Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Analysing his 19 months in office since January 20, 2025, The New York Times has ‘discovered’ the achievements of President Donald Trump in his second term in the White House: He threatens friends and courts foes!
His hostility to allies like Oman, Canada, and South Korea, and his affection for adversaries like North Korea (and Pakistan), may still shock some. But it comes as little surprise, the media reported, after a decade of upheaval.
The latest surveys, ahead of the November midterm elections to Congress, have suggested Trump is now touching his lowest popularity level ever: only 33 per cent of American voters still support him.
The irony is, once again, Trump is threatening his country’s own partners with everything from tariffs to bombs. Once again, he is fawning over a nuclear-armed tyrant deemed to be one of the biggest dangers to US security. And once again, the world is left trying to make sense of a United States that has upended the world order that it established eight decades ago, NYT said.
Nearly 10 years after he first came to the White House on the slogan of America First, his attack-thy-friends, befriend-thy-enemies approach to international relations has become the feature, not the bug, of US foreign policy. Traditional alliances from Europe to Asia to the West Asia have frayed while he courts those once seen as its adversaries, even the Evil Axis, such as Pakistan and North Korea. The third member of this axis, Iran, is currently fighting a war against America.
Even so, the past few days have thrown the Trumpian worldview into stark relief. He declared that he would bomb Oman, a key friend in the complicated diplomacy of the West Asia, if he decides it is getting in the way of his war with Iran. He was set to impose punitive new tariffs on Canada, once considered the United States’ closest friend. And he announced that he would pull back military support from South Korea, the bulwark of the US network of partners in the Asia-Pacific.
At the same time, he again began sending public mash notes to North Korea’s absolute dictator, Kim Jong-un, with whom by his own description he “fell in love” in his first term (2016-20). Kim, who rules one of the most oppressive nations in the world, never did give up his nuclear weapons, as Trump once declared he would. Instead, Kim has vastly expanded his nuclear arsenal in defiance of Trump, who nonetheless remains a suitor, no matter how unrequited.
Trump has long argued that his approach to other countries, however unorthodox, makes sense for the United States. Under previous presidents, allies took advantage of America’s security presence and trade rules without reciprocating, Trump maintains. He sees relatively high trade deficits and relatively low Nato military spending as proof that so-called friends are exploiting the United States.
As for sweet talking North Korea, China, Russia and other longtime adversaries, Trump contends that the confrontational policies of the past failed to achieve what they set out to, so better to try more diplomacy. He still hopes to reach a nuclear accord with North Korea, seal a comprehensive trade deal with China and reestablish full ties with Russia by brokering an end to Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
The war with Iran has provided a new scorecard for the allies that deserve support and those that do not. Countries that have declined to facilitate military operations against Tehran or use force to help guaranteed passage through the Strait of Hormuz have in his view betrayed the United States, even though he never asked for their opinions before starting the war. After targeting Britain, France, Spain, Italy and others for not doing more to help him against Iran, Trump has now focused his ire on South Korea.
“We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbour, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?” he said this week after announcing that he would scale back joint exercises with South Korea.
By contrast, he went on, “Kim Jong-un has always treated me with great respect, and we’ve met on numerous occasions, actually, two primary occasions — spoken and spent time. I understand him. He understands me.”
If so, that distinguishes Kim from European and Asian allies who still do not understand Trump, even if they have come to expect his volatile outbursts. Until now, presidents of both parties have valued their relationships with overseas friends. And while there have been plenty of moments of tension over the years, they have worked to keep them from escalating too far.
The presence of US forces in South Korea since the 1950s war has long irritated Trump, who sees it in zero-sum terms. In his first term, he sought to pull troops out and cancel military exercises, judging them wasteful and unnecessarily provocative toward his friend in North Korea. He sought to charge South Korea billions of dollars for US protection, and linked security issues to his complaints about Seoul’s trade policies.
Trump is not the first president interested in bringing troops home from South Korea so long after the war. President Jimmy Carter also promised to scale down US forces there, but gave up amid resistance from Congress and his own administration. Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was Bush’s defense secretary, surprised the South Koreans by redeploying a brigade to Iraq, and never returned it. Today, about 28,500 US troops are stationed in South Korea, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Oman, for its part, has for years been an important interlocutor between the United States and Iran, helping to facilitate negotiations when the two sides were open to talks. But Trump has grown increasingly aggravated that Oman has sought to broker a deal with Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz and levy a toll on foreign ships.
He first threatened to mount an unprovoked war on the sultanate in May, saying that “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up.” On Monday, he lashed out again, declaring that if Oman “gets in the way” of his efforts to reach an agreement with Iran, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
Canada faces a different form of hostility from Trump, who vowed to slap new tariffs of 50 percent on more than 500 Canadian goods, including hockey sticks and cheese, as of Tuesday at midnight. As of Tuesday afternoon, Canada was still trying to stave off the tariffs by offering trade concessions meant to appeal to Trump.
But even if the two sides reach an accord, there remain many points of friction between the neighbors, exacerbated by Trump’s oft-expressed ambition to take over Canada and make it “the 51st state.” Just last month, the opening of the new Gordie Howe International Bridge linking Detroit with Windsor, Ontario, was delayed for weeks over various grievances Trump has with Canada.