20 BriefingDonald Trump and the world The EconomistJune 9th 2018
2 North Koreans have told foreign con-
tacts that the fate of theJCPOAmeans their
country will not trust any deal offered it.
This is one of the big downsides of pulling
out ofthe Iran deal. It did not 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 the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) by claiming that
things such as car imports are a national-
security matter will make things worse.
In all three cases there is another worry:
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 Kim has so far paid very little to get
one. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem
was a very big deal for Israel, which might
have been willingto do a lot to make it hap-
pen—but was not asked to. And a move on
the trade balance Mr Trump makes so
much of might spare China from having to
take steps that would strike at its theft ofin-
tellectual property, itssubsidies andits re-
strictions on foreign investment.The pirates don’t eat the tourists
Thus it is possibleto 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 inthis 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 theeffectiveness 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,”
says Mr Burns. “He’s the weakest 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 tobe “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 free world.”
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 the world has changed.
Some of what Mr Trump is overturning
is quite recent, and not all that popular; to
walk away from it is simply to cross over to
a path not taken but still clearly visible. The
JCPOAhad many enemies. The Paris cli-
mate agreement was carefully crafted so as
not to need Senate ratification—which it
had no hope ofgetting. Hillary Clinton told
American voters that she would reject the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal
negotiated under Mr Obama, as Mr 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 pressedNATOallies to spend more
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 ofbusiness—and the internationalist
and idealist Wilsonians. The unilateralist-
isolationist heirs to Andrew Jackson went
along with 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 lookless aberrant.They didn’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 Trumpon some things, as
when he hastried to ease sanctionson Rus-
sia. The Europeans will grouse, but have no
real alternative other than to stick with the
NATOalliance. 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 inTPP, should it
one day wish 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, recently wrote inForeign Affairsthat
“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 1