In unrelenting rain, more than sixty world leaders—Presidents and Prime Ministers, kings and princes, from a third of all the nations on Earth—shared big black umbrellas as they marched together down the Champs-Élysées, in Paris, on Sunday. They gathered to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War, and to express global unity. Donald Trump was not among them. He drove to the ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in the dry comfort of his limousine. Aides cited security. The only apparent threat was from an unarmed topless activist, with the words “Fake Peacemaker” emblazoned across her chest, who tried to run near his motorcade.
The President did the same thing the previous day, calling off a trip to honor the more than two thousand Americans buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, some fifty miles outside of Paris. (All told, fifty thousand Americans died in the First World War.) The White House cited foul weather. The response was fast and furious on the President’s favorite medium. Nicholas Soames, the grandson of the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a Conservative Party member of the British Parliament, tweeted, “They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate @realDonaldTrump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen.” He added the hashtag “#hesnotfittorepresenthisgreatcountry.” Michael Beschloss, the Presidential historian, tweeted a picture of President John F. Kennedy and the French President Charles de Gaulle getting soaked (without umbrellas) in Paris when they honored the war dead, in 1961. There were numerous jibes on Twitter, including one from @votevets, about whether the decision had something to do with Trump’s hair. The same day, despite the rain, the leaders of France and Germany managed to visit Compiègne—also fifty miles from Paris—where the Armistice was signed in a railway car a century ago.
Trump flew his entourage almost four thousand miles for the commemoration but showed little interest in most of it. He lunched with his counterparts and offered brief remarks at a second American cemetery. But, otherwise, it was a dud of a trip. His disdain was all the more striking for the fact that he needs the rest of the world more than ever. The U.S. midterm elections produced a divided Congress, limiting movement on major domestic issues for the next two years. As he mounts his reëlection bid for 2020 Trump will need foreign-policy breakthroughs to appear either productive or Presidential. Yet he seems, instead, to be withdrawing further.
The President also skipped the inaugural Paris Peace Forum—created to foster collective global action—which was attended by the other world leaders, after the Armistice commemoration on Sunday. “Will today be a symbol of lasting peace or a last moment of unity before the world falls into more disorder?” the French President, Emmanuel Macron, who served as host, said, challenging his peers. “It depends solely on us.” The forum’s theme was the need for a sense of community in order to prevent a Third World War. “If isolation wasn’t the solution a hundred years ago, how can it be today, in such an interconnected world?” the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said. As she spoke, Trump was already on Air Force One, en route back to Washington.
Trump “no longer sees America as the country that leads others towards a common purpose,” Ivo Daalder, the co-author of “The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership,” and a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, told me in an e-mail. “This was so evident over the weekend in Paris, where another American president (from Wilson to Obama) would have taken center stage, and instead Macron tried to fill a gaping hole.”
Trump’s relations with his foreign counterparts are crumbling. The U.S. schism with Europe—where hundreds of thousands of Americans died to preserve allies—has arguably not been this deep since the First World War ended. The gap is wide on existential issues (climate change), global threats (Russia), and war and peace (the Iran nuclear deal). Since Trump took office, Europe has launched discussions on creating military and financial institutions that skirt the United States.
Even the bromance with Macron has ended. Last week, the French President said that Europe needed a regional military, because it could no longer rely on the United States as a partner. On Twitter, Trump slammed Macron’s idea as “very insulting.” The two men tried to make nice in Paris. But in his Armistice speech the French leader openly rebuked Trump’s “America First” agenda. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” Macron told world leaders. “By saying, ‘Our interests first—who cares about the others?,’ we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace, and what is essential: its moral values.” Macron warned of “old demons” returning and unleashing chaos. As he spoke, Trump grimaced.
The only leader that the President seemed to connect with at the Armistice ceremony was the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who showed up late. When he joined the commemoration, the two men smiled at each other. Putin gave Trump a thumbs-up sign.
Trump’s need for foreign-policy breakthroughs comes as his biggest diplomatic initiatives are either stuck or breaking down. The Helsinki summit with Putin, in July, has produced nothing on arms control, Ukraine, or Syria. The Middle East peace plan designed by Jared Kushner has been repeatedly delayed. Since the Singapore summit, in June, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, has not provided an inventory of his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons or ballistic missiles—much less explained how or when they will be destroyed. The scheduled meeting in New York last week between the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Yong Chol, was abruptly cancelled—and is not expected until next year. Earlier this month, North Korea warned that it could restart “building up its nuclear forces” if U.S. sanctions are not removed soon.
Trump is also spurning diplomatic opportunities. He opted out of two other summits this week in Asia, a pivotal venue given China’s growing dynamism and the North Korea initiative. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation—twenty-one members that border the Pacific Rim—accounts for more than forty per cent of world trade and more than half of the world’s total G.D.P. It will meet in Papua New Guinea. The smaller summit, of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, will be held in Singapore. Other world leaders, including Putin and the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, will attend one or both summits. Trump will be at neither; Vice-President Pence flew out on Sunday in his stead.
The next test of whether Trump can wring out a foreign-policy success will be the annual G-20 meeting of the world’s biggest economies, which will open in Buenos Aires on November 30th. Trump is scheduled to hold talks with both Putin and Xi. “There are powerful reasons why Trump will be more engaged after the election, not least because he has more room for maneuver abroad than he will at home,” Daalder told me. “It is those bilateral meetings, where his goal is to win, that will continue to be his focus. Plenty for him to do, even if the chances of success in all of them are slim.”
