American foreign policy

Donald Trump has instructed his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea. The two countries have had a bilateral defense agreement since 1953, and it was in defense of the government in Seoul that 36,500 American service personnel gave their lives during the Korean War. (It is worth noting that, despite the signing of an armistice at Panmunjom in July 1953, the conflict is technically ongoing.) Trump’s hazardous decision to downgrade military cooperation with and support for South Korea has come as a surprise.

One day President Trump wants to dial down hostilities with Iran. “We’re low-keying” the conflict, he said Sunday. A day later, though, he was keyed up. After Tehran demanded reparations from Washington as part of its attempt to resurrect June's Memorandum of Understanding, Trump said on Truth Social that it was the Iranians who should: Compensate America for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Cole, and thousands of others killed in combat. Now it is Trump who has become a hostage of Tehran The problem is simple. For all his bluster about staring down the mad mullahs, Trump is on the run.

This week Ed Miliband made his first trip to Washington DC since becoming Andy Burnham’s Foreign Secretary. He is 56 now, an MP of more than 20 years’ standing in his fourth cabinet role, yet there is something both boyish and gauche about him: the eternal younger brother. How would he fare as Britain’s envoy to President Trump and the cult of MAGA? Miliband had been invited to Washington by Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the pair met at an Association of South East Asian Nations foreign ministers’ conference in the Philippines last month. It had been rumored that the Trump administration was disappointed at Burnham’s selection of Miliband as Foreign Secretary, insofar as it is possible to imagine President Trump displaying much interest in the matter at all.

Donald Trump’s quest for regime change in Iran has backfired horribly. The President misunderstood the resilience of the 47-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran, the strategic calculations of one-time ally Israel and the physical and political geography of the Strait of Hormuz. Vice President J.D. Vance appears now to be positioned as the public face of failure. The decision to launch the assault on Iran was underpinned by Israeli confidence that Iran’s leadership could be toppled and that the United States’ overwhelming firepower would produce shock and awe. It came in the immediate aftermath of plans to acquire Greenland, incorporate Canada, assert dominance over the Panama Canal and topple the then Venezuelan government. Cuba is no doubt next on Trump's list.

J.D. Vance jokingly compared himself to Richard Nixon yesterday. "Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media... kinda sounds like J.D. Vance," he said at the Richard Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. "I’ve always liked Richard Nixon." At the same time, 8,000 miles away, in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian forces struck another ship, further undermining what critics have called "the Vance deal" – the "Memorandum of Understanding" between Tehran and Washington. And that suggests, at a foreign-policy level, the Nixon-Vance parallel is more apt than the 50th Vice President realizes. Of course, Nixon was Commander-in-Chief and Vance is not. And the Vietnam War is very different to America’s current fight with Iran.

Before Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, there were many commentators who sought to sanitize the President. Take him seriously but not literally, they said. Some hinted that his cruder and wilder hyperbole was not the ignorant, boorish reflex it seemed but a shrewd and daring negotiating tactic in Trump’s beloved "art of the deal." It has been reported that the United States is planning to announce a reduction in the number of troops it will make available to NATO in Europe. America is planning to shrink its commitment to the NATO Force model, under which troops "carry out the alliance’s operations, missions and other activities during peacetime.

Air Force One is in the air as I write, whizzing from Beijing back to Washington – and Donald Trump leaves China with many questions unanswered. There were warm words on both sides and plenty of friendly symbolism in the President’s big summit with Xi Jinping. But the fundamental great power tensions remain – over trade, technology, and war and peace in the Middle East and Taiwan. Washington and Beijing agree that Iran should never have a nuclear weapon – though it remains unclear the extent to which China will help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Its closure hurts the Chinese economy, of course, but China has significant energy reserves and Xi knows that the pain spreads around the world to his advantage.