipulate him into doing what he wants.

[Trump] doesn't know anything about Russia and its history with Ukraine. He doesn't know that much about the war. …

It's like [Trump is] a sort of blunt object running into this complex situation and sometimes he gets frustrated. But I've still never heard him openly criticize Russia in a way that suggested to me that he was planning to put any pressure on Russia or increase sanctions on Russia, which actually Senate Republicans have argued he should do.

Nor have I heard him talking about increasing armament levels or increasing any kind of support for Ukraine: So I take this is a kind of performance. He's so-called anger at his friend [Putin], maybe in the hope that the friend will somehow change his mind. But as I said, there's a very deep and profound misunderstanding of who is Putin, who is Russia, what is this war about, why Ukraine is fighting also why Russia's fighting.

Look, Russia started this war because they believe that the United States and Europe would not ally with Ukraine. And he genuinely believed that this was a way to end bring an end to NATO, to demonstrate that the western alliance is weak, to undermine American power. For Putin this is existential, in that sense that he understood this as a as the final kind of death blow to the liberal world that he hates.

And of course Trump doesn't see any of that context at all. [my emphasis]

Other foreign policy analyst might tend to describe Russian aims in Ukraine as more specifically directly at keeping Ukraine out of NATO than the hope that NATO would just fall apart over the 2022 invasion.

But her description of Trump’s diplomatic cluelessness and incompetence certainly fits well with what we’re seeing of him in action.

By the way, Trump isn’t yet even six months into his second Presidential term.

Applebaum also has some worthwhile comments about Trump’s domestic authoritarianism in the interview.

1. On Trump's "Spectacle of Power" - A New Interview With Anne Applebaum. Simon Rosenberg YouTube channel 06/25/2025. (Accessed: 2025-26-06). Slightly edited from the YouTube transcript, e.g., omitting the “you know”s.