David A. Andelman, visiting scholar at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, wrote an op-ed for CNN about about foreign affairs under President Trump’s administration.
Major negotiations were set to take place on Wednesday in Washington on President Donald Trump’s efforts to jawbone China and Mexico into trade pacts substantially more favorable to the United States.
But suddenly, a deeply wounded president may be ill-equipped to hold any feet to the fire in critical crises of his own making on three continents.
Initial media reaction across Europe and Asia overnight suggest a world somewhat stunned by the legal dramas Tuesday involving Trump’s former lawyer and campaign chief. Stunned, and clearly aware of how problematic his presidency has suddenly become.
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In Germany, where there has been no love lost between Trump and Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leading daily Süddeutsche Zeitung headlined: “Ticking time bombs for Trump.”
In Asia, the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua played the story very straight, quoting CNN as reporting “Cohen was not expected to cooperate with the government…saying that by pleading guilty both Cohen and prosecutors would avoid the spectacle and uncertainty of a trial.”
Of course, the effects of this confluence of events should not be minimized. In Washington, American and Chinese officials were set to begin their first trade negotiations since June when talks between Wilbur Ross and China’s lead economic adviser Liu He broke off in Beijing.
This time, there’s a hard deadline, with new 25% tariffs set to kick in on $16 billion worth of goods on Thursday and Trump himself predicting there’d be no real progress in the latest round of negotiations. After all, why should there be?
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At the same time, Mexican and US officials were due to resume their trade talks in Washington on Wednesday after a day’s postponement. The key outstanding issue? Automotive manufacturing, the quantity of locally made components needed to avoid tariffs.
And that’s just the first step toward a renegotiation of the entire North American Free Trade Agreement — a top priority for Trump, at least before the double blows that fell on Tuesday.
And Canada, quite prudently, is waiting on the sidelines to resume its talks with Washington to examine the outline of any Mexican-US agreement.
But trade is not the only issue that requires an American president in full command of the levers of power available to him. Also at stake are any number of pending or potential international crises, many provoked single-handedly by Trump before the apparently deep wounds inflicted in the last 24 hours.