Sunday, August 06, 2017

Troublesome Diplomacy
Greed and spontaneity peculiar to Trump have negative effect on diplomacy, shocking the world and his administration as well.

At the recent G-20 summit, nicknamed “19:1 international meeting”, Trump advocated protectionism when the participants argued for economic cooperation and he insisted on the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change to seek its own interests when others called for reduction of greenhouse gas emission. More strange is that he instigated international sanctions against the DPRK while speaking about its “threat with ICBM” quite irrelevantly in the debate about economic issues.

As far as the DPRK’s ICBM test fire is concerned, it is attributable entirely to the merits of successive US rulers including Trump who have persistently imposed nuclear threat on it.

Trump also adopted an approach completely different from that of State Secretary Tillerson as regards the worsening friction between some Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Tillerson took a soft attitude to Qatar from the beginning of the crisis, but Trump openly sided with Saudi Arabia-led Arab bloc.

Such diplomacy serves as a good source of media coverage.

Foreign media report that Tillerson is widely thought to have lost ground due to Trump and the White House and Trump conducts most of his diplomacy through his Twitter account and tweets his foreign policy decisions and initiatives almost every day without prior consultation with his chief diplomat. The local media even say that Tillerson may resign.

According to an opinion poll conducted in the US over the half-year performance of Trump in office, the approval ratings fell to 36 percent, the record low among his predecessors. But it seems better than his diplomatic performance.

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