Who understands our times, Bernie or The Donald?

April 13, 2019

by Fareed Zakaria.com

https://fareedzakaria.com/columns/2019/4/11/who-understands-our-times-bernie-or-the-donald

There are many explanations for Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory in this week’s election that have to do with Israel’s particular situation — its economic boom, stable security climate and the prime minister’s political talent. But he is also part of a much larger phenomenon: the continued strength of populist nationalism around the world — and the continued inability of left-of-center parties to respond to it.

 

The case for populist nationalism goes something like this. It’s a nasty world out there. People are trying to take our jobs, undermine our security, move into our country. The cosmopolitan urban elites don’t care; they benefit from these forces. So we need a tough guy who will stand up for the nation and against the liberals in our midst.

In some variant or another, this is the argument made by Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Jair Bolsonaro, the Brexiteers — and, of course, President Trump.

In 1972, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that nationalism “expresses the inflamed desire of the insufficiently regarded to count for something among the cultures of the world.” He placed the roots of modern nationalism in Germany, a country obsessed with finding its place in the sun. But the sentiment — a kind of victim mentality — can be found in almost all modern variations, even among rich and powerful nations.

Look at Putin’s claim that Russia has been pushed around by the West since the Cold War, the Chinese obsession with their humiliation since the opium wars, the Israeli right’s complaint that the world is biased against Israel and Trump’s constant refrain that all foreigners — from Mexicans to Chinese to Europeans — take advantage of the United States. These leaders promise to rectify the situation and restore their countries’ proper standing in the world.

Trump’s embrace of the word “nationalism” illustrates the simultaneous attacks on domestic elites (with their politically correct language) and on perfidious foreigners. “We’re not supposed to use that word,” Trump said in October. “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.”

When asked the next day what he meant by the term, Trump responded, “I love our country. And our country has taken second fiddle. . . . We’re giving all of our wealth, all of our money, to other countries. And then they don’t treat us properly.”

Netanyahu, for his part, has long argued that Israel deserves a much better “place among the nations,” a phrase that was the title of his 1993 book that argued for a robust Israeli nationalism that is aggressive and unapologetic. Though Israel’s strength and security have grown immeasurably, as its historical enemies — Saudi Arabia and Syria, among others — have either become buddies or basket cases, the argument that the world is against it has somehow persisted.

In fact, despite the pose of victim hood adopted by most of these populists, nationalism is probably the most widely held ideology in the world today. Which American politician today does not speak up for the United States? The real debate is whether nationalism should be informed and influenced by other values such as liberty and equality and, if these two sets of values conflict, which one should be preferred. That’s why the most ardent capitalists — from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman — have always been in favor of globalization and economic freedom above nationalist protections and controls.

The danger for liberals is that they underestimate the power of these raw, emotional appeals. For centuries, liberals have assumed that nationalism was a kind of irrational attachment that would grow weaker as people became more rational, connected and worldly. In fact, Berlin wrote, like a twig that is bent in one direction and has to snap back, as globalization grew in its reach, nationalism would be the predictable backlash.

Populist nationalists understand the core appeal of their ideology. I recently asked a Bolsonaro supporter whether the Brazilian president’s economic policies (which are free-market-oriented and reformist) or his cultural nationalism was the key to his appeal. The supporter’s answer: Nationalism is the party’s core; the economics is simply about efficiency and growth.

Meanwhile, liberals in the United States still don’t seem to get it. The Democratic Party continues to think the solution to its woes is to keep moving leftward economically. This week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) revealed his new Medicare-for-all plan, which was immediately co-sponsored by four other presidential candidates. The plan will probably require an additional $2 trillion to $3 trillion in annual tax revenue.At the same time, Trump tweets about the Democrats’ love of “open borders” and insists he will protect the country and enforce its laws. What if Trump understands the mood of our times better than Sanders?

(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers Group

 

Uncle Joe and the Perils of Good Intentions

April 8, 2019

By Katy Waldman

April 7, 2019

Joe Biden’s charisma, for those who see it as such, depends on him being slightly naughty, and then on us discerning his good (or at least harmless) intentions and giving him a pass.

Photograph by Win McNamee / Getty

Americans have been on a long road trip with Joe Biden. The former Vice-President’s hot mikes, his “handsiness,” “gaffes,” and “loose-lipped and emotive manner” are all a matter of family lore.  Everybody knows a story or two or ten of Uncle Joe whispering in a woman’s ear, clasping her waist, or smelling her hair.

As Biden, now seventy-six, prepares to enter the 2020 Presidential race, several women have come forward to describe deeply uncomfortable situations involving his incursions into their personal space.

What’s changed is not the severity or nature of the offenses—no one has accused Biden of sexual misconduct. It’s just that the voices narrating the scenes have switched, so that we’re looking at the same gestures through a different lens. We’re looking through the lens of Lucy Flores, who wrote in The Cut that her encounter with Biden before a campaign event in 2014 left her feeling “uneasy, gross, and confused.” Or the lens of Amy Lappos, who said that, at a 2009 fund-raiser, Biden grabbed her around the neck and rubbed noses with her. “It’s not affection,” Lappos told the Hartford Courant. “It’s sexism or misogyny.”

On Wednesday, Biden tweeted a video acknowledging the accusations. “The boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset, and I get it. . . . I’ll be much more mindful,” he said. But he stopped short of apologizing. “I’ve always tried to make a human connection,” he said. “Life is about connecting to people,” he also said. The statement gently implied that Biden’s critics were fundamentally untethered—misunderstanding not only him but also the higher purpose of their time on earth. On Friday, Biden appeared more defiant. “I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done,” he said. “I’ve never been disrespectful intentionally to a man or a woman—that’s not the reputation I’ve had since I was in high school, for God’s sake.” The same day, at a conference of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, in Washington, D.C., Biden joked about getting permission from the union’s president, Lonnie Stephenson, before putting his arm around Stephenson’s shoulder; then he made a similar joke about a child who joined him onstage.

What Biden perceives as intimacy, as empathic connection, may be, in fact, polite forbearance. Every woman knows men who remind her of Joe Biden. (If familiarity is his brand, then women are all too familiar.) These men radiate physicality and friendly exuberance, like messy Labradors—and who wants to seem uptight to a Labrador? Biden’s charisma, for those who see it as such, depends on him being slightly naughty, and then on us discerning his good (or at least harmless) intentions and giving him a pass. It might feel small and cruel not to give him a pass. On some level, a politician as intuitive and personable as Biden must realize that people dislike feeling small and cruel.

Although Biden has been in the public eye for nearly fifty years, his portrayal in the press as a well-meaning rogue is only about a decade old. He has always been a fundamentally sympathetic character, owing to the terrible family tragedies he has endured: the death of his first wife and baby daughter in a car accident, in 1972, and, in 2015, the death, from cancer, of his forty-six-year-old son, Beau. Still, Biden was long seen as a standard politico: slippery, telegenic, vaguely compromised. His first Presidential campaign flamed out, in 1987, owing to his plagiarism both on the stump and back in law school. In 1991, he oversaw Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where Anita Hill faced an all-white, all-male panel of interrogators, and where he declined to subpoena at least three witnesses who could have corroborated Thomas’s pattern of harassing behavior. “Biden was oily and unctuous throughout,” Howard Rosenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times. (“I’ve worked my whole life to empower women,” Biden said in the video on Wednesday.)

Only in 2007, as he considered entering the Presidential race (“I’m a tactile politician and I trust my feel, and I’m telling you I think there’s some pace on the ball”), did the word “blundering” start to appear in coverage of Biden, partly because of a remark Biden made about the then candidate Barack Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. As similar anecdotes began to surface—Biden also referred to Obama as “Barack America,” and encouraged a man in a wheelchair to “stand up” and let the crowd see him—the main cliché about Biden became that he was infelicitously blurty. Media narratives coalesced around words like “quirky,” “anachronistic,” “effusive,” “undisciplined,” “garrulous,” and “folksy.” Wolf Blitzer highlighted the senator’s penchant for “off-the-cuff comments”; Politico called him “a reliable fount of gaffes, awkward statements, and hyperbole.”

On January 20, 2009, a new narrative twist arrived, with an article in The Onion titled “Joe Biden Shows Up to Inauguration with Ponytail.” The piece marked the début of the comedy Web site’s Diamond Joe character: a muscle-car-loving, Pearl Jam–singing playboy prone to causing trouble at Dave & Buster’s. (Sample headlines: “Biden to Cool His Heels in Mexico for Awhile,” “White House Infested with Bedbugs After Biden Brings in Recliner Off the Curb.”) The Onion’s fictional Biden made hypermasculine tropes look not only unthreatening but delightful. They were the satirical equivalent of petting the Labrador on the head. A slick, womanizing Biden, a shirtless Biden who soaped up his Trans Am on the White House driveway and starred in Hennessy ads (“Sensual, Powerful, Biden”), was, oddly, a familiar Biden—which is partly why the joke worked so well for so long. (It also worked because of the strong contrast with the impeccably statesmanlike Obama, a deft comedian who was, unlike Biden, always in on his own joke.)

By 2010, the “wacky uncle” meme was in full flower. “Joe Biden,” a reporter wrote for the Washington Times, “has acquired . . . immunity. He regularly says things ranging from goofy to merely silly to outrageous, but the passage of the years has made him a lovable old uncle that nobody any longer takes seriously.” In Marie Claire, Alexandra Jacobs described Biden as glad-handing “every politico, getting in close, squeezing their shoulders.” Of the candidate and his second wife, Jacobs wrote, “Joe and Jill Biden exude a marital heat uncommon in buttoned-up Beltway circles.” Jacobs also quoted the Obama aide Valerie Jarrett: “They’re very, very outwardly demonstrative.” (Even Jill Biden, in her forthcoming memoir, admits that, early in their relationship,

Joe’s ebullient courtship left her feeling “strange and uncomfortable,” and that she “sometimes found all that affection draining.”) “Affectionate and freewheeling,” the Times called Uncle Joe, in 2013. The reporter Amy Chozick revealed that, when speaking to his colleague Hillary Clinton on the phone, during President Obama’s first term, Biden sometimes signed off with the words “I love you, darling.”

The next significant update to the Biden mythology came in 2015. A viral photo of the Vice-President massaging the shoulders of Stephanie Carter, the wife of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, during Carter’s swearing-in, caused pundits to snarkily invoke the “ick factor” and the “yuck factor.” (In a Medium post, Carter defended Biden’s “attempt to support me.”) The hosts of the “Today” show pulled together a slide show of images of Biden cozying up to women. “Joe Biden is the most entertaining Vice-President ever,” Carson Daly said, while Willie Geist observed that “he’s getting a little handsy,” and Al Roker smirked at the “Vice-Presidential magic fingers.” (These types of segments are what Flores is invoking when she writes, “Despite the steady stream of pictures and the occasional article, Biden retained his title of America’s Favorite Uncle. On occasion, that title was downgraded to America’s Creepy Uncle, but that in and of itself implied a certain level of acceptance.”)

If Biden is not sorry for anything he has ever done, it’s in part because most men and some women have been telling him for a long time that he has nothing to be sorry for, or, if he does, that it is mitigated by its entertainment value. And it’s conceivable that there is nothing inherently wrong with a kiss on the back of the head. But it’s irrefutable that there is nothing sacrosanct about it, either. A nose rub is a curious hill to die on. Biden’s identity is predicated on harmlessness, and he must cling to that identity even after harm has been demonstrated. Biden may believe that Lucy Flores, Amy Lappos, and other women felt demeaned by their encounters with him, but he also believes that their misunderstanding of his good intentions forfeits their claims to our sympathy. His brand is empathic connection, and to maintain it he must resist empathically connecting with the discomfort and embarrassment of the women he attempted to empathically connect with, using his hands and mouth.

If some Democratic women still have reservoirs of affection for Uncle Joe, they may be sourced in part from one of his greatest political performances: when he faced off against Sarah Palin in the Vice-Presidential debate in October, 2008. In her preview of the event, the Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick offered Biden some prescient advice. Palin “will attack, and you will smile,” Lithwick wrote. “She will make jokes, and you will laugh. Do whatever you need to do—take four Percocet, deploy Zen breathing techniques—to prevent yourself from attacking this woman.” That is exactly how Biden proceeded. The beaming and genial man who showed up onstage deflected Palin’s offensives with such pleasantness that one would have thought he’d spent a lifetime learning to prioritize and reflect back other people’s feelings. It was the first Vice-Presidential debate since 1984 to feature a woman, and Biden flipped the gender script. He was deferential, ever-smiling, on point. He performed polite forbearance. He played the girl. One wonders if he remembers what that felt like.

• Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

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The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Joe Biden

March 25.2010

By John Cassidy

March 22, 2019

Though Joe Biden is doing well in early-opinion polls, if he intends to run for the Presidency in 2020, he needs to jump in and start making the case for himself.

 

Photograph by Michelle Gustafson / Bloomberg / Getty

Inside the political world, there is a common presumption that entering an elongated Democratic-primary contest will prove damaging to the former Vice-President Joe Biden, who is riding high in early opinion polls, and that, as the saying goes, the first day of his campaign may well be the best. Only time will tell if this prediction is right. But the events of this week have demonstrated that Biden is also exposing himself to hazards by standing on the edge and hesitating.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Biden “has expressed concern” to associates “that he wouldn’t be able to raise millions of dollars in online donations immediately” as some of the other Democratic candidates, including the former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke and Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, have. On Thursday, the Times reported that Biden and his advisers are thinking about announcing that Biden would only serve one term, an effort to frame his bid “as a one-time rescue mission for a beleaguered country.” The Times and Axios also reported that Team Biden is considering naming a Vice-Presidential candidate straight away, and that one of the people under consideration is Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician who delivered the Democratic reply to January’s State of the Union address and was widely agreed to have aced it.

The message these stories send is that Biden is worried about various things: money, his age (he will turn seventy-seven later this year), and his ability to reach younger and more progressive voters. At least some of these worries may well be justified, but they aren’t the sort of thing that any Presidential contender wants amplified on the home pages of national newspapers, particularly a contender whose biggest assets are supposedly his likeability and electability. Assuming that Biden does intend to run, he needs to jump in and start making the case for himself, as other candidates have done. In an environment of heightened political activism, blanket media coverage, and ubiquitous social media, history doesn’t favor those who wait. And it certainly doesn’t favor he whose proto-campaign is already generating damaging stories.

If Biden does take the plunge, he will start out with at least two substantial advantages. Having faithfully served as Barack Obama’s wingman for eight years, he is widely liked among Democratic voters; his popularity extends across regions and racial groups. Moreover, Democrats desperately want to nominate someone who can beat Donald Trump, and Biden currently polls better than the other Democratic candidates in head-to-head matchups. An Emerson College survey that came out on Wednesday showed him defeating Trump by ten percentage points, fifty-five to forty-five. The matchups involving other Democrats, such as Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, were a lot closer.

Of course, the fact that Biden is polling well in March, 2019, doesn’t mean that he’s the best candidate to take on Trump in November, 2020. To win the nomination, he’ll need to prove his mettle on a daily basis, avoid the mistakes that plagued his two previous Presidential bids, and cast off some of the baggage he has acquired during his nearly fifty years in politics. (He entered his first electoral race, for New Castle County Council, in 1970.)

He could begin by saying sorry to Anita Hill for his role in the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings (he has said that he wished he could have done more to prevent other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee from hounding Hill but stopped short of issuing an apology); reiterating his contrition about the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which led to mass incarceration of minorities; and apologizing for some of the statements he made in the mid-seventies, when, as a freshman U.S. senator, he vigorously opposed school-busing. (A recent Washington Post article dug up a number of Biden quotes, including this one, from 1975: “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and . . . to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ ”)

Judging by some comments he made last weekend, Biden’s first instinct will be to defend his record and point to progressive positions he has adopted over the years, such as his support for public housing, labor unions, and expanding voting rights. He needs to go further. Democratic-primary voters know that Biden started out in a different era, but many of them will also want him to demonstrate that he embraces an environment in which there is zero tolerance for anything that smacks of sexism or racism.

Making such a gesture is the right thing to do, and it could help defuse some of the attacks that are sure to come. It’s a smarter play than immediately floating the idea of selecting Abrams as his running mate, talented though she is. As the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty pointed out, the Abrams story smacked of gimmickry, and it was also “presumptuous” of Biden’s advisers to assume that Abrams would accept the role of “acting as Biden’s human shield, constantly called upon to answer for his past positions on issues that put him at odds with African American and female voters.” (On Thursday, a spokesperson for Abrams issued a statement saying that she has met with more than a half-dozen Presidential contenders, and she “continues to keep all options on the table for 2020 and beyond.”)

To be sure, if Abrams doesn’t decide to enter the Presidential race on her own account, she could eventually be a potential running mate for a number of the other candidates, Biden included. Right now, though, the former Vice-President needs to stand on his own feet. He would do well to take the advice of his Delaware friend and colleague, Senator Chris Coons, who has called on him to make clear that he has the energy and determination to serve for two terms.

Whatever he does, Biden will be attacked from the left for being too centrist, too friendly with Republicans, and too in hock to financial interests headquartered in Delaware. These are substantive criticisms. Still, if he combines his defense of the Obama legacy with a populist economic agenda focussed on advancing the middle class—one that he has already embraced—he could be a formidable candidate. And despite being the front-runner in the polls, he could also benefit from being underestimated by pundits, many of whom expect him to falter. In any case, though, he needs to get in there. Enough of the “Hamlet” act.

• John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also writes a column about politics, economics, and more for newyorker.com.

  https://www.newyorker.com

Will Trump Win a Second Term?

March 8, 2019

Mar 7, 2019 Elizabeth Drew

ttps://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-trump-wins-second-term-in-2020-by-elizabeth-drew-2019-03

 

 

Logic would suggest that US President Donald Trump can’t make it through a reelection fight: his base is too small, and he’s done next to nothing to expand it. But Trump’s success at solidifying his base could be his salvation in 2020.

 

WASHINGTON, DC – It seems that every time I write about Donald Trump’s presidency, I pronounce it to be in more trouble than ever. This time is no different: he and his presidency are indeed in more trouble than ever. And yet that may not prevent him from winning again in 2020.

The Burn and the Smart Elizabeth

I used to think Trump might not even finish his first term, much less get a second. Now I’m agnostic. For one thing, the US Justice Department’s questionable view that a sitting president can’t be indicted is an inducement to fight to stay in office. Logic would suggest that Trump can’t make it through a reelection fight: his base, an estimated 35-38% of voters, is too small, and he’s done next to nothing to expand it. And while he has governed for the base, he’s failed to fulfill many of his promises. But logic isn’t a trademark of the Trump Presidency.

Much of Trump’s base is quite satisfied that he’s named two very conservative justices to the Supreme Court, that he’s rolled back regulations on various industries, and that businesses and the wealthy got their tax cut. But business tycoons and the wealthy don’t attend his rallies and cheer his every utterance. Those who do tend to be middle- and lower-middle class voters, to whom he has delivered little other than the satisfaction of yelling at mentions of Democrats and chanting – still – “Lock her up!” even though their target, Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, has said that she won’t run again in 2020.

Trump is America’s first cult President. His followers delight in his insouciance toward the norms of political behavior, his dismissal of “political correctness,” and his skill at taking down opponents (like mocking the ultra-liberal Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed native-American heritage, with the sobriquet “Pocahontas”). He skates on the edge of incitement and governs on the edge of danger. His disparaging of the press – a fanatic Trump supporter roughed up a BBC cameraman at a recent rally – satisfies his followers’ suspicion of “elites,” while helping him create a fact-free environment in which his thousands of lies define an alternate reality. His invention of a “national emergency” on the US-Mexico border channels his base’s bigotry (plus his own) and supposedly justifies an unprecedented presidential power grab (bipartisan majorities in Congress don’t agree).

Trump’s success at solidifying his base could be his salvation in 2020 if the Democratic nomination process doesn’t produce a strong enough opponent or ends in hostility. And, though Trump appears to have committed several impeachable offenses – accepting “emoluments,” or gifts or income from foreign sources, and obstructing justice, among others – the Democrats are reluctant to be seen as seeking his removal from office, owing to the fierce opposition of Trump’s base. (Fanatic Trump supporters have threatened literal civil war if their hero is impeached or convicted.) Leading Democrats say that they won’t begin impeachment – or a vote in the House to indict a president on specific grounds – without bipartisan support.

This could be a circular trap: it took some time for any Republicans to accept the possibility that Richard Nixon should be forced to leave office, and Trump’s base is both larger and more institutionalized (through Fox News, among other pillars). By launching a broad investigation of Trump’s private and public actions – the House Judiciary Committee (which has jurisdiction over impeachment) this week sent out 81 demands for more information – congressional Democrats are actually trying to prepare for impeachment. If this doesn’t succeed, the theory goes, they will at least have damaged Trump’s reelection prospects. It would also be useful in case Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s anticipated report does not offer anything helpful. (No one outside that investigation has a clue as to what Mueller has found.)

With an overcrowded field of democrat presidential hopefuls, he may be in The White House beyond 2020.Will he be impeached? That’s the Question to ask.

Some of the figures now called before the committee were suggested by Trump’s former consigliere, Michael Cohen, who, in his own recent open testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, called his former boss a racist, a con man, and a cheat. (Apparently he had also been helpful to the Democrats in closed testimony before the Intelligence Committee.)

Although the oversight committee’s Republican members portrayed Cohen as untrustworthy because he’d been convicted of lying to Congress and will soon go to jail, they noticeably didn’t defend Trump. (Cohen had essentially lied to defend Trump, with his encouragement.) He also offered some evidence and anecdotes that could prove highly problematic for Trump – for example, by suggesting that Trump knew in advance about the first WikiLeaks dump of Democratic Party emails and about the infamous meeting in Trump Tower between top Trump aides and Russian operatives. In the end, a poll showed the public believes Cohen over Trump by 50% to 35%.

There has already been conflict between the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and the White House over the former’s demand for information on why intelligence officials denied Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the high security clearance he needed to carry out some diplomatic tasks – and why they were overruled by the president, a highly unusual (though legal) act. Kushner is suspected of using his public position to advance his private interests, namely raising funds for his family’s real-estate business. More recently, it was revealed that the president ordered that his daughter Ivanka also be given clearance, though this is not required for her job, whatever it is. These are among the wages of Trump running the White House as a family business and of his indifference toward governance norms.

So was the failure of Trump’s meeting in Hanoi with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The collapse of the talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula was the result of Trump and his aides not preparing adequately – such agreements are often pre-cooked, or at least there are no great surprises – and of Trump’s assumption that his powerful personality and what he sees as a close relationship with the brutal Kim would carry the day.

The failure of the Hanoi summit was to some extent offset by relief that Trump hadn’t given too much away – though he had been on the path to doing so. True to form, Trump and his aides blamed the outcome on the Democrats for holding the Cohen hearing on the same day. And, true to form, they were lying: the hearing date had been set first.

Elizabeth Drew

Writing for PS since 2015
38 Commentaries

 

Elizabeth Drew is a Washington-based journalist and the author, most recently, of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.

Elizabeth Warren and Axelrod

March 3, 2019

 

Trump’s Foreign Policy wreckage in Asia

February 20, 2019

Author: by Editorial Board, ANU

Trump’s foreign policy wreckage in Asia

Right now, he is the most dangerous man in the Free World

The real worry is that beyond Trump’s Presidency all the signs suggest that both the impulse of the United States to engage multilaterally will be very difficult to repair and that Mr Trump has fractured trust in multilateral endeavours around the world.–Editorial Board, ANU

When the Trump administration came to power two years ago, the response by policymakers with a huge stake in the relationship — from the leadership of China to that of rusted on allies like Japan or Australia — was that Trump’s team would settle back after the election and that business would resume with the new administration more or less as usual.

 

Burney Sanders– Will he do the BURN in 2020?

The United States was the crux of the economic and political security system on which the world has relied for more than three-quarters of a century. The global economic architecture which the United States and its allies put in place after World War II is now absent US leadership and care. Mr Trump and his team have trashed it. Trump’s trade war with China and his trade actions against others, including US allies like Japan, Europe and Canada, show utter disrespect for its core rules. This system is the international system of rules, whatever its weaknesses, on which Asia’s political security also vitally depends.

The wreckage of Mr Trump’s approach to foreign policy continues to pile up across Asia and around the world.

Joe Biden must make up his mind soon

The immediate outlook, over the next year or two, promises rising economic and political uncertainty. The real estate market bargaining style that Mr Trump has brought to dealing with these issues undervalues the complex interdependence between the economic and political security interests that are at stake. It undervalues the damaging multilateral consequences of bilateral dealing. That’s what is so risky about the bilateralisation of the US trade negotiations with China, which as the largest trading nation in the world is wisely bound into the multilateral global trading regime. Japan too is under pressure to do a bilateral trade deal with Mr Trump — a deal that goes beyond the multilateral commitments it has made to members of the so-called TPP-11. On the US trade conflict with China, there’s a deepening perception gap with Washington, and diplomatic realignment despite the deep security undertow in some countries.

Asian policy leaders are still coming to terms with the reality that Mr Trump is different and that the United States which delivered his electoral success is never likely to be quite the same. But there’s a growing understanding in Tokyo, Jakarta and even Canberra of what’s at stake in dealing with Mr Trump’s administration and the more proactive response that will be needed to defend core Asian economic and political interests that transcend the anxieties that exist between a rising China and the rest of Asia.

In this week’s lead essay Sheila Smith argues that based on the past performance of the Trump administration, US policy in Asia will ‘be erratic and self-serving’ in the coming year as the Trump administration continues ‘to work out its issues with countries in the region bilaterally and sporadically’. The ‘more openly pugilistic US relationship with China’, she says, ‘unsettles nerves’ across the region.

But the main problem for US foreign policy makers, Smith reckons, is not the behaviour of other global actors, including those in Asia or elsewhere. The main problem is the ‘crippling divisions within the Trump administration itself, and between the administration and the legislative and judicial branches of the US government, [that] could make any attempt to marshal US resources into foreign relations almost impossible’.

The coming year, as Smith says, will likely be a year of domestic political entanglement for the President and his administration. The effect of the political turbulence surrounding the White House and the extent to which it dominates US foreign policy is one dimension. But the lack of focus and consistency in the direction of foreign policy strategy is an altogether higher order concern. Diminished expertise and experience at all levels of the Trump administration undermine the trust that allies, partners and even adversaries can put in the reliability of US posturing.

In the short term, these worries are focused on Mr Trump and his administration. Some think that Trump will have more freedom to pursue his ambitions for ‘America First’ around the world. The immediate issue is how to respond to the ‘America First’ momentum in all its dimensions. But even if there are fewer experts in the government to challenge Mr Trump’s vision, implementation of his goals remains a challenge, especially against what now appears to be comprehensive pushback by the US security community in almost every theatre.

The turmoil at home, Smith warns, could produce more brittle and reactive decisions. This could bedevil meaningful dealings with others around the globe because of the instinct to seek settlement prematurely, in the trade war with China or denuclearisation in North Korea, for example, instead of pursuing stable, long-lasting agreements that serve the interests of the United States as well as its partners.

The crrizeises Mr Trump proudly proclaims that he alone could have dealt with are largely of his own making ( and for he arrogantly thinks he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize). It’s hardly surprising that Asian allies and partners alike should worry about how Mr Trump might deal with a real crisis when there’s a significant move within the US Congress to put limits on the President’s use of nuclear weapons.

The chances that the Trump administration, in this mode, will succeed in mitigating global-system destabilising trade and other tensions with China or, alone, secure an agreement on denuclearisation with North Korea appear remote.

Only multilateral engagement on both these and other issues such as climate change is likely to deliver stable, mutually advantageous outcomes to the United States and all its partners in any of these areas. That’s not on Mr Trump’s agenda.

The real worry is that beyond Trump’s presidency all the signs suggest that both the impulse of the United States to engage multilaterally will be very difficult to repair and that Mr Trump has fractured trust in multilateral endeavours around the world.

The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.