There are three major changes of world historical importance happening at the moment. None of them is being handled well by Trump. The first, is the start of a trade war between the USA and its former major allies. At the G7 meeting this week Trump utterly failed to understand what was happening and its significance. He put himself in a minority of one by imposing tariffs on steel and aluminium. When the rest of the G7 bluntly told him that they would retaliate in ways that cost US jobs his answer was to threaten them that they would regret it if they imposed any fresh tariffs of their own. In other words he tried to threaten them with retaliation to their retaliation.
That attitude has virtually guaranteed that we are about to enter into a trade war. If there is one more economically damaging thing than uncontrolled globalisation it is narrow minded nationalism. We know from the 1930s what tit for tat tariffs and subsidies do for the world economy. They do immense harm. When the tariff or the subsidy is imposed it protects jobs in one country at the expense of another. Then when the retaliation comes in the result is a much greater job losses than anything that was gained by propping up the home industry with tariff barriers in the first place. Once the cycle of retaliation gets underway everyone suffers. Trump just left the rest of the G7 with no option other than to retaliate. What the world needs is a move towards more effective international management of a global economy. What Trump is doing is to put the existence of any kind of world trade agreements at risk. Not exactly the actions of a great leader.
It is never easy for a nation that has been the most economically successful and most powerful to experience a relative decline. The UK is still struggling with the psychology of that decades after it happened. Trump has tapped into the fear inside the US that economic events are moving against it and is securing temporary domestic popularity by riding that fear. Telling nervous people that their glorious past is about to return under your all-seeing wisdom is quite a good way of winning support in advance of an election. Believing your own economic fantasies and leading the biggest economy in the world into a backward looking isolationist trap is a very bad way of managing change.
When it comes to the second huge challenge of our time Trump is failing even more dramatically. It has been evident for many years now that it is not just a global economy that needs managing but the very existence of life on that globe. We only have one planet and it is simply not adequate to try and protect that planet and enable it to prosper by relying on voluntary agreements. Astonishingly the damage to our environment has become so clear and so threatening that nations did sign up to the Paris agreement and did create some kind of prospect of eventually investing enough money and political will in making the necessary changes to limit the very worst damage. Trump has ruined much of that by simply insisting that his nation isn’t going to take any action to control climate change if it costs it any money.
We know we need to move away from fossil fuel use and quickly. Trump thinks the way forward is to issue licences to drill for oil in the arctic. We know we need to massively reduce the use of plastics and to manage their disposal. Trump isn’t interested because he can see the costs but not the benefits. We know that every respectable climate scientist is telling us that CO2 levels are at a dangerous high and still rising when they badly need to come down. Trump’s approach is to cut off funding for their research and pull their publications off every US government website. By comparison the Chinese government is investing in hundreds of thousands of electric buses, replanting trees by the millions and installing similar numbers of solar panels. It is not hard to see which approach is more likely to equip an economy to be ready for the future.
The third challenge we are facing is that the technology of nuclear weapons has become relatively easy to access for a significant number of nations but the politics that might enable us to control their use is still primitive. Many deeply unpleasant nations have either created nuclear weapons or have the capacity to do so relatively soon. Anyone who studies Pakistan’s political debates for even a short period of time must shudder with fear at the realisation of what kind of views are held by people with their finger on the button there. Things aren’t much better in India where extreme Hindu nationalism is growing in strength. Then there is Iran where some of the most narrow-minded clerics in the world are desperately trying to keep the lid on a young population that wants greater freedom.
Trump is therefore very right to say that the world will be a much safer place if we can at least get nuclear weapons out of Korea. He is utterly wrong to believe that he personally is about to achieve this because he made big enough threats and acted tough. The North Koreans have been listening to threats from the US for decades and ignoring them. What has changed is that the Chinese have told Kim he has become a nuisance and they won’t prop up his clumsy economy unless he shapes up and starts being more sensible. At the same time the South Korean President has utterly changed the atmosphere in that country from being one of sterile confrontation to a genuine drive for dialogue. In short quiet behind the scenes diplomatic moves by others have set up an opportunity for peace. Trump is on the verge of taking the benefit from all that hard work by signing a deal that he has done little to create and much to undermine.
It would, of course, be great to reduce the threat of war in the Korean peninsula and get better control over nuclear weapons there. But Korea isn’t the only problem. The situation of having a few great powers that hold nuclear weapons whilst other nations are not considered mature enough to do so is logically unsustainable and cannot last. How future problems are handled is a great deal more important than how one summit is spun.
Where do we go from here if the US President walks away from the table convinced that he got the best deal in history out of North Korea as a result of bullying behaviour and refusing to back down? Take that attitude of mind into the efforts to wean Iran off its nuclear weapons and you wreck decades of work to get that country moving in a more positive direction. Instead of empowering the opposition he will simply empower and entrench the clerics. Take that attitude into discussions with Putin and who knows what might happen.
The great irony of nationalists is that they hold very similar views but have completely incompatible ambitions because they only look to the interests of their own country. Putin and Trump have virtually identical political ideologies. They both believe in a strong charismatic leader who can restore lost greatness to their nation. That makes them natural bedfellows. The second the interests of the two countries clash and they have to think about compromise and collaboration they become natural enemies. It is logically impossible for all nations to be first. That is a pretty hard thing to grasp for leaders who believe in America first or a resurgent Russia. Compromise is a hard thing to sell to a country fed on a diet of nationalist rhetoric.
Anything which builds up the strength of the narrow-minded nationalism that Trump champions is deeply dangerous. Anything which helps to build stronger international decision making in a world of equal peoples is constructive. So just remember as they try to sell you Trump’s finest hour that such sweet illusions make it more likely that we will get to witness a lot more of him at his worst.
We already have some very strong evidence about how bad that can be.