On the world stage, Trump plays up both diplomacy and military might

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So much for the Trump retreat from the world stage.

All year, commentators and political figures have been struggling with the perceived desire of the United States – which for decades, in the Shakespearean locution, was satisfied to bestride the narrow world like a Colossus – to step back from overseas military and diplomatic engagement and to adopt an America First foreign policy.

That’s not what an end-of-the-year glimpse of the Trump administration suggests:

Christmas Day Tomahawk missile strikes in Nigeria that Donald Trump described as “fast, vicious, and sweet”; a Sunday visit to Mar-a-Lago from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; a Monday visit to the President’s Palm Beach retreat from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Nigeria disputes Trump claim that U.S. missile strike aimed to protect Christians

Who thought that a maxim from the disgraced Nixon-era attorney-general John Mitchell would be the foreign-policy adage of the age? “Watch what we do,” Mr. Mitchell said at the start of the Nixon years, “not what we say.”

What members of the Trump team say: We’ll eschew foreign involvement. What the President does as he nears the first year of his second administration is far different.

In Iran, in the Caribbean, and now in West Africa, there is, in the infelicitous phrases that issued forth from Mr. Trump in recent days, “guns-a-blazing” and “hell to pay.”

For a decade, Americans had come to see the truth in the insight of conservative columnist Salena Zito, who argued that Mr. Trump shouldn’t be taken literally but instead should be taken seriously. The greatest affirmation of that epigram is in foreign policy and national security.

Much of what the President says and does is regarded as risible in the high counsels of global diplomacy (and very likely in Moscow), and as capricious and cruel (as it is viewed in Ottawa).

But it’s not viewed in those ways in Iran, where in late June he ordered a strike against nuclear-weapons facilities; in Venezuela, increasingly vulnerable to regime change as American forces intervene off the coast of South America; or in Nigeria’s Sokoto State, where he spoke of “ISIS Terrorist Scum” and said in a Truth Social posting, “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”

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There are multiple plausible explanations for the Trump administration’s turn to foreign engagement, many of them rooted in presidential tradition that he customarily proves himself in defying.

One is the persistence of the American role as the “global policeman” that dates to the Truman Doctrine of 1947. A second is the unavoidable U.S. economic interests around the globe, which has a special appeal to Mr. Trump, who still regards himself as a business leader.

Another is the tendency of American presidents under pressure at home – in this case contending with rebellion among MAGA forces and perhaps vulnerable to mysteries hidden in the Jeffrey Epstein files – to adopt a separate notion from Shakespeare: that national leaders sometimes escape awkward moments at home by making it their “course to busy giddy minds/With foreign quarrels.”

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In more modern terms, that is sometimes called a wag-the-dog tactic, in which presidents divert attention from difficult domestic issues by conjuring up distractions abroad.

That expedient has been employed by both Richard Nixon (with a 1974 Middle East tour amid the gathering storm of Watergate) and Bill Clinton (with a 1998 strike against Sudan and Afghanistan just after acknowledging a sexual affair with a White House intern).

The Christmas missile attack mounted from a U.S. Navy ship in the Gulf of Guinea against two Islamic State camps in Nigeria came with the approbation, and the assistance, of the Lagos government. “This is what we’ve always been hoping for – to work with the Americans,” Foreign Affairs Minister Yusuf Tuggar told Nigerian broadcaster Channels Television Friday morning.

That may be the most poignant diplomatic expression of the year, for it reflects the sentiment that many leaders around the globe – though not those affiliated with the Warsaw Pact, of course, or some in the Global South – have been saying since the end of the Second World War. That sentiment is precisely what the MAGA forces, who argue that foreign involvement leads to foreign intervention and then to “forever wars” – dread most of all.

Mr. Trump has spent the year trying to straddle both sides. If his Republican predecessor Theodore Roosevelt saw the virtue of a president who would “speak softly and carry a big stick,” Mr. Trump has adopted only half that maxim. He likes the big-shouldered role of an American president, even one who insists his focus is inward, not outward.

This burst of diplomatic and military involvement comes as Mr. Trump has recast the Defence Department as the War Department and, in recent days, moved to boost the power of the American Navy with new battleships (bearing the Trump name) and the conversion of Coast Guard cutters to Navy warships.

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His actions in several theatres of global engagement have engendered criticism among his most devoted supporters but also among his most fervent opponents. This is particularly so when it comes to his interventions, verbal and military, in Africa, a continent that since Second World War engagement in Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Egypt, has been generally outside the focus of American foreign policy. Until recently, U.S. involvement has been largely limited to Cold War struggles in places like Congo and Angola.

“Africa’s never gotten the attention it deserves,” Den­nis Coleman Jett, a retired pro­fes­sor of in­ter­na­tional af­fairs at Penn State Univer­sity and onetime American ambassador to Mozambique, said in an interview. “People are barely aware of or acknowledge what the U.S. has been doing in Africa.”

Trump critics note that the President’s interests seem to be confined to Christians (in Nigeria) and white people (in South Africa) but not extended to malnourished people in Sokoto State and across the continent, where his administration’s foreign-aid cuts have sowed hunger.