To many observers, Donald Trump’s foreign policy represents an “upside-down world.” As the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, put it this morning, Trump’s “attack-thy-friends, befriend-thy-enemies approach to international relations has become the feature, not the bug, of U.S. foreign policy.”
Baker and others are right: Trump kicks our friends while he kisses up to our enemies. The question is why. Some point to his supposed love of authoritarians — and there’s plenty of evidence for that. Others point to his long-running complaint that America’s friends free-ride on U.S. protection while running trade surpluses at America’s expense — also true.
But the deeper reason is this: our enemies have taken Trump’s measure, and our friends haven’t – at least not yet. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea each have found a way to play Trump – through a mixture of defiance, flattery, and imposing costs he had not anticipated or understood. Most U.S. allies, by contrast, have chosen a third option — neither confrontation nor flattery, exactly, but quiet hope that deference will make the problem go away. It hasn’t, and it won’t. The lesson of the last eighteen months is simple: don’t give in. Play him — don’t flatter him.
Iran Gets the Better of Trump
Next week, Trump’s war against Iran passes the six-month mark. Launched as a short war meant to topple the Islamic regime and end Iran’s nuclear program in short order, Trump’s immediate goal now is to restore free passage through the Strait of Hormuz — a state of affairs that went unquestioned until the first bombs fell.
For decades, Iran feared a direct military confrontation with the United States and built a regional proxy network as a deterrent against exactly the kind of attack Trump and Israel eventually launched. That deterrent failed. But the war taught Iran’s newly installed leadership something else: it could hit U.S. bases throughout the region, hold the energy and other infrastructure of its neighbors hostage, and — most consequentially — control the strait through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquid gas flowed before the war began.
Trump tried to end the war on his terms through negotiation. But the memorandum of understanding reached two months ago, and that expired on Monday, was widely and rightly seen as a U.S. surrender. Then he threatened escalation. In April he warned of the destruction of an entire civilization. In August he vowed strikes that were bigger and more powerful than any since World War II. Thirteen times Trump threatened escalation against Iran; thirteen times he backed down.
The reason is simple: Iran would not capitulate. It struck back instead. “We have no problem with war at all, and we are ready for the big confrontation,” Iranian officials told their American counterparts, according to a former Iranian diplomat’s account. “Trump told the Iranians: ‘I will hit the power in Iran.’ So the Iranians said: ‘If you strike, we strike.’”
Trump is now left declaring the Strait of Hormuz U.S. territory — posting a map to that effect on Truth Social. But the reality, as Iran’s foreign ministry put it, is that the strait “was Iran’s, is Iran’s, and will remain Iran’s.” Six months in, Iran remains defiant and in control. Trump, for his part, has stopped threatening to bomb Iran and started threatening to bomb Oman instead — America’s longtime friend, punished for trying to broker the peace Washington couldn’t.
Great Respect from Kim Jong Un
Where Iran has frustrated Trump by hitting back, Kim Jong Un has taken the opposite approach — flattery, not force — and it has worked even better, and at no cost to Pyongyang at all. In his first term, Trump believed he could talk North Korea out of its nuclear weapons, something three of his predecessors had already failed to do. He tried the usual playbook: threatening to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” and boasting that his “Nuclear Button” was “much bigger and more powerful” than Kim’s.
Kim didn’t flinch and didn’t fight back. He simply offered a summit instead. Trump was delighted, treating it as an honor to be the first sitting U.S. president to meet a North Korean leader — though the honor plainly ran the other way. Meetings followed, but Trump came away with nothing: no denuclearization, no missile freeze. North Korea kept building, developing a land- and sea-based arsenal that today holds American territory at risk.
Now, as force and more threats have failed to unreal Iran’s nuclear program, Trump thinks his relationship with Kim will allow him to succeed where earlier efforts failed completely. The US president is pushing his aides for another meeting with Kim — a leader who “has always treated me with great respect,” Trump says. “I understand him. He understands me.” Kim certainly does. The North Korean despot has learned that a warm letter and a little praise are enough to let Trump claim vindication, and that Trump’s need for that story matters more to him than what Kim is actually doing with the time it buys: building more weapons, deploying longer-range missiles, sending troops and missiles to fight for Russia in Ukraine, and quietly repairing ties with Beijing. Flattery, not defiance, is Kim’s leverage — and it has bought him everything he’s wanted.
China Plays the Art of the Deal
No country has demonstrated it has Trump’s number better than China, and no leader knows this better than Xi Jinping. Early in his second term, Trump tried to play hardball, raising tariffs on Chinese goods in steps — 10, 20, 50, 100, and finally 145 percent. Beijing matched him at every step. Trump backed off only when the bond markets got nervous, and the two countries have lived under an uneasy trade truce ever since.
China had been preparing for this fight for decades. In the early 1990s, it set out to dominate the processing of the critical materials that run through nearly all advanced manufacturing. “The Middle East has oil,” Deng Xiaoping said in 1992. “China has rare earths.” When Beijing finally cut off exports of those materials, it threatened to shut down American manufacturing across the board — and Trump reversed course.
Having proven its leverage in 2025, China moved in 2026 to cultivate Trump rather than fight him further. Xi understood that Trump craved a “big deal” and that nothing would please him more than being treated like a king. The price for that treatment became clear at a summit in Beijing in May, where Xi walked Trump through the Forbidden City and his private garden — and, in between the pageantry, made his real ask: Taiwan.
Xi has long insisted that Taiwan’s unification with the mainland is inevitable — a matter of when, not whether. In Beijing, he pressed Trump on U.S. arms sales to the island and pushed him to state his opposition to Taiwanese independence, which would go well beyond the traditional American position of merely not supporting it.
Trump never directly answered the independence question. But he made unmistakably clear that he’d heard Xi. He told Fox News’s Bret Baier he was holding a pending $12 billion arms package “in abeyance,” adding, “it’s a very good negotiating chip for us” — a marked break from the policy, set in 1982, that the U.S. would not consult Beijing on arms sales to Taiwan. He also repeated his false claim that Taiwan had “stolen” America’s chip industry, and offered a geography lesson that answered, more clearly than any policy statement could, how far he’d go to defend the island: “China is a very, very powerful big country, that’s a very small island,” he told Baier. “It’s 59 miles away. 59 miles. We are 9,500 miles away.”
Xi, no doubt, was delighted. He too had gotten Trump’s number — and now sees an opportunity to seize Taiwan during the time Trump remains in office.
Putin Plays Trump
Putin has played Trump more skillfully than anyone. He persuaded Trump that the two of them, without Ukraine at the table, should negotiate the end of Russia’s war. He got Trump to cut off military and economic aid to Kyiv and to press Ukraine to cede territory Russia had failed to take in more than a decade of fighting. He got Trump to push for Ukrainian elections mid-war. He got the United States to vote alongside Russia and North Korea against Ukraine at the United Nations. He secured a summit in Alaska at the very moment the rest of the Western world was trying to isolate him. And when reports surfaced that Russia had shared intelligence with Iran to help target American forces in the Gulf, Trump’s response showed where his instincts lie: “I’ll ask Putin about it. I don’t think they’ve been doing it.”
Unlike Iran and China, Putin hasn’t had to make defiance costly to move Trump. He has simply given Trump something he wants more — the role of history’s peacemaker — and let Trump talk himself into concession after concession. The result is the same as if Moscow had forced the issue: aid to Ukraine cut, sanctions relief floated, a war grinding on with no American pressure on the one party actually prolonging it.
Resisting the Shakedown President
Trump is what I’ve called the Shakedown President. For much of his life he shook down real estate buyers and sellers, contractors, bankers, lawyers — friends and family alike. As president, he has shaken down law firms, media companies, universities, and businesses of every kind. Abroad, he has tried to shake down America’s oldest friends, using U.S. power to dominate those who long assumed they had nothing to fear from Washington.
But in China, Russia, North Korea, and now Iran, Trump has met adversaries who refused to be shaken down — by charming him, imposing costs, and subtly making their own demands into Trump’s. And rather than lashing out against our foes, he takes out his frustrations against our friends.
Humiliated by six months of Iranian defiance, Trump didn’t escalate against Tehran. Instead, last weekend he lashed out at South Korea — ordering the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with Seoul because of its refusal to help in a war Trump thought he’d win in days. And he added salt to the wound, praising North Korea and its leader, a country whose million-men army threatens the South, home to nearly 28,000 US troops. Punish the ally; court the adversary — all in the same Truth Social post. It’s what bullies do.
There is only one way to deal with a bully: don’t give in. Not with flattery. Not with silence, which he reads as weakness. The Europeans, Asian allies like Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and Canada, Mexico, and Brazil all have real leverage of their own — economic, military, diplomatic — and they’d be far better off using it together than hoping, separately, that Trump will change. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran didn’t get Trump’s number by waiting. They got it by making him pay for pressing them. Bullies only ever back down when someone is willing to hit back.
You mistake as 'friends' us peoples who thought we knew all'y'all.
'Acquaintances' is more apt.
Friends do not let loose a raging sociopath on one another.
(let alone twice)
Great article. Note that the ones who read and play Trump are almost all dictatorships. I'd suggest the reason democratic leaders haven't played that game is because Trump is electoral poison (especially in Europe). Even his biggest UK fanboys, Reform, now distance themselves from him.