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Max Boot, a lifelong conservative who advised three Republican Presidential candidates on foreign policy, keeps a folder labelled Trump Stupidity File on his computer. Its next to his Trump Lies file. Not sure which is larger at this point, he told me this week. Its neck-and-neck.

Six months into the Trump era, foreign-policy officials from eight past Administrations told me they are aghast that the President is still so witless about the world. He seems as clueless today as he was on January 20th, Boot, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. Trumps painful public gaffes, they warn, indicate that hes not reading, retaining, or listening to his Presidential briefings. And the newbie excuse no longer flies.

Trump has an appalling ignorance of the current world, of history, of previous American engagement, of what former Presidents thought and did, Geoffrey Kemp, who worked at the Pentagon during the Ford Administration and at the National Security Council during the Reagan Administration, reflected. He has an almost studious rejection of the type of in-depth knowledge that virtually all of his predecessors eventually gained or had views on.

Criticism of Donald Trump among Democrats who served in senior national-security positions is predictable and rife. But Republicanswho are historically ambitious on foreign policyare particularly pained by the Presidents missteps and misstatements. So are former senior intelligence officials who have avoided publicly criticizing Presidents until now.

The President has little understanding of the contextof whats happening in the worldand even less interest in hearing the people who want to deliver it, Michael Hayden, a retired four-star general and former director of both the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, told me. Hes impatient, decision-oriented, and prone to action. Its all about the present tense. When he asks, What the hells going on in Iraq? people around him have learned not to say, Well, in 632 . . . (That was the year when the Prophet Muhammad died, prompting the beginning of the Sunni-Shiite split. * )

He just doesnt have an interest in the world, Hayden said.

I asked top Republican and intelligence officials from eight Administrations what they thought was the one thing the President needs to grasp to succeed on the world stage. Their various replies: embrace the fact that the Russians are not Americas friends. Dont further alienate the Europeans, who are our friends. Encourage human rightsa founding principle of American identityand dont make priority visits to governments that curtail them, such as Poland and Saudi Arabia. Understand that North Koreas nuclear program cant be outsourced to China, which cant or wont singlehandedly fix the problem anyway, and realize that military options are limited. Pulling out of innovative trade deals, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, will boost Chinas economy and secure its global influenceto Americas disadvantage. Stop bullying his counterparts. And put the Russia case behind him by coperating with the investigation rather than trying to discredit it.

Trumps latest blunder was made during an appearance in the Rose Garden with Lebanons Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, on July 25th. Lebanon is on the front lines in the fight against ISIS , Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah, Trump pronounced. He got the basics really wrong . Hezbollah is actually part of the Lebanese governmentand has been for a quarter centurywith seats in parliament and Cabinet posts. Lebanons Christian President, Michel Aoun, has been allied with Hezbollah for a decade. As Trump spoke, Hezbollahs militia and the Lebanese Army were fighting ISIS and an Al Qaeda affiliate occupying a chunk of eastern Lebanon along its border with Syria. They won.

The list of other Trump blunders is long. In March, he charged that Germany owed vast sums to the United States for NATO . It doesnt . No NATO member pays the United Statesand never hasso none is in arrears. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal , in April, Trump claimed that Korea actually used to be part of China. Not true . After he arrived in Israel from Saudi Arabia, in May, Trump said that he had just come from the Middle East. (Did he even look at a map?) During his trip to France, in July, the President confused Napoleon Bonaparte, the diminutive emperor who invaded Russia and Egypt, with Napoleon III, who was Frances first popularly elected President, oversaw the design of modern Paris, and is still the longest-serving head of state since the French Revolution (albeit partly as an emperor, too). And thats before delving into his demeaning tweets about other world leaders and flashpoints.

The sheer scale of his lack of knowledge is what has astounded meand I had low expectations to begin with, David Gordon, the director of the State Departments policy-planning staff under Condoleezza Rice, during the Bush Administration, told me.

Trumps White House has also flubbed basics. It misspelled the name of Britains Prime Minister three times in its official schedule of her January visit. After it dropped the H in Theresa May, several British papers noted that Teresa May is a soft-porn actress best known for her films Leather Lust and Whitehouse: The Sex Video. In a statement last month, the White House called Xi Jinping the President of the Republic of Chinawhich is the island of Taiwanrather than the leader of the Peoples Republic, the Communist mainland. The two nations have been epic rivals in Asia for more than half a century. The White House also misidentified Shinzo Abe as the President of Japanhes the Prime Ministerand called the Prime Minister of Canada Joe instead of Justin Trudeau.

Trumps policy mistakes, large and small, are taking a toll. American leadership in the worldhow do I phrase this, its so obvious, but apparently not to himis critical to our success, and it depends eighty per cent on the credibility of the Presidents word, John McLaughlin, who worked at the C.I.A. under seven Presidents, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, and ended up as the intelligence agencys acting director, told me. Trump thinks having a piece of chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago bought him a relationship with Xi Jinping. He came in as the least prepared President weve had on foreign policy," McLaughlin added. Our leadership in the world is slipping away. Its slipping through our hands.

And a world in dramatic flux compounds the stakes. Hayden cited the meltdown in the world order that has prevailed since the Second World War; the changing nature of the state and its power; Chinas growing military and economic power; and rogue nations seeking nuclear weapons, among others. Yet the most disruptive force in the world today is the United States of America, the former C.I.A. director said.

The closest similarity to the Trump era was the brief Warren G. Harding Administration, in the nineteen-twenties, Philip Zelikow, who worked for the Reagan and two Bush Administrations, and who was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, told me. Harding, who died of a heart attack, after twenty-eight months in office, was praised because he stood aside and let his Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, lead the way. Hughes had already been governor of New York, a Supreme Court Justice, and the Republican Presidential nominee in 1916, losing narrowly to Woodrow Wilson, who preceded Harding.

Under Trump, the White House has seized control of key foreign-policy issues. The Presidents son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a real-estate developer, has been charged with brokering Middle East peace, navigating U.S.-China relations, and the Mexico portfolio. In April, Kushner travelled to Iraq to help chart policy against ISIS . Washington scuttlebutt is consumed with tales of how Trump has stymied his own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, the former C.E.O. of ExxonMobil.

The national-security system of the United States has been tested over a period of seventy years, John Negroponte, the first director of national security and a former U.N. Ambassador, told me. President Trump disregards the system at his peril.

Trumps contempt for the U.S. intelligence community has also sparked alarm. I wish the President would rely more on, and trust more, the intelligence agencies and the work that is produced, sometimes at great risk to individuals around the world, to inform the Commander-in-Chief, Mitchell Reiss, who was chief of the State Departments policy-planning team under Secretary of State Colin Powell, told me.

Republican critics are divided on whether Trump can grow into the job. Trump is completely irredeemable, Eliot A. Cohen, who was counselor to Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, told me. He has a feral instinct for self-survival, but hes unteachable. The ban on Muslims coming into the country and building a wall, and having the Mexicans pay for it, that was all you needed to know about this guy on foreign affairs. This is a man who is idiotic and bigoted and ignorant of the law. Cohen was a ringleader of an open letter warning, during the campaign, that Trumps foreign policy was wildly inconsistent and unmoored.

But other Republicans from earlier Administrations still hold out hope. Whenever Trump begins to learn about an issuethe Middle East conflict or North Koreahe expresses such surprise that it could be so complicated, after saying it wasnt that difficult, Gordon, from the Bush Administration, said. The good news, when he says that, is it means he has a little bit of knowledge. So far, however, the learning curve has been pitifullyand dangerouslyslow.

* This post has been updated to clarify the contextual significance of the year 632.

Link:
Why Is Donald Trump Still So Horribly Witless About the World? - The New Yorker