The Economist June 9th 2018 BriefingDonald Trump and the world 1912 Those who despair, or think “Yes, but”,
may also be open to surprise—indeed most
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 how he operates. Mr Trump is in-
curious and profoundly narcissistic, 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 lack of humility
Mr Trump appears to see the world as he
saw the New York property market, 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 saw reality 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
NATOwho 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 of Mr 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 Barack Obama, and not to think hard, if
at all, about consequences. You can expect
angry and fatuous tweeting and weird 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
look good.
The four major policy moves of the 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,
they have scandalised much of the 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 Koreanpresident, Moon Jae-in (himself a victim of
Mr Trump’s bullying in other matters), 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
split with the Europeans makes 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 deal with it if they face American
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.
A new alignment of interests 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,” says Mr 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 to Mr Indyk.
It is hard to make 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
bigcan soak up a lot of Boeings, soya and
liquefied natural gas.
There is almost no way 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
if Mr Trump could claim a hat-trick, the po-
tential downsides could more than offset
any gains. With North Korea, for example,
there is the disturbingpossibility that Mr
Kim might offer to give up hisICBMs,
which look as if they can carry weapons to
any part of America, but not, yet, all his
bombs or all his shorter-range missiles.
Thus South Korea and Japan would remain
under threat—and feel betrayed by an ally
interested in protecting only itself. That
could open the way to a regional arms race.The lost world
Change in approval of US leadership, 2016-
Percentage pointsDecrease Increase
No data
>20 10-20 0-9 0-9 10-Source: Gallup