Author name: moderat ereport

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s April visit to the White House was, by all accounts, a success. She soothed President Donald Trump with dulcet talk of “Western nationalism,” eased through a potentially awkward moment regarding Ukraine, and invited Trump to visit Rome—extracting a promise that he would come in the “near future.” Yet despite the apparently seamless choreography, she and her team offered some after-action advice to fellow world leaders hoping for similarly controversy-free exchanges with Trump: Prepare for the unexpected. Specifically, she had been caught off guard when, before a supposedly private lunch in the Cabinet Room, journalists had been escorted in for seven minutes of questions; she found herself awkwardly positioned with her back to the cameras—much of the footage of Meloni captures the silky blond strands atop her head—and she was forced to either ignore the media in order to address Trump directly or twist herself to the left, away from the president, to try to speak with the reporters. Exactly a week later, when Jonas Gahr Støre, the prime minister of Norway, arrived at the White House, he was prepared. His team had watched videos of prior visits with world leaders, and strategized over various scenarios. Having seen Trump seem to bristle when Meloni was asked a question in her native Italian, they encouraged their own press corps to pose their queries exclusively in English. (The Norwegian journalists also seemed to have done their homework; young female reporters positioned themselves near the front, smiling to catch Trump’s attention, and got in an early flurry of questions.) “You have to—to use Trump’s words—play the cards you have,” one European diplomat told us anonymously, like nearly every other diplomat or foreign official we spoke with, to avoid angering Trump or revealing their nation’s strategies for managing the mercurial U.S. president. [Anne Applebaum: The U.S. is switching sides] In Trump’s second term, foreign leaders now meticulously prepare for their phone calls and meetings with him, often war-gaming possible surprises and entanglements, and trading information and best practices with allies. Eight diplomats and officials from six countries, as well as other foreign-policy experts, all described to us an unofficial formula for ensuring fruitful interactions with Trump: an alchemic mix of flattery, firmness, and personal flourishes. Foreign leaders, especially those from fellow democracies, face an inherent tension in wanting to woo Trump while also advocating for their country’s own interests and maintaining their standing back home. “There is a sense that you want to be on the right side of history. You do want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and reread your statements in the Oval Office a couple of years later and say, ‘I feel good about what I said,’” a second European diplomat told us. This, of course, can prove complicated. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky learned this lesson rather publicly in a now-infamous Oval Office blowup on the last day of February, which got him booted from the White House so quickly that Trump’s aides ate the lunch intended for him and his fellow Ukrainians. (“No deal and no meal,” Axios blared at the time.) And in May, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was meeting with Trump in the Oval when the U.S. president unexpectedly dimmed the lights and began playing a video that he said buttressed his unsupported claim that South Africa’s white population is facing a “genocide.” “The leaders of friendly countries are turning keys in the lock desperately trying to find a way to prevent their meetings with President Trump from being disasters,” Kori Schake, the director of defense and foreign-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, told us. “The challenge for foreign leaders is that President Trump seems to only have two categories—supplicants and enemies.” But that hasn’t stopped visiting officials and diplomats from trying. “They ask knowledgeable Americans, ‘Might this work? This is what we’re thinking of trying. Do you think this is good enough?’” Schake told us. Even some of the preparations—walking through the day’s expected events in advance of the actual visit—underscore the inherent unpredictability of this administration. “Our entire walk-through with the White House was like, ‘This is what it’s going to be like, but we follow the lead of the president,’” the second European diplomat told us, laughing. Trump has long been eager to receive a Nobel Peace Prize—for any conflict, in any region. So it was not entirely surprising when the government of Pakistan nominated Trump for the prize last month for helping resolve tensions between Pakistan and India. Pakistan, after all, was simply following the dependable diplomatic crutch of flattery with Trump, hoping to improve its standing with the U.S. president by offering him the possibility of something he desperately covets. (His subsequent bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites created understandable consternation among Pakistanis, but during an Oval Office meeting last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took up the cause, announcing that he had, too, nominated Trump for the Nobel Prize—this time for his work in the Middle East.) The same week that Pakistan put Trump up for the peace prize, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte engaged in some behind-the-scenes blandishments with Trump ahead of a NATO summit in the Netherlands—which became public when Trump posted on Truth Social the entirety of a text message Rutte had sent him. The missive praised Trump for his “decisive action in Iran,” which Rutte called “truly extraordinary,” before moving on to laud Trump for pressuring his NATO allies to spend more on defending their countries. “You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening,” Rutte wrote. “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.” During the actual summit, Rutte went on to call Trump “Daddy” as Trump likened Israel and Iran to fighting schoolchildren. “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language,” the NATO chief said. Trump and his team were, predictably, delighted. They began selling