LONDON (AP) — Do not antagonize one's opponents unnecessarily, a basic principle of diplomacy says. But as the United States faces a trade war with China and various tensions overseas, President Donald Trump's emissaries are increasingly ticking off allied countries and being called to account.
Just this week, no fewer than three U.S. envoys scrambled to extricate themselves from diplomatic hot water.
Denmark’s foreign minister summoned the top U.S. diplomat in the country to answer for reports that at least three people with connections to Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland, a Danish territory. France summoned the U.S. ambassador, Trump in-law Charles Kushner, over his letter to President Emmanuel Macron alleging the country has not done enough to fight antisemitism. And the American ambassador to Turkey, longtime Trump friend Tom Barrack, apologized Thursday for using the word “animalistic” while calling for a gaggle of reporters to quiet down during a press conference in Lebanon.
But in the other two cases, the Trump administration stood pat. Kushner did not show up for his summonsing, leaving the French to take it up with his No. 2. The top diplomat in Denmark did attend his meeting in Copenhagen, and the State Department said a “productive conversation” ensued. But behind the scenes in Washington, the Trump administration — through an official who spoke only on condition of anonymity — had a far more casual response.
“The Danes," the official said, “need to calm down.”
A pattern emerges
There was much tsk-tsking from the diplomatic world over the indelicate exchanges, which would perhaps have been minor on their own.
But they're consistent with Trump's blunt-spoken style, his “America First” approach to foreign policy and his attitude toward reporters — all of which appeal to broad swaths of his political base. And they track with the president's record of upending norms. Indeed, the State Department has offered little in response, except to say that it supports Kushner's letter to Macron and that the government “does not control or direct” the actions of private citizens in Greenland.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly dismissed the notion that the recent diplomatic kerfuffles have undercut Trump’s global standing or dimmed his trust in his envoys.
“President Trump has restored America’s standing on the world stage, and his foreign policy accomplishments speak for themselves," Kelly said, citing Trump's trade deals, his strike on Iran 's nuclear facilities and the freeing of Americans detained in other countries as examples. “He has full confidence in his entire team to advance his America First foreign policy agenda.”
The trifecta of ire against American diplomats in recent days was only the latest against Trump's overseas appointees, several of whom raised eyebrows during the president's first term. That's in part due to the particularly American practice — in both parties — of handing coveted postings to campaign donors and presidential friends regardless of their diplomatic experience.
Trump's diplomats have something of a track record of annoying foreign governments. During his first term, numerous U.S. ambassadors from Iceland to Germany and South Africa as well as the European Union got under the skin of their host governments, prompting summonses if not private complaints.
One former senior State Department official said Trump loved the publicity these incidents received and often sent the ambassadors in question congratulatory notes when their actions produced news coverage.
The main exception to that was Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the EU whom Trump fired just days after Sondland testified on Capitol Hill during Trump’s first impeachment proceedings over Ukraine.
The hearings touched on another messy diplomatic matter — Trump's ousting of his ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who testified that she felt pressured to issue statements of support for Trump. “The woman,” Trump said during a phone call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “she’s going to go through some things.”
Still, the recent dustups were striking for their risk of amplifying tensions among Western allies as the U.S. and China vie for economic superiority and talk of a meetup between their leaders as soon as this fall.
“The Trump administration stresses, I think rightly, that the U.S.-China rivalry is now the major axis around which international affairs turn,” Iver B. Neumann, director of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, an independent think tank in Norway, wrote in an email. “One of the major assets of the U.S. in that rivalry is that it has a high number of allies, whereas China only has one (North Korea). Present U.S. policy alienates allies on purpose, which risks losing them.”
What happened with France?
It started with Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, which angered Israel and the U.S. because it revived the prospect of a two-state solution to the seemingly endless conflict.
Kushner's response, published Sunday by The Wall Street Journal, alleged that such “public statements haranguing Israel and gestures toward recognition of a Palestinian state embolden extremists, fuel violence and endanger Jewish life in France.” Kushner urged Macron, among other things, to "abandon steps that give legitimacy to Hamas and its allies.”
France's Foreign Ministry said it “firmly refutes” Kushner's allegation and declared that it fell “short of the quality of the transatlantic relationship between France and the United States and the trust that should result from it between allies."
(Trump has said several times and in several contexts, “I don't trust anybody,” including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.)
The ministry summoned the U.S. ambassador on Monday, a formal and public notice of displeasure. He did not show, so French officials met with the embassy’s No. 2 instead. Kushner, a real-estate developer, is the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
What about Denmark?
Trump has been relatively quiet recently about his desire to acquire Greenland, the Danish territory in the Arctic, for security purposes. In March, Greenland voted to decide its own future as it moves toward independence from Denmark.
But Trump's hint that he could invade the massive island stands. So when Denmark's main broadcaster reported Wednesday that at least three people with connections to Trump had been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland, Denmark's Foreign Ministry summoned the top U.S. diplomat in the country, Mark Stroh, a career member of the foreign service, for an explanation.
The State Department said "the U.S. government does not control or direct the actions of private citizens," values its relationship with Denmark and "respects the right of Greenlanders to determine their own future.”
Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the nonprofit Stimson Center in Washington, said Trump’s envoys are unlikely to be reprimanded or change their agendas. But the incidents might serve as a warning “to watch what they are saying and doing more carefully.”
“The ball is in other countries’ court to decide whether they are willing to jeopardize the diplomatic relations with (the) U.S. further,” Sun wrote in an email. Doing so would “have significant repercussions over much more critical domains.”
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Associated Press writers Matthew Lee, Aamer Madhani and Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this story from Washington.
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