The world is about to find out what Donald Trump really believes

By David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman and Binyamin Appelbaum, New York Times News Service

Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016 | 2 a.m.

WASHINGTON — In Donald Trump’s private conversations and public commentary, one guiding principle shines through: The world is a zero-sum place, and nations, like real estate developers, are either on the winning side of a deal or the losing side.

Yet he also is the ultimate pragmatist, perfectly willing to dispense with seemingly core beliefs in return for negotiating advantage. That is why many of his closest supporters have long cautioned that the most headline-grabbing proposals of his run for the presidency should not be taken literally — they are guideposts, the supporters suggest, not plans. Even Trump once described his proposed ban on Muslim immigrants as a mere “suggestion."

As he enters the Oval Office that Ronald Reagan — another populist pragmatist, but one who had served in public office before the White House — left nearly 28 years ago, the world is about to find out what Donald Trump really believes. Or at least, what he is going to try to do, in partnership with Republicans who on Tuesday retained control of both houses of Congress.

It was in Reagan’s last months in office that Trump took out a full-page ad in several newspapers complaining that “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.”

Flirting with a presidential run himself — he was 41 — and seeking the publicity that would become addictive, he called for the United States to pull out of the Middle East, which he called “of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies,” and asked, “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing protect their interests?”

It is a line he often repeated in his unlikely candidacy. America’s Asian allies, South Korea included, are about to learn whether that is an opening negotiating position, or the condition for America’s continued military presence in the Pacific. Japan’s best hope arises from the fact that he is now focusing his attentions on the United States’ five-times-as-large trade deficit with China, which he described in May as engaged in “the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

At home, his instincts often mix elements of what he has heard or read from the left and the right. His economic policy might best be described as “Big Government Conservatism,” a mix of major tax cuts, mostly for businesses, and a massive infrastructure program to rebuild the dank airports and collapsing bridges that he used in the campaign as a symbol of America’s declining status. It is a subject he comes to easily as a developer who wanted to get customers to his properties.

So far, those proposals do not add up to a coherent strategy. The tax cuts come right out of the Republican playbook; the spending right out of the Democrats’ agenda of spurring the economy with government-led job creation.

His commitment to preserve social programs is far more Barack Obama than Reagan. His vow to rip apart the Affordable Care Act, the symbolic domestic achievement of the Obama presidency, adopts the favorite cause of the Republican leadership with whom he has often clashed.

Experts who have looked at his proposals — many so vague they cannot be “priced” — have concluded that federal deficits will soar. And that gets to Trump’s willingness to entertain two completely contradictory thoughts at once, because rarely did he finish an interview or a debate without reminding listeners that a federal debt heading toward $20 trillion was a “disaster” that only he could fix. In his first year, he will have to square those two promises — or not.

Indeed, his campaign talk has often contradicted his past proposals. In the early 1990s, for example, Trump lobbied Congress to raise income taxes on the wealthy to encourage investment in real estate, while advocating the restoration of tax breaks for real estate investments.

In 1999, Trump proposed a “net worth tax” on the wealthy to pay off the national debt. “Personally this plan would cost me hundreds of millions of dollars, but in all honesty, it’s worth it,” Trump said at the time.

His motivation: He was considering a bid for the presidential nomination of Ross Perot’s Reform Party, which had made federal debt reduction one of its signature issues.

But it is in national security that he faces some of the biggest quandaries.

His zero-sum instincts kick in when the subject turned to immigration, which is essentially the importation of people. He has long argued that immigrants take jobs from Americans, diminishing prosperity by dividing the American pie into a larger number of smaller pieces. The idea that they can bolster the economy too — as some of the founders of Intel, Google and other Silicon Valley powerhouses did — never creeps into his speeches.

Trump’s views of the economy are also deeply rooted in his identity as a real estate developer. He regularly emphasizes the economic importance of making things, while rarely mentioning the service work that employs most Americans. He has repeatedly promised to revive the steel production, a line of work that now employs about as many people as a large medical center.

In fact, it is the era when America was making steel that Trump harks back to when he talks about the era when America was at the peak of its power. He noted in a March interview that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, “we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war.”

It is a view of U.S. power that spills over into his approach to national security. He sees little long-term benefit from funding efforts to eliminate the root causes of terrorism. His mind goes to military solutions first. Few statements were more often repeated, or more heartfelt, than his vow to bomb the Islamic State, and “take the oil.”

Those lines always brought his crowds to their feet. Now comes the far more complex part: He is about to inherit the problem of how to hold and redevelop Mosul once the Islamic State forces are ousted — under a military plan that he has dismissed as ineffective — and how to “take the oil” of a sovereign state, Iraq. And he must do so without returning to an era of constant U.S. combat presence that had made embers of his own war-weary party, and Hillary Clinton, blanch.

And no relationship will be under more scrutiny than how Trump handles President Vladimir Putin of Russia, whom he has repeatedly praised in terms that shocked his own party, and his running mate.

The Cold War was the ultimate geopolitical zero-sum game. For most Repubicans, it still is: Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a growing bipartisan consensus in the foreign policy and intelligence leadership that Russia must be both constrained and contained, its harassment of the new members of NATO halted, its cyberattacks deterred.

Trump is an outlier to that view, and never once backed the idea of “containment.” He repeatedly made the case that he, and he alone, could negotiate with authoritarians like Putin.

Would he lift the sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea — a move that Trump has seemed to suggest was justified — and its harassment of Ukraine? Would he back off from the Obama administration’s decision to bolster the U.S. military presence off Russia’s borders?

“My administration,” Trump said recently, “will work with any country that is willing to partner with us to defeat ISIS, and halt radical Islamic terrorism. And that includes Russia.” On Wednesday, Putin seemed to return that sentiment, sensing his opportunity and saying he looked forward to restoring “fully fledged” relations with the United States.

“If they want to join us by knocking out ISIS, that is just fine as far as I’m concerned,” Trump said recently, in a statement that oozed Kissingerian realpolitik. “It is a very imperfect world, and you can’t always choose your friends. But you can never fail to recognize your enemies.”

Such issues will stretch Trump in new directions. His experience in the business world did little to hone his thinking how to prioritize U.S. national interests: When asked about it in March, he said “protection of our country” was No. 1, but he struggled to explain others including when he thought U.S. troops should be put at risk in defense of a humanitarian cause. With nearly 500,000 people dead in Syria, that issue will be on his desk on the afternoon of Jan. 20, along with many others.