Maybe it was a year back, and maybe it was Sebastian Gorka, or another commentator on foreign affairs speaking of certain countries and their relationship with the USA. He referred to the notion of countries being our "enemy", or our "adversary." Those closer to us were "friends" or "allies."
I don't know that those are formalized terms in the diplomatic circles in which people such as Dr. Gorka operate, but I think his point was to try to distinguish, certainly as far as what we would regard as characterizing unfriendly countries, the difference between an enemy, like Iran, and an adversary, like, in that case, Russia.
Several days ago, in preparing for the summit Monday with Vladimir Putin, President Trump referred to Russia using a different word that made me pause the TV to think about for a minute.
He referred to the Russians as "our competitors."
No president before Trump would ever have used that term, because no president before Trump looked at diplomacy and foreign affairs through the eyes of a pure businessman before. And that is certainly made clearer when we look at the issue of LNG -- liquefied natural gas.
The USA has immense stores of natural gas that could power our country for centuries. For some reason -- global warming, perhaps? -- the Obama people refused to allow us to sell natural gas to Europe or anywhere else, even though there was a strong market for it there and, by displacing coal-fired power, actually would have cut greenhouse gases.
President Trump reversed that policy, allowing us to sell -- if Europe would buy. Of course, in the meantime, with no other source of gas, Europe started buying from Russia, which also has large supplies of natural gas and a land bridge to Europe. Pipelines got built, and Europe -- particularly our historic friends like the Germans -- started sending money to Russia for natural gas they could have bought from us.
From a geopolitical standpoint, it made the Germans reliant on Russia for energy, meaning that they - and other NATO allies -- were reliant on, as Trump pointed out, the opponent that NATO existed to contain!
Now the Russians are not our "enemy"; we are not at war with them even if our defense posture is predicated on their being the major threat. They are an adversary, not innately about to do anything to help us, and doing lots of things, like poking around in our elections (albeit unsuccessfully thus far), to cause harm or at least turmoil.
But when economic realities, such as the need for energy, cause our allies to get chummy with our adversaries, it makes it a lot tougher to achieve diplomatic successes.
So Donald Trump, the businessman president, sees things the way previous presidents, all swamp-bound in recent years, have not been able to. By using economic pressure to achieve geopolitical ends (in this case, weakening NATO), Russia is behaving like a business competitor, and President Trump sees that quite readily.
How do you treat a global geopolitical adversary? You treat them like a business competitor, and you negotiate as you would in business, determining what your competitor wants, balancing against what you want, and trying to achieve positioning to your favor.
I've about gotten fed up with the handshake, backside-kissing world of international diplomacy. To me, it is yet another swamp where nothing is done to help the American people and the American taxpayer; that is not the primary goal of previous State Departments.
I'm perfectly happy to see us start looking at all relationships with other countries as either trading partners or competitors, just as much as we look at them as military allies, adversaries or enemies.
It's a fresh breath of common sense in a world devoid of it.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton