In addition to these opposing faces, the strange swings in the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts in its first 13 months have had, and continue to have, significant consequences for actual counterterrorism. This administration appears to recognize the importance of counterterrorism cooperation with other countries. Indeed, burden-sharing was a central element of the draft counterterrorism strategy that leaked to the press last May. Yet that document also apparently reflected Trump’s penchant for zero-sum relationships that ostensibly put “America first.” Such a transactional posture threatens to undermine critical partnerships.

Trump has also largely jettisoned his predecessors’ efforts to promote political reforms that might, over time, redound to the benefit of counterterrorism efforts. Bush emphasized democratization, while Obama emphasized promoting good governance and rule of law in concert with building partners’ security capacity. The outcomes were disappointing at times. Both Bush and Obama often learned that they had to prioritize short-term security objectives over longer-term approaches frequently dependent on the uncertain will and capacity of other countries. But they at least knew they had to address underlying risk factors for terrorism and understood that American values can be an important weapon in their own right. In contrast, Trump appears to prefer dealing with authoritarian regimes, giving them carte blanche to persist in the types of repressive and rapacious policies that can fuel jihadist terrorism. Countries with which Bush or Obama cooperated out of necessity have become privileged partners under Trump.

And then there’s Trump’s puzzling Middle East polices. Last summer, he backed the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, host of al-Udeid airbase, which is vital to U.S. air operations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Trump’s own secretaries of state and defense openly criticized the move. More recently, the administration has been at odds with itself over the future of U.S. support for Kurdish militias. The region is, admittedly, a bundle of contradictions that would demand tradeoffs from any administration. But the Trump team has appeared unwilling even to resolve internally which tradeoffs it is willing to make. This confusion makes it even harder to manage the complex politics of a region that remains the heart of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

Looking ahead, maintaining continuity and sustaining progress in actual counterterrorism may become a bigger challenge if civil servants and foreign-service officers continue to depart at alarming rates and if, as a result, Trump loyalists exert more control. This could have grave consequences, especially on critical areas such as intelligence cooperation with other countries.

And a similar evolution may worsen the impact that Trump’s broader foreign policy choices have on counterterrorism. Even a well-functioning White House would struggle to situate counterterrorism within broader U.S. foreign policy and to manage the inevitable tradeoffs. Trump’s foreign policy choices reflect a president who is erratic, apparently uninterested in the analysis of his own intelligence community, enthralled by authoritarianism, and hyper-nationalist. Worse still, managing the fallout from those tendencies often rests in the hands of a State Department that’s been steadily and sadly eroded from within by its own secretary.