Trump foreign policy quickly loses its sharp edge

By Mark Landler, New York Times News Service

Saturday, Feb. 11, 2017 | 2 a.m.

WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump took a phone call from the leader of Taiwan in December and asserted that the United States might no longer be bound by the “One China” policy, his defenders hailed it as a show of strength — the latest delicate issue on which Trump was willing to challenge decades of diplomatic orthodoxy.

On Thursday evening, Trump fell back into line. In a call with President Xi Jinping of China, he pledged fealty to One China, a 44-year-old policy under which the United States recognized a single Chinese government in Beijing and severed its diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

Trump has also tacked to the center on Israel. After presenting himself as a stalwart defender of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who would buck the pressure campaign against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Trump warned Israelis this week that he did not believe that “going ahead with these settlements is a good thing for peace.”

And on Iran, where Trump threatened as a candidate to rip up the nuclear deal struck by President Barack Obama, advisers to the new president told the European Union’s top foreign policy official, Federica Mogherini, that the United States would fully carry out the agreement.

As Trump begins to shape his foreign policy, he is proving to be less of a radical than either his campaign statements or his tempestuous early phone calls with foreign leaders would suggest. On Friday, as he welcomed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan to the White House, Trump characterized America’s alliance with Japan as a “cornerstone of peace and stability.” Those time-tested words bore little resemblance to his threats during the campaign to mothball the partnership.

“Every president discovers that it looks different from the perspective of the Oval Office than it did on the campaign trail,” said Martin S. Indyk, executive vice president of the Brookings Institution. “The fact that President Trump is proving flexible on some key foreign policy issues suggests he’s less ideologically driven than his early moves would imply.”

To some extent, Trump is simply undergoing the same evolution that all of his predecessors went through. Obama, who ran as an anti-war candidate, became an avid user of drone strikes and other covert counterterrorism operations pioneered by George W. Bush.

In Trump’s case, however, the recalibration is starker because of the extreme nature of the positions he had staked out on issues like China, Russia and the NATO alliance, as well as the Trump campaign’s thin ranks of policy advisers and his slowness in assembling a full national security team in the White House. It also stands in stark contrast to his more uncompromising approach on other matters like the legal challenges to his executive order on immigration.

“He made it all the way to inauguration without doing the deep-dive policy reviews and internal debates that every other successful administration does during the campaign and the transition,” said Peter D. Feaver, who served in Bush’s National Security Council.

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, administration officials said, was among those who urged Trump to publicly endorse the One China policy as a way to defuse tensions with Xi. Before Thursday, the two leaders had not spoken since Nov. 14; administration officials said the Chinese leader would not get on the phone with Trump without assurances from the administration that he would commit to the policy.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has also emerged as an influential player, officials said. He recently returned from a trip to Asia during which he offered reassurances