“If he’s telling lies on relatively unimportant things, like the size of the crowd at his inauguration, that’s not of great importance in the overall scheme of things,” said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to the United States.

“But, “if I can’t rely on you to get the small things right, how can I count on you to do so on things that really matter?”

Trump’s Falsehoods Make Foreign Leaders Ask: Can We Trust Him?
 WASHINGTON — President Trump’s litany of false statements and spurious claims has opened a national debate on the fragility of a fact-based society. But overseas, where America’s allies and enemies parse a president’s every word for signs of threat or reassurance, Mr. Trump’s falsehoods have prompted a different kind of alarm.From defense treaties to trade pacts, foreign leaders are struggling to gauge whether they can depend on the United States to honor its commitments. They are sizing up a fickle president whose erroneous remarks on small issues cast doubt on what he might say on the big ones — the future of NATO, say, or the Iran nuclear deal — that involve war and peace.

Mr. Trump spent the weekend in a round-robin series of phone calls with foreign leaders, clearly designed to settle nerves. But from Tokyo and Beijing to London and Berlin, foreign officials are watching the president’s false assertions with alarm, unsure of whether they can trust him and wondering whether that will undermine their dealings with Washington.“If he’s telling lies on relatively unimportant things, like the size of the crowd at his inauguration or whether or not it rained on his parade, that’s not of great importance in the overall scheme of things,” said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to the United States.“But as I used to say to my staff,” he added, “if I can’t rely on you to get the small things right, how can I count on you to do so on things that really matter?”

For foreign leaders, particularly those who depend on the United States for a security umbrella or as a market for their goods, Mr. Trump’s unreliability sets up an acute diplomatic challenge. The best they can do, in some cases, is to try to pin him down on basic facts or nudge him in the right direction, as two European leaders, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, both did in recent days.In a phone call with Mr. Trump on Saturday, Ms. Merkel objected to the president’s temporary ban on the entry of Muslims from seven countries. To make her case, the chancellor’s spokesman said, Ms. Merkel found herself explaining to him the Geneva Conventions, which oblige countries to protect refugees of war on humanitarian grounds.

For Mrs. May, who visited the White House on Friday, the goal was to clarify Mr. Trump’s position on NATO. During the presidential campaign, he derided the alliance as obsolete and questioned whether the United States would automatically come to the defense of its members. More recently, he has said the United States will support it — a pledge the prime minister claimed to have extracted from him in their closed-door meeting.
 “Mr. President, I think you said, you confirmed that you’re 100 percent behind NATO,” Mrs. May said at a joint news conference, looking at Mr. Trump, who did not mention the alliance in his remarks.Diplomats draw a distinction between Mr. Trump’s plainly false assertions about crowd sizes or the millions of people who voted illegally in the election and his hints about lifting sanctions on Russia or promises to rip up the Iran nuclear deal. The latter two fall into a more standard category of positions taken by a political candidate that may later change.

Mr. Westmacott said those were not what he would call “barefaced lies.” “They are early statements of policy,” he said, “perhaps not well thought through, which European capitals — and others which might draw the wrong conclusions — need to see clarified.” Mrs. May’s meeting with Mr. Trump, he said, was a useful first step in that process.The trouble is, Mr. Trump’s willingness to bend the truth could make it difficult to judge when the United States has settled on firm policies on these issues.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/us/politics/trump-falsehoods-foreign-leaders-diplomacy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Last edited by Goose (1/31/2017 8:13 am)