Opinion
Sucking up to Trump is now the diplomatic norm. But does it work?
Nick Bryant
Journalist and authorSo many column inches have been devoted to Anthony Albanese’s failure so far to have a face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump that it is easy to overlook an upside. Not yet have we had to witness the Australian prime minister genuflecting towards the US president, the deferential default of so many international and corporate leaders who enter Trump’s gilded court.
President Donald Trump holds the FIFA World Cup Winners Trophy during an announcement at the White House Oval Office on Friday.Credit: AP
Many come bearing gifts. Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, this month presented Trump with a glass, disc-like ornament emblazoned with the president’s name that was mounted on a 24-carat gold base. Many come proffering complements. Along with the present of a golden cross, Archbishop Elpidophoros of the Greek Orthodox Church compared the president to “the great Roman emperor Constantine the Great”. Recommending Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, the golden bauble he most treasures, has become standard fare – the diplomatic equivalent of turning up at a dinner party with a middling bottle of red.
Few leaders arrive at the White House empty-handed. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer dramatically pulled from his pocket a letter from King Charles inviting the president to make an unprecedented second state visit. Thus, a monarch became party to an act of near-feudal reverence – although for decades, the UK’s much-vaunted special relationship with the United States has become ever more servile, regardless of who resides in the White House.
Illustration by Joe BenkeCredit: Joe Benke
If suck-uppery were an international competition, the Order of the Brown Nose – to borrow the British satirical magazine Private Eye’s mock honour – would surely go to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Ahead of a crunch NATO summit in June, Rutte fired off a series of ingratiating texts congratulating the president on bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. “Mr President, dear Donald,” gushed the former Dutch prime minister. “Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do.” Then, when the two men met in Brussels, Rutte famously called the president “daddy”.
This kind of sycophancy was also a feature of Trump 1.0. The late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe – as well as presenting Trump with a set of gold-plated golf clubs – nominated him for the Nobel in recognition of a nuclear disarmament agreement with North Korea that had not yet been agreed. But the self-emasculation of international leaders has become noticeably more self-emasculatory. Volodymyr Zelensky underscored this point at the White House last week when he turned up in a suit, pulled from his pocket a letter from his wife to First Lady Melania Trump, gifted him a golf putter (inscribed with the motto “Let’s putt peace together!”) and showered his host with gratitude.
Donald Trump hosts UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House in February.Credit: nna\riwood
The question is: does it work? Mark Rutte can point to how nobody is talking any more about America’s imminent withdrawal from NATO, a distinct possibility when Trump won the 2024 presidential election. That, and a NATO alliance strengthened by beefed-up defence spending commitments from member states. Starmer was rewarded with a UK-US trade deal, and has cajoled Trump into not abandoning Ukraine.
“The strategy is to flatter Trump, to indulge his pet obsessions and never to contradict him,” wrote Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. “Once those foundations are laid, Trump’s interlocutors try to push the US president in their direction.” In Washington last week, that meant pushing Trump towards security guarantees for Ukraine from which he had previously shied away.
Trump’s diplomacy has achieved results, such as playing a constructive role in easing tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan in May after a terror attack in Indian-administered Kashmir. Often, though, he seems preoccupied as much with stagecraft as statecraft, the artifice of the photo-op more so than the art of the deal. Foreign leaders, by becoming willing actors, run the risk of endorsing phoney assurances and meaningless grandstanding. A vague security guarantee from the Trump administration, for instance, feels akin to a degree certificate from Trump University.
Besides, these displays of deference look so worshipful and self-belittling, like courtiers tip-toeing around a mad monarch. Announcing their trade deal at the G7 summit, Starmer had to bend down to pick up scattered papers when Trump opened up his leather folder to display the agreement to the press. Last week’s White House meeting with European leaders over Ukraine began with the now obligatory bouquets of compliments. This kind of flummery fuels Trump’s sense of omnipotence and “I alone can fix it” self-certainty.
What we are also witnessing is a geopolitical form of codependency, the psychological term for relationship addiction. Its tell-tale signs are people-pleasing, a failure to establish firm behavioural boundaries and low self-esteem. It can lead to dysfunctional and abusive relationships. For bonds to continue, the abnormal becomes normalised.
It provides a useful frame for thinking about Trump’s domineering relationship with America’s longstanding allies and their over-reliance on the United States. Maybe codependency also helps explain Trump’s meekness towards Vladimir Putin, the strongman who makes him swoon, the leader to whom he defers.
During the first term, which I covered up close, Malcolm Turnbull’s approach, which was not to be bullied by Trump, yielded dividends. After their first fiery telephone exchange, Trump agreed to adhere to a refugee deal negotiated by the Obama administration that he wanted to ditch. But the contemporary leader who most resembles Turnbull, Mark Carney of Canada, has been punished by Trump for adopting an adversarial approach. Even if he can claim a moral victory by standing up to an authoritarian leader keen to turn the Maple Leaf nation into America’s 51st state, it has exacted a heavy penalty in tariffs, which have been levied against Canada at 35 per cent.
So far, Trump has been personally polite towards Anthony Albanese, though the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, spoke of “disappointment, and some disgust” within the Trump administration over Australia’s commitment to recognise Palestine. How an eventual tête-à-tête will unfold is a real tune-in-and-find-out cliffhanger, another hallmark of Trump’s performative diplomacy.
Nick Bryant is a journalist and broadcaster. He is former Washington correspondent for the BBC. His latest book is The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself.