Donald Trump is undermining the rules-based international order

LafayetteBis · Jun 10, 2018

From The Economist, here: Donald Trump is undermining the rules-based international order

Excerpt:

There are three perspectives from which to look at this. The most prevalent in the foreign-policy establishment and the chancelleries of Europe is despair. The rules-based order ushered in after the second world war, which provided both the greatest-ever increase in human wealth and global trade and a whole human lifetime without worldwide armed conflict, is being dismantled. No good will come of it.

The second perspective could be called “Yes, but”. Yes-but-ism doesn’t exactly reject despair, but tempers it with various caveats: that Mr Trump’s outrages may not be as profound, unprecedented and permanent as they might seem; and that the old rules-based order was already failing in a number of respects.

The third perspective is openness to surprising success. This holds that Mr Trump’s one-off mixture of ambitions and style means he might be able to achieve things that people working in old ways within the old system simply could not.

These are perspectives, not camps. 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 incurious 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 consequences. 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 international relations as he saw reality television: unpredictability and absurdity raise the ratings, turnover in the characters keeps things fresh and you should never let anyone 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 NATO who is now at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “That’s a big problem.” This is largely true and renders joined-up policymaking and sustained effort more or less impossible. But the unpredictability is not total. The nature of Mr Trump’s goals hardly 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 personal touches, as in the remarkable, cloying letter to Mr Kim of May 24th. You can expect everything to be transactional. At every point Mr Trump wants to get something for himself—something which will look good.

The four major policy moves of the past three months—scrapping the Iran deal, offering a summit to Mr Kim, setting the scene for a trade war with China and slapping steel tariffs on his allies—all reflect who Mr Trump is and how he works. No other recent president would have undertaken one of these, let alone all four at the same time. To his undoubted pleasure, they have scandalised much of the foreign-policy establishment.
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Donald Trump is undermining the rules-based international order

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Donald Trump is undermining the rules-based international order

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