This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 4th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

As tensions rise over North Korea and Iran, what should the focus of American

foreign policy be in 2018? Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign

Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, describes the terrain of the decisions facing the current

administration.

Compare and contrast Donald Trump campaigner with his first year as the chief diplomat for the United States.

Yeah, those are two words that we never want to see used in conjunction with Donald

Trump, chief diplomat.

In fact, again, it's not funny because when the actual chief diplomat,

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has attempted at various stages in his unhappy tenure in that office to engage in negotiations

with foreign leaders or to signal to foreign leaders that he is interested in negotiations, the President of the United States

routinely scorned the notion that the United States of America would engage in negotiations with any number of countries that President Trump doesn't see fit

to negotiate with, including North Korea and Iran, for example.

So I do think that one of the that in that sense it is consistent with President

Trump's behavior is consistent with candidate Trump's rhetoric from the

2016 campaign which was quite dismissive of the notion that the United States even

needs to bother with negotiations or diplomacy that instead the United States can

rely on toughness and tough talk and military strength to intimidate, coerce, cajole,

etc, recalcitrant foreign actors to do what we want them to do.

Now in a more serious aspect we see the limits of this, for example, with respect to China.

The president talked, the president talked about China in a very consistently tough way over the course of his campaign and

yet when he came into office he appeared to back away from that.

...