CNN
—
It’s not exactly news that foreign leaders – much like their counterparts in the United States – have concluded that flattery is a necessary prerequisite to doing business with President Donald Trump.
In his first term, Trump seemed practically smitten by the “love letters” he received from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Other leaders pulled out all the stops to make him feel special.
But even against that backdrop, we’ve entered new and striking territory. As Trump has undertaken a much more transparently transactional second term and busted a series of norms while politicizing his office, it seems foreign leaders have taken notice of the new paradigm.
So they’ve turned the obsequiousness up to 11. It seems no amount of sycophancy is deemed over the top, no accolade too premature.
Despite most of the world’s people having remarkably little faith in Trump, these leaders are treating him as an all-conquering hero on the world stage, in escalating terms.
On Wednesday, this took the form of multiple African leaders, expressing support, with some prompting, for Trump to receive his much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had gotten the ball rolling on this Monday by signaling he had nominated Trump, and nobody was about to disagree.
“I can guarantee you that Mauritania would never be opposed to President Trump receiving a Nobel Peace Prize,” said the president of that country, Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, during a lunch at the White House.
“Of course we are” supportive of Trump winning the prize, Guinea-Bissau’s President Umaro Sissoco Embaló said.
Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye called it “a deserved prize.”
“I think that President Trump deserves it for all the efforts that he’s worked on,” Gabonese President Brice Oligui Nguema said. Nguema cited a peace deal the Trump administration has brokered between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.
Never mind that we have no idea how real that deal actually is, and that Trump has failed to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, as he promised to do upon taking office. And never mind that Trump, in the same event Wednesday, displayed a striking lack of familiarity with the African continent. (He didn’t even seem to know that English was the national language of Liberia, praising its president for his ability to speak it and asking where he studied.)
Never mind all that. Trump was pleased.
“I didn’t know I’d be treated this nicely,” Trump said. “This is great. We could do this all day long.”
It seems foreign leaders would happily oblige.
At the same event Wednesday, Senegal’s president suggested Trump’s supposed foreign policy acumen stemmed from his prowess as a “tremendous golf player.” He even suggested the American president might invest in a golf course in Senegal, as Trump’s personal business has done in ethically dubious ways elsewhere.
Netanyahu was also effusive after Trump authorized US strikes on Iran. He repeatedly cast the strikes as history-altering, calling them a “pivot of history that can help lead the Middle East and beyond to a future of prosperity and peace.” Netanyahu added that the “forces of civilisation thank you.”
Perhaps even more remarkable recently has been NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s rhetoric, given Trump’s less-than-easy relationship with that alliance.
After the Iran strikes last month, Trump posted on Truth Social a personal message from Rutte that sounded as if it could have been written by the White House’s communications team. Rutte called the strikes “truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do.”
“Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win,” Rutte said, remarking on Trump’s push to get NATO members to spend more on defense.
“You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done,” he added.
Then at the NATO summit in The Hague, Rutte responded to a vulgarity Trump uttered by likening him to “daddy.” He said: “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.”
Rutte denied he was calling Trump NATO’s “daddy.” But his use of the word aligned with Trump allies’ well-cultivated image of him as a domineering “daddy” figure dispensing tough love. And the White House and Trump quickly seized upon the remark accordingly.
We might never know how intentional Rutte’s remark was. But it was a massive gift to the American president that cast NATO in a subservient position vis-à-vis Trump, just as he would prefer. And despite Rutte’s efforts to downplay it, Trump clearly isn’t about to let him.
And that’s really the point here. Praising Trump so effusively might seem harmless. Foreign leaders often heap praise on one another while conducting diplomacy, however disingenuously, because that’s what you do.
But while some level of that is to be expected, there are gradations. At some point, leaders may sacrifice their credibility and rhetorically transfer power to someone who might not always have their interests at heart.
You might recall how then-Vice President Mike Pence heaped praise on Trump; in 2017, he spent three straight minutes at a Cabinet meeting praising Trump an average of once every 12 seconds.
Fast forward to January 6, 2021, when Trump – appearing indifferent to Pence’s fate – criticized his vice president as rioters descended on the US Capitol. Pence has since expressed plenty of concern with the direction Trump has taken the conservative movement and his power grabs on issues like tariffs.
The effusive treatment of Trump also can’t help but reinforce the transactional nature of his second term. To the extent the flattery actually works on Trump, it’s in effect trading policy decisions for his own personal accolades.
Netanyahu seems to have calculated that this is a great way to keep Trump interested in a controversial policy that the Israeli leader supports: striking Iran.
Qatar’s leaders have clearly deduced that giving the aviation-enthusiast Trump a souped-up airplane is a great way to win his affections, even as some Republicans have worried about the strings that are attached and about Trump getting too cozy with a country that has been linked to terrorist groups.
But the calculation that you just give Trump what he wants and worry about the rest later is proliferating, as evidenced by the increasing number of institutions bowing to Trump’s transparent domestic power grabs.
Now, it appears to have resulted in a game of one-upmanship by foreign leaders.
