Western allies of the United States gathered in Munich this past week, anxious, adrift and despairing in the face of President Trump’s brute display of muscle-flexing on the global stage. But it was people not at the table at the Munich Security Conference who have become most marginalized in Mr. Trump’s world.
Palestinians and Afghans, Greenlanders and Panamanians — these are the true pawns in the president’s geopolitical chess game. Their priorities, preferences and aspirations seem almost beside the point in Mr. Trump’s ambition to redraw the map of the world along “America First” lines.
Even Ukrainians now appear at risk of a peace settlement being negotiated over their heads, as Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia embark on talks to end a war that has left tens of thousands of Ukrainians dead, much of the country in ruins, and nearly a fifth of its territory in Russian hands.
“Strong-arming has been part of American foreign policy throughout our history,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. “But there was usually an effort to legitimize American power through some form of dialogue. That’s absent from Trump’s foreign policy.”
In his propensity to make deals that take little heed of those most directly affected by them, Mr. Trump’s foreign policy echoes that of a bygone era, when imperial powers waged a great game for influence, with scarcely a pretense that their conquests were rooted in the desires of local populations.
Mr. Trump’s expansionist instincts have been likened to those of William McKinley, the 25th American president, whose victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 brought the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico under the control of an up-and-coming United States. He annexed Hawaii, as well.
But Mr. Trump is also in the tradition of Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, the British and French diplomats who conducted the secret negotiations that carved up the Levantine remnants of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Sykes-Picot Agreement drew the borders of the modern Middle East, with little regard for the ethnic and religious communities that their lines crossed.
Historians trace the resentments that erupted into conflict in the Middle East to the arbitrary nature of Europe’s partitioning of the region. Some question whether Mr. Trump’s cavalier approach to the interests of the Palestinians or Panamanians could stoke new tensions and ignite future conflicts.
“As Oct. 7 showed, you ignore locals at your peril,” said Richard N. Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to the deadly attack on Israel by Hamas fighters from Gaza. That triggered the war that Mr. Trump proposes to end by dispersing Gaza’s 2.1 million Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt, and then taking over the enclave to redevelop it as an Arab Riviera.
“Ultimately, what happens in Ukraine or Gaza or Panama will be heavily influenced by the people who live in those places,” Mr. Haass continued. “The ability of the U.S., Russia or China to control these things is not automatic.”
Mr. Haass said it was too soon to conclude that Mr. Trump intended to cut the Ukrainians out of a negotiation with Russia. The president himself insisted Ukraine would be part of the process, as would other countries. He called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine after speaking to Mr. Putin.
But Mr. Trump’s announcement of “immediate” peace negotiations with Russia — blindsiding Mr. Zelensky as well as European leaders — bore the hallmarks of a blitzkrieg approach to geopolitics in the early days of his second term. His proposal to empty Gaza appeared to catch off guard even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who was visiting him in Washington.
Analysts said Mr. Trump’s lightning speed was designed to knock potential critics of his deals off-balance and short-circuit the kind of lobbying or scrutiny that could delay or dilute them. Some said Mr. Trump learned from his first term, when his secretary of state at the time, Mike Pompeo, oversaw a more traditional negotiation with the leaders of the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan.
While the Trump administration left Afghanistan’s pro-Western government and America’s NATO allies out of the process, the prolonged, public nature of the talks brought demonstrators, including women’s groups, into the streets of Doha, the capital of Qatar, where the two sides were meeting.
Critics say the 2020 deal opened the door to the Taliban’s calamitous takeover of Afghanistan 17 months later, though allies of Mr. Trump blame that on what they say was President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s botched withdrawal of American troops.
“Trump learned that the establishment and the media can put enormous pressure on a deal,” said Vali R. Nasr, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “His approach now is to present the world with a fait accompli, with no room to influence things.”
“Deals that are this opaque and that are done this quickly are more vulnerable to grave errors because they are not subject to scrutiny,” said Mr. Nasr, who worked on Afghan policy during the Obama administration.
Mr. Trump is not the only president to try to make deals privately. President Barack Obama famously negotiated a rapprochement with Cuba — later reversed by Mr. Trump — under a veil of secrecy. Mr. Obama authorized American diplomats to open a secret back channel to Iranian officials, which cleared the way for a nuclear agreement that Mr. Trump also later abrogated.
Mr. Trump often appears more comfortable dealing with adversaries than allies. That could open the door, Mr. Haass said, to a new round of diplomacy with Iran. Mr. Haass, who has long argued that the United States needed to redefine its objectives on Ukraine, said there was also potential for Mr. Trump to make progress with Mr. Putin in winding down the war.
The trouble is likely to come in Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure allies. Neither King Abdullah II of Jordan nor President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt have yielded to his proposal that they take Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Panama has rejected his demand that the United States seize the Panama Canal.
Denmark has rebuffed Mr. Trump’s proposal to acquire Greenland, its semiautonomous territory. So has Greenland itself, though the prime minister, Múte Egede, said it would be open to working with the United States on defense and natural resources. In this, Mr. Egede might have a clearer insight into Mr. Trump’s motives than many leaders.
The president’s foreign policy, analysts said, is so rooted in commercial calculations that local people barely enter the equation. Greenland lies along valuable Arctic shipping lanes and, like Ukraine, has rich mineral deposits. Panama has its canal. Gaza has a scenic Mediterranean coastline.
“What’s different about Trump is that it’s 100 percent materialist,” said Professor Kupchan, who worked on European affairs in the Obama administration. “There’s not an iota of ideology in any of this.”
When McKinley started the Spanish-American War, Professor Kupchan said, he did so ostensibly to liberate the Cubans from Spanish colonial rule. Even the conquest of the Philippines, he said, was done under the cloak of a “civilizing mission.”
“This is devoid of any civilizing mission,” he said. “This kind of bald transactional approach, unadorned by any ideology, is new.”
