https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...ngerous-216202
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There was the matter of Mexico and his promise to build that “big, beautiful wall,” presumably to keep not just Mexicans but all of their citizens out of the United States too. And the threat to blow up the North American Free Trade Agreement. And then, a month earlier, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump had volunteered that he was considering a “military option” in Venezuela as that country’s last vestiges of democracy disappeared. Amid the international furor over his vow to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea in the same golf-course press conference, the news that the president of the United States was apparently considering going to war with its third-largest oil supplier had gotten relatively little attention. But the leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Panama invited to the dinner remembered it well.
So, it turned out, did Trump. After the photo op was over and the cameras had left the room, Trump dominated the long table. His vice president, Mike Pence, was to his right; Pence had just spent nearly a week on a conciliatory, well-received tour of the region, the first by a high-ranking administration official since Trump’s inauguration. To Trump’s left was his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. “Rex tells me you don’t want me to use the military option in Venezuela,” the president told the gathered Latin American leaders, according to an account offered by an attendee soon after the dinner. “Is that right? Are you sure?” Everyone said they were sure. But they were rattled. War with Venezuela, as absurd as that seemed, was clearly still on Trump’s mind.
By the time the dinner was over, the leaders were in shock, and not just over the idle talk of armed conflict. No matter how prepared they were, eight months into an American presidency like no other, this was somehow not what they expected. A former senior U.S. official with whom I spoke was briefed by ministers from three of the four countries that attended the dinner. “Without fail, they just had wide eyes about the entire engagement,” the former official told me. Even if few took his martial bluster about Venezuela seriously, Trump struck them as uninformed about their issues and dangerously unpredictable, asking them to expend political capital on behalf of a U.S. that no longer seemed a reliable partner. “The word they all used was: ‘This guy is insane.’”
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By the fall, it was clear to those who had hoped it might be otherwise: The grownups might be in the room with Trump, but they couldn’t always deliver. “I invested in McMaster,” said the European official, “but I see in retrospect he is scared to come out and oppose some of the views of Trump. He is nowhere as strong as all my previous counterparts.” In the first few months, many of Trump’s critics overseas had kept their mouths shut, fearing a Trumpian eruption or Twitter blast. Now, they started speaking up as German Chancellor Merkel did after that disastrous May summit in Brussels. In private, there was talk—not necessarily realistic—of how Merkel and France’s energetic new centrist leader, Emmanuel Macron, would have to fill the West’s leadership void. The Latin Americans who met for dinner with Trump in September told the former U.S. official afterward that maybe they should invite the Chinese into the region instead.
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