As hard as it is to believe, it's worse than we thought

When President Donald Trump sat down for dinner on September 18 in New York with leaders of four Latin American countries on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly, anxieties were already running high.

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Trump had volunteered that he was considering a “military option” in Venezuela as that country’s last vestiges of democracy disappeared. Amid the international furor over his vow to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea in the same golf-course press conference, the news that the president of the United States was apparently considering going to war with its third-largest oil supplier had gotten relatively little attention. But the leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Panama invited to the dinner remembered it well.

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“Rex tells me you don’t want me to use the military option in Venezuela,” the president told the gathered Latin American leaders, according to an account offered by an attendee soon after the dinner. “Is that right? Are you sure?” Everyone said they were sure. But they were rattled.

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A former senior U.S. official with whom I spoke was briefed by ministers from three of the four countries that attended the dinner. “Without fail, they just had wide eyes about the entire engagement,” the former official told me. Even if few took his martial bluster about Venezuela seriously, Trump struck them as uninformed about their issues and dangerously unpredictable, asking them to expend political capital on behalf of a U.S. that no longer seemed a reliable partner. “The word they all used was: ‘This guy is insane.’”

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The jarring reality of their encounters with Trump has at times been even more disturbing to America’s friends and allies than the initial news accounts have suggested. When he went to dinner with leaders from fellow NATO member states in May, for example, Trump had already given a speech that was being roundly criticized by allies for failing to reaffirm America’s normally unquestioned commitment to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the mutual defense provision that is at the heart of the alliance Trump has called “obsolete.” And news was making the rounds of an equally disastrous private meeting he had earlier in the day in Brussels with the leaders of the European Union. But what was not reported at the time was that even after all of that, some European leaders came away most disturbed by what Trump said at their private dinner. “He was very tough and very outspoken in his intervention,” a European diplomat in attendance confirmed to me about the meal. Another European attendee said Trump at the dinner was “unlike anything they’ve ever heard” in such a setting. “All this bluster and blasting. He walks in and starts talking, breaking china all over the place.” And to top it off, Trump left early.

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Over the course of the year, I have often heard top foreign officials express their alarm in hair-raising terms rarely used in international diplomacy—let alone about the president of the United States. Seasoned diplomats who have seen Trump up close throw around words like “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent” and “dangerous.” In Berlin this spring, I listened to a group of sober policy wonks debate whether Trump was merely a “laughingstock” or something more dangerous. Virtually all of those from whom I’ve heard this kind of ranting are leaders from close allies and partners of the United States.

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[A] conversation, with Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law who had been given an expansive international portfolio ranging from restarting Middle East peace talks to dealing with Mexico and China, was just as troubling [a European diplomat related]. Kushner was “very dismissive” about the role of international institutions and alliances and uninterested in the European’s recounting of how closely the United States had stood together with Western Europe since World War II. “He told me, ‘I’m a businessman, and I don’t care about the past. Old allies can be enemies, or enemies can be friends.’ So, the past doesn’t count,” the official recalled. “I was taken aback. It was frightening.”

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The dysfunction continued to plague Trump’s foreign policy team as the tumultuous year came to an end. “It’s a snake pit,” a senior Republican who has remained in close contact with many of the players told me in early December. “There are personality tensions between the president and Tillerson, between the president and McMaster, between McMaster and Tillerson. It’s broken and it’s going to have to be fixed one way or another. It can’t go on like this.”

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I recently met a senior general of a U.S. ally at a conference. What was it like to deal with Trump’s government, I asked? “It’s a vacuum, a void,” he said. “There’s a complete inability to get answers out of American counterparts who don’t know what policy is.” An international diplomat who has worked extensively on hot spots such as Afghanistan and Iraq told me he has been to Washington five or six times in recent months. His normal contacts at the State Department were so out of the loop, “Frankly, they were asking me, ‘What do you think the White House thinks?’”

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The Latin Americans who met for dinner with Trump in September told the former U.S. official afterward that maybe they should invite the Chinese into the region instead.

  Politico

And they'd probably be wise to do so.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.