Stereotypes are useful when they correlate with reality (such as different groups have different gifts). Stereotypes are not useful when you insist that different groups have inherent qualities that explain all of their actions. Regarding an out-group as inherently evil, be it communist, Iranian, Islamic, ethno-nationalist, is stupid. All groups respond to incentives and the essential qualities of a group usually vary depending on context.
There’s nothing inherently evil and untrustworthy, for example, about China, Russia, Iran and Palestinians. You can make deals with them. You are usually better off by not going to war with them.
No matter how much evidence can be produced that countries like China and Iran, for example, are defensive realist powers primarily concerned with their own security — that accept many institutions of the international order while rejecting others — the Republican hawks are utterly convinced that they’re hell-bent on world domination. Congressman Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, warns that the Chinese “seek to dominate the world [and establish] a new world order with America subservient to China.” Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, believes the United States and China are hopelessly locked in a New Cold War — something that would likely come as a surprise to Chinese leadership.
Waltz, Rubio, and virtually all the rest of the Republican establishment also contend that Iran is compelled by an irrational hatred of the United States and Israel to relentlessly pursue nuclear weapons. This is despite U.S. intelligence having known since at least 2007 that Iran has not had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003, and Iran having vowed in 2015 that “under no circumstances will [it] ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons,” while severely curtailing its civilian nuclear program. In fact, even though the 2015 nuclear deal had more than quadrupled the time it would have taken Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, while international authorities repeatedly verified Iran’s compliance, Rubio declared in 2018 that the deal had “pave[d] the Iranian terror regime’s path to nuclear weapons.”
Trump is surprisingly not a stereotypical foreign policy thinker. Stereotyping requires having strong, inflexible beliefs about the inherent characteristics of others. Trump’s beliefs, to the contrary, are subject to change based on how useful he assesses someone to be for advancing his personal interests at any particular moment.
This is why Trump’s apparent beliefs and actions toward many foreign states and leaders have changed rapidly in a relatively short period of time.
…when aggression against Iran has carried a significant political cost, Trump has pulled back from military action, even as more orthodox Republicans have continued to agitate for it. This occurred at least four times during Trump’s first administration, including during repeated near-miss scenarios in which the United States and Iran teetered on the brink of war…
On each occasion save the last, Republican hawks agitated for war with Iran because they believed Iran was evil, irrational, duplicitous, or could be dealt with only by using force. Meanwhile Trump, after initially following his advisors, became increasingly hesitant to attack Iran as he realized they behaved rationally in response to incentives and could impose unacceptable costs on the United States that would hurt his chances of winning re-election. Once he lost the 2020 election and he no longer had anything to lose but potentially much to gain by attacking Iran, however, he changed his position again and supported military action.
This is not a pattern of behavior you would expect from a policymaker engaged in stereotyping. Stereotypes are fixed. They don’t change based on extraneous factors or things that are true and false about the world. Yet, Trump changes his assessment of other actors all the time based on how useful he thinks they are for helping him fulfill his goals and how nice he thinks they’re being to him. Basically his entire governing philosophy is organized around inducing and coercing others to bolster his own status, while leeching as much money as possible through extortion and petty corruption. When your interests are so simplistic and dependent on being able to manipulate others, you don’t really have the latitude to cling to false images about others’ interests and character.
The conceit of Trump’s foreign policy is that, even though it’s mostly instrumentally rational, it’s also driven by Trump’s own provincial self-interest. Sometimes this coincides with the national interest, as when he avoided escalating with Iran for fear that it would lose him the election. Much of the time, however, Trump’s interests are tangential or directly opposed to the national interest.
The first time around, Trump was constrained by public opinion. The second time around, he’ll likely be much less preoccupied with such things as poll numbers because he won’t be running in any future elections. His interests will lie primarily in settling personal scores: that is, exacting revenge on his enemies and returning favors to the elites of the Republican Party who accommodated his hostile takeover of its institutions, who now do the grunt work of making his administration function, who cling to fanciful notions about Chinese and Iranian designs on world domination, and whose true-blue, red-blooded American hearts swell with jingoistic fervor at the prospect of burning flesh on the other side of the world. Many of these elites also believe, as it was put by neocon godfather Michael Ledeen — whose daughter was the Pentagon’s point woman for the Middle East during the last year of Trump’s first administration — that: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
….As for the Iranians, Trump likely won’t ever forgive them for being the problem child of his first administration. In another universe, Trump could have done with Iran what he did with North Korea and declared himself the Dealmaker of All Dealmakers. But the Iranians — who, like the Americans, engage in stereotyping — foolishly turned down Trump’s offer to meet without preconditions and got on his bad side instead. It’s probably fair to assume that he holds a grudge against them due to their alleged attempts on his life, for example. Whether this means Trump would opt for military action is hard to tell, but to paraphrase Michael Tracey, if Trump does indeed live out the decades-long Republican fantasy of bombing Iran, we can rest assured that the bombs will have been dropped by a non-stereotyper.
