Big trouble brewing

President-elect Trump’s cabinet appointments were not moderates from the first. With the exception of Defense and Homeland Security, he has appointed people who oppose the missions of the departments they have been named to lead. Rick Perry famously couldn’t even remember that Energy was one of the departments he said as a candidate he wanted to abolish. Ryan Zinke, named to Interior, opposes the conservation that department is entrusted with.

On domestic issues, we can anticipate that Congress will present a roadblock to some of the more outrageous proposals from the new administration. Abolishing Obamacare without providing an alternative isn’t going to happen, for precisely the reason Republicans opposed it in the first place: there are a lot of people enjoying its benefits. Depriving 20 million people of health insurance is not a winning political maneuver. The Energy Department isn’t going away, if only because it makes our nuclear weapons and manages nuclear waste. I’ll bet the national parks will still be the national parks four years from now, even if they will be open to more commercial activity than today.

On foreign policy, there are fewer constraints. The beneficiaries are not so well defined and presidential powers are dominant. Trump shook the One China policy with a single phone call, precipitating bellicose rhetoric from Beijing about the South China Sea. He has named as ambassador to Israel an advocate of Jewish settlements on the West Bank who opposes the two-state solution and looks forward to moving the embassy to Jerusalem. His bromance with Putin is already shaking allied confidence in NATO. Trump is a master at upsetting apple carts with small gestures.

His nominee for Secretary of State, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, is not at first sight the same type. By all reports, he has been a capable, maybe even an outstanding, manager of a gigantic energy company, which under his guidance even accepted that global warming is real and caused in part by human activity. But he too has been willing to defy expectations and do business not only with Russian President Putin but also a non-sovereign state like Iraqi Kurdistan as well as with petty dictators in weak states who need Exxon to exploit their resources so they can steal the revenue and keep themselves in power. It is hard to picture Tillerson supporting democratic reforms after a career of ignoring regime abuses, as Rachel Maddow ably made clear last night in an interview with Steve Coll:

Perhaps the most important foreign policy nomination has not yet been made: the US Trade Representative is presumably the person who will need to fulfill Trump’s campaign promises by renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, and ending the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If he follows through, these moves will make Europe, Asia and Latin America doubt America’s longstanding commitment to free trade and investment, present the Chinese and Russians with opportunities to fill giant gaps, and undermine the World Trade Organization.

That however is not my biggest concern. Trump is an ethnic nationalist with an extreme ethnic nationalist, Steve Bannon, as his chief strategist. They will be sympathetic to ethnic nationalist reasoning, which is what Russian President Putin is offering as an explanation for his aggression in Crimea, Donbas, Transnistria, South Ossetia, and  Abkhazia. “Just trying to protect ethnic Russians,” Putin says. How many of these places will Trump be willing to concede to Russia in order to consummate his bromance with Putin? The Trump administration may also be more sympathetic than Obama has been to Iraqi Kurdistan’s independence ambitions, setting off a series of partitions in the Middle East (Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, even Turkey and Iran are potential candidates).

Four years is a long time. I don’t think it will be more than a month before some of Trump’s international moves brew the United States big trouble.