Trump's assault on NATO and his assault on the GATT/WTO world trading system should be seen as being of a piece with each other 1/ nyti.ms/2JaXUrK
In both cases you go badly astray if you take Trump's claimed motivations and goals at face value. That is, trade war and disruption of the Western alliance are NOT bargaining ploys aimed at pressuring others into changing their policies 2/
There's probably nothing the Chinese could do that would satisfy Trump on trade; there's certainly nothing the Europeans could do, since they're no more protectionist than we are. Nor would, say, a rise in German defense spending calm the waters 3/
The best hypothesis is that trade war and destruction of alliances aren't means to an end -- they are ends in themselves. Trump isn't trying to fix the system, he wants to destroy it, and supposed wrongdoing by others is just an excuse. 4/
Why the urge to destroy? Well, partly it's because it's what Putin wants. But I also suspect that the whole postwar system offends Trump's sense of how things should be. It was devised by elites -- the kind of people who, in his mind, have sneered at him his whole life 5/
And the formal institutional structures those elites created -- NATO, the WTO, etc. -- basically form a kind of international rule of law that constrains bullies, where Trump wants a world in which bullies can do whatever they want 6/
So Trump isn't aiming for any kind of deal. In particular, for Trump a collapse of trade rules and a drastic, permanent reduction in world trade, a permanent collapse of Western mutual security agreements, are features, not bugs 7/
