Econ_June_09

The Economist

June 9th 2018

Briefing

Donald Trump and the world

Those who despair, or think “Yes, but”,

may also be open to surprise—indeedmost

of them are, to some extent. That said, few

of them suspect the successes, if any, to be

other than short-lived.

To look at Mr Trump from any of these

perspectives requires first assessing who

he is and howhe operates. Mr Trump is in-

curious and profoundlynarcissistic, which

means he is also thin-skinned. He is often

impetuous, with no taste for long-term

strategy or the consideration of conse-

quences. He lies as only someone can do

who does not care about the truth.

The lackof humility

Mr Trump appears to see the world as he

saw the NewYorkpropertymarket, a place

of screw or be screwed. A deal where the

other guy walks away happy is one where

you could have got more. He sees interna-

tional relations as he sawreality television:

unpredictability and absurdity raise the

ratings, turnover in the characters keeps

things fresh and you should never let any-

one forget who is the star of the show.

“He’s entirely unpredictable day to day,

to his own staff,” complains Nicholas

Burns, a former American ambassador to

NATO

who is now at Harvard’s Kennedy

School. “That’s a big problem.” This is

largely true and renders joined-up policy-

making and sustained effort more or less

impossible. But the unpredictability is not

total. The nature ofMr Trump’s goals hard-

ly changes: you can expect him to try to

press ahead with things mentioned on the

campaign trail, to undo anything achieved

by BarackObama, and not to think hard, if

at all, about consequences. You can expect

angry and fatuous tweeting andweird per-

sonal touches, as in the remarkable, cloy-

ing letter to Mr Kim of May 24th. You can

expect everything to be transactional. At

every point Mr Trump wants to get some-

thing for himself—something which will

lookgood.

The fourmajor policymoves ofthe past

three months—scrapping the Iran deal, of-

fering a summit to Mr Kim, setting the

scene for a trade war with China and slap-

ping steel tariffs on his allies—all reflect

who Mr Trump is and how he works. No

other recent president would have under-

taken one of these, let alone all four at the

same time. To his undoubted pleasure,

theyhave scandalisedmuch ofthe foreign-

policy establishment. So what is it like to

look at them from the perspective of being

open to the surprise of success?

First comes the on-off-on-again Singa-

pore summit with Mr Kim (see Asia sec-

tion). Mr Trump has both been more

threatening to the North Korean regime

than any previous president and, in offer-

ing a summit that will show the two men

as equals, more accommodating. The sum-

mit, which would not have come about

without the efforts of the South Korean

president, Moon Jae-in (himself a victimof

Mr Trump’s bullying in othermatters), will

not achieve a rapid or total denuclearisa-

tion of the Korean peninsula. But it may of-

fer a road to rapprochement where there

was none before, and a lessening of ten-

sions on the peninsula which, though ex-

acerbated by Mr Trump, have been a seri-

ous long-standing security concern. The

summit could look, at least, like a success.

Turning to the Middle East, Mr Trump’s

ditching of the Joint Comprehensive Plan

of Action (

JCPOA

), as the Iran deal is for-

mally known, was part of a broader push

to increase pressure on Iran; uncritical sup-

port for Saudi Arabia and Israel is another

part. The ditching of the deal was followed

by a tough speech by Mr Pompeo present-

ing a laundry list of demands to Iran. The

splitwith the Europeansmakes co-ordinat-

ing pressure on Iran harder and creates a

“major disconnect between the objective

and the means,” says Martin Indyk, a Mid-

dle East specialist at the Brookings Institu-

tion, a think-tank.

But the Iranian economy is chronically

weak, and European companies may not

choose to dealwith it ifthey faceAmerican

reprisals. Pressure on Iran could build. “For

all those who say there’s no chance this

can work, there’s a part of me that says:

well, I wonder,” says Dennis Ross of the

Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Anewalignment ofinterests between Isra-

el, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states

helps. “If it’s properly handled there is a

way to push back against the Iranians in

the region,” saysMr Indyk.

Blunting the Shia crescent would be

widely seen as a triumph. An even bigger

triumph would be regime change in

Iran—a far bolder, some would say fool-

hardy, policy aim, and one that would be

very hard indeed to sell to America’s non-

Middle Eastern allies.

Mr Trump’s suggestions that his deal-

making skills might be applied to Israel

and Palestine, meanwhile, remain far-

fetched. The peace plan drawn up by his

son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is said by one of

those consulted on it to be “a really serious

effort”; that this is seen as something one

could not take for granted about a White

House plan says a lot in itself. But any

chance that it would be well received by

the Palestinians was scuppered when Mr

Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, opened the

Jerusalem embassy. The prospect of a deal

is “a fantasy”, according toMr Indyk.

It is hard tomake progress on Israel and

Palestine if you see everything in terms of

winners and losers. The same is even truer

on trade, where Mr Trump is completely

driven by bilateral trade balances. But his

willingness to do what others have not

may get him a claimable victory here; it is

possible that China might find ways to

shrink its trade surplus. An economy that

big can soak up a lot of Boeings, soya and

liquefied natural gas.

There is almost noway to put a positive

spin on the steel tariffs against America’s

allies (see Finance section). But a success-

ful-looking North Korea summit, a cowed

Iran and Chinese concessions on trade

would look like winning to Mr Trump and

his supporters, and to some other observ-

ers, too. His approach would have brought

about what others dared not attempt.

Like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun

Now look again, from the perspective of

despair. There is no guarantee of anything

which even resembles a success. But even

ifMr Trump could claima hat-trick, the po-

tential downsides could more than offset

any gains. With North Korea, for example,

there is the disturbing possibility that Mr

Kim might offer to give up his

ICBM

which lookas if they can carryweapons to

any part of America, but not, yet, all his

bombs or all his shorter-range missiles.

Thus SouthKorea and Japanwould remain

under threat—and feel betrayed by an ally

interested in protecting only itself. That

couldopen theway to a regional arms race.

The lost world

Change in approval of US leadership, 2016-17

Percentage points

Decrease

Increase

No data

10-20

0-9 0-9

>20

Source: Gallup