WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has been in office for barely two weeks, but Congress is already in diplomatic damage control.
Senators are huddling in meetings or on phone calls with ambassadors of major allies, assuring them that, yes, the U.S. is still their friend.
They are cobbling together visits to other nations, something that members of Congress regularly do, but this time with the goal of assuring world leaders that powerful lawmakers do not walk in lockstep with Trump.
Others are drafting legislation to blunt the force of Russia, with which the Trump administration has been uncharacteristically aligned.
They are also trying to discern some kind of consistency from the White House, which was made far more difficult when the administration seemed on Thursday to essentially be embracing former President Barack Obama’s positions by demanding that Russia withdraw from Crimea, that Israel curb settlement construction and that Iran face more sanctions for ballistic missile tests.
“Congress will have to take a much more active role than usual in foreign policy,” said Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “In part, to try and move the Trump administration to support more traditional American values abroad and to counter some of the damage he has done. It’s going to be necessary and it’s going to be bipartisan.”
Cardin said he would soon be visiting Mexico “to repair some of that relationship.” He and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the chairman of the committee, recently met with Sigmar Gabriel, the German foreign minister, and King Abdullah II of Jordan. Both senators said they picked up on significant concerns.
“The king mentioned that recent policies are having an effect,” Corker said.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released a remarkable public statement Thursday noting that he had called Australia’s ambassador to the U.S., Joe Hockey, to express his “unwavering support for the U.S.-Australia alliance” after a contentious phone call between Trump and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull concerning the status of refugees from an Australian detention center.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., echoed the sentiments in a news conference. “Prime Minister Turnbull was in my office a couple months ago,” he said. “He’s a very important ally. Australia is a very central ally, they are and they will continue to be.”
Trump has broken with the policy positions of congressional Republicans on myriad issues, from trade to immigration to tax reform, and they have largely, so far, bent in his direction.
But in the area of foreign relations, particularly when it comes to long-standing U.S. allies like Australia, Democrats and Republicans have been unified in discontent, and sometimes horror. They were displeased with Trump’s statements endorsing torture. They were made anxious by Trump insulting the Iranian government on Twitter, seemingly his preferred medium for foreign confrontations.
They have routinely pushed back on his suggestions that NATO and the European Union are outdated. The phone fracas with the leader of Australia was merely the latest.
“The president says ‘America First,’ and I agree,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, “but obviously we have important allies around the world.”
House Republicans met last week in Philadelphia with Theresa May, the British prime minister, before she headed to the White House, in part to convey an important message about the U.S. commitment to NATO.
While such conversations were once box-checking affairs, they have now become a matter of mild emergency, said several House and Senate aides. But efforts to counter Trump’s missteps and policy provocations can go only so far.
“Congress can’t run an effective parallel foreign policy,” said Martin Indyk, executive vice president of the Brookings Institution, who served as the ambassador to Israel in the Clinton administration.
“That is the prerogative of the executive branch,” he said. “There are now real, substantive differences between the Trump administration and the Mexican government that can only be mended by the two of them dealing directly with each other. Senators can help soothe ruffled feathers, but they’re not the source of the problem and therefore can’t fix it.”
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
