Saunders: President has foreign policy working on Trump time

That’s right. Trump scheduled a summit that leaves his national security staff and the hollowed-out State Department bureaucracy about a month to prepare for complicated negotiations involving highly technical issues. It would have been nice if Trump were this quick at filling vacant positions in Foggy Bottom.

Did he schedule the summit too fast?

“Yes,” answered Ty Cobb, a foreign policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan now with the National Security Forum. In Cobb’s experience, summits follow extensive preparation over minute details — all resolved before a summit begins, so that the summit itself is simply a ceremony. Trump is leapfrogging the usual order.

And yet, Cobb finds himself thinking maybe Trump has found a smart approach with North Korea. Cobb said he had just finished a panel discussion with two other national security veterans, and all three “were struck at the success this president has had relying on his instincts instead of the bureaucracy.”

Americans pretty much had become used to the glacial pace of statecraft. Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are ripping up the old playbook.

In December, when Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — and said he would move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City — D.C.’s chattering class expected the move to take years.

Wrong. On Monday, six months after Trump’s declaration, the United States opened the new embassy — and made good on a promise in legislation enacted in 1995. Cobb posited that past administrations would have moved at a snail’s pace to relocate the embassy. Staffs would have picked through all the angles and “would have reached a compromise decision that satisfies no one.”

Getting up to speed

James Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, offered that he would have recommended against the embassy move. “Nobody really cares about the embassy,” Carafano said, “not even the Palestinians. It’s all symbolic.” Trump? He “does it anyway,” Carafano continued — to show the Palestinians that Trump is serious about their leaders’ need to change.

If year two of Trump’s foreign policy seems to be moving fast, Carafano added, it’s because Trump is an intuitive decision-maker. In the first year, America didn’t see these rapid-fire moves because, “You can’t be an intuitive decision-maker if you don’t know the issues.” But now Trump is up to speed.

Trump brought Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton on board, said Carafano, “to get the government to move on Trump time.”

Trump time — those two words no doubt send shivers through the saggy spines of foreign policy solons.

Cobb sees an executive “overturning decades of tradition and caution.” Is he worried? “Yes, we’re all worried about that,” said Cobb. But to Trump’s credit, “it’s worked out so far.”

Despite all the doomsday predictions, Carafano noted, “He hasn’t started World War III yet. That’s good.”