Econ_June_09

20 Briefing

Donald Trump and the world

The Economist

June 9th 2018

North Koreans have told foreign con-

tacts that the fate of the

JCPOA

means their

country will not trust any deal offered it.

This is one of the big downsides of pulling

out ofthe Iran deal. It didnot just put at risk

a well-crafted plan that genuinely con-

strained Iran’s nuclear capacity and put in

place unprecedented limits and safe-

guards—strictures from which Iran could

now walk away at any time. It damaged

America’s trustworthiness: the hegemon

broke its word. That is why the Pentagon

and many diplomats argued against it.

Meanwhile some Iranian analysts warn

that, as America piles on new sanctions,

Iran is more likely to restart uranium en-

richment than embrace democracy.

On trade, a Chinese move on the bilat-

eral deficit which satisfied Mr Trump

would do nothing to solve the genuine

problems in the world trade system, nor,

Mr Trump might be sad to learn, reduce

America’s overall trade deficit much. And

the damage being done to theWorld Trade

Organisation (

WTO

) by claiming that

things such as car imports are a national-

securitymatterwill make thingsworse.

In all three cases there is anotherworry:

that Mr Trump comes cheap, and can be

played. The Kims have wanted the valida-

tion of a peer-to-peer summit for decades;

this Mr Kimhas so far paid very little to get

one. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem

was a very big deal for Israel, which might

have beenwilling todo a lot tomake it hap-

pen—but was not asked to. And a move on

the trade balance Mr Trump makes so

much ofmight spare China fromhaving to

take steps thatwould strike at its theft ofin-

tellectual property, its subsidies and its re-

strictions on foreign investment.

The pirates don’t eat the tourists

Thus it is possible to be open to short-term

success and still gravely regret Mr Trump’s

rejection of the world order that a biparti-

san consensus in American foreign-policy

circles has long embraced.

RAND

, a think-

tank firmly rooted in this consensus, re-

cently completed a two-year project on the

benefits to America of the international

rules-based system. It concluded that the

system has boosted the effectiveness of

American diplomacy and military

strength, and helped to advance American

interests: “A strong international order is

strongly beneficial for the United States.”

Hence the despair at that order’s weak-

ening. “[Mr] Trump has fundamentally

changed American policy for the worse,”

saysMr Burns. “He’s theweakest president

in my lifetime, and the most dangerous.

I’m not alone. These are mainstream

views.” So they are. Richard Haass, the

president of the Council on Foreign Rela-

tions, and a Republican, thinks people al-

ready view America differently. “The Un-

ited States has knocked itself off the

pedestal,” he says. The effects are likely to

be “lasting and corrosive”. “We have yet to

come to terms with the full extent of the

damage he’s doing to America’s role in the

world,” says Michael Fullilove, who heads

the Lowy Institute for International Policy

in Sydney. “The leader of the free world

doesn’t believe in the freeworld.”

It is against this background that one

has to set the “Yes, but” perspectives: yes,

but it is not all that new; yes, but it will not

last; yes, but theworld has changed.

Some ofwhat Mr Trump is overturning

is quite recent, and not all that popular; to

walkaway from it is simply to cross over to

a pathnot takenbut still clearlyvisible. The

JCPOA

had many enemies. The Paris cli-

mate agreement was carefully crafted so as

not to need Senate ratification—which it

hadnohope ofgetting. HillaryClinton told

American voters that she would reject the

Trans-Pacific Partnership (

TPP

) trade deal

negotiated underMr Obama, asMr Trump

has done—though for her it was a reluctant

and not entirely convincing concession,

while for him it was a proud boast.

Many of Mr Trump’s bugbears were is-

sues before. Anger at China’s theft of intel-

lectual property and restrictions on invest-

ment has been building for decades. Mr

Obama pressed

NATO

allies to spendmore

on defence, too. He also kept troops in Iraq

and Afghanistan that many of his suppor-

ters wanted to see brought home, just as

Mr Trump is doing. “Historians will look

back and see more in common between

Obama and Trump,” says Allan Gyngell, a

doyen of Australian foreign policymaking

at the Australian National University in

Canberra.

There is also a case that Mr Trump is in

fact part of a long tradition: “America First”

was a slogan of four successive presidents

from Woodrow Wilson onwards. Walter

Russell Mead of Bard College identifies

four guiding philosophies for American

foreign policy: Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian,

Jacksonian and Wilsonian. The cold war

produced a hybrid between the Hamilto-

nian approach—international engagement

favouring American interests, particularly

those of business—and the internationalist

and idealist Wilsonians. The unilateralist-

isolationist heirs to Andrew Jackson went

alongwith this, but when the Soviet threat

was removed they soon saw all those for-

eign encumbrances as a pain. Mr Trump,

who has a portrait of Old Hickory in the

Oval Office, takes the same view. A 19th-

century precedent does not make this a

good approach to the 21st. But it does make

Mr Trump look less aberrant.

Theydidn’t stop to think if they should

Another “Yes, but” point is to stress the re-

silience of the old apparatus. The State De-

partment, which seemed to be going to pot

under Rex Tillerson, is likely to see morale

pick up under Mr Pompeo; the Pentagon

provides continuity. Congress has tried to

constrain Mr Trump on some things, as

whenhe has tried to ease sanctions onRus-

sia. The Europeanswill grouse, but have no

real alternative other than to stickwith the

NATO

alliance. America’s Pacific partners

are at pains to keep what Roland Paris of

the University of Ottawa calls a “docking

bay” for the United States in

TPP

, should it

one daywish to return.

What is more, the degree of Chinese

competition to American pre-eminence

can be overestimated, according to Joseph

Nye, an expert on American power at Har-

vard’s Kennedy School. America remains

far ahead militarily. Convertibility for the

yuan is for the future. Jake Sullivan, of the

Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace, recentlywrote in

Foreign Affairs

that

“rumours of the international order’s de-

mise have been greatly exaggerated.”

And there is little evidence that the

American public has taken a decisive Jack-

sonian turn. Polling by the Pew Research