Trump’s friendships are America’s asset

The list of world leaders who have formed half of a Trump “bromance” is lengthy, but such leaders seem to fit in a few categories. There are those who broadly mirror the president in terms of character and temperament and in that sense resemble his own real-life friends. Who are Bibi Netanyahu and Rodrigo Duterte if not the Roger Stone and Anthony Scaramucci of the east? Then there are ones who clearly tickle his Hollywood side — handsome, theatrical men such as Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, whose sharp dress, charismatic speeches, and elegant wives makes them heads of state straight out of “central casting.” And then there are the leaders Trump seems to exert great effort at befriending because he perceives them to be on his same plane of influence and power, a group that includes not only Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, but curiously also Japan’s Shinzo Abe — perhaps reflecting a lingering 80s-era view of global economics.

One of the great missed opportunities of the Obama years was that the president never seemed interested in leveraging his personal popularity around the globe — the love that won him a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing in particular — into any lower-level closeness with his foreign counterparts. Many world leaders seemed to like the “idea” of him, but in practice it never manifest as much. There was never a Thatcher to Obama’s Reagan, or even a Blair to his Bush.