Hubris in the U.K.

The Weekly Standard, May 26, 2017

Special advisers to political leaders need to get out more. Prime Minister Theresa May's decision to sneak what was quickly labeled a "dementia tax" into the Conservative party's general election manifesto (the British general election will be held on June 8) was reportedly heavily influenced by Nick Timothy, a Rasputin (with beard to match) in the court of a prime minister with few confidants. It was inserted into the manifesto at the last minute absent, reportedly, much consultation to speak of with those who would be actually facing the voters. That was a mistake.

Within days of the manifesto's release, one poll showed that the Tory lead had dropped by 5 percentage points to (a still immensely comfortable) 12 percent. This was almost certainly due, in no small part, to the dementia tax (or, to describe the culprit more politely, one of the new proposals for the funding of "social care").

Medical progress is uneven. Life­spans have been extended, but bodies and minds have struggled to keep up. There has been rapid growth in the number of the elderly who find it difficult or impossible to cope on their own, and there has been a corresponding growth in the expense of caring for them. In the U.K., government will pay for nursing-home care, but only after the person staying there is down to his or her last £23,250 in assets (roughly $30,000). If Methuselah is looked after in his own home, however (something that saves the state money), the value of his residence is not counted in that total: He gets to hang onto his house and pass it on to his heirs. Responding to the widespread perception that the system was too harsh, David Cameron's coalition government had earlier brought in reforms that included the introduction (delayed until 2020) of a porous and less than comprehensive "cap" of £72,000 on what anyone could be charged for social care.

May's idea was very different. Instead of a cap there would be a floor. To put it far too simply, the last £100,000 in assets would be shielded. Apart from that, there would be no limit on how much Methuselah could be asked to pay. Turning the screw still tighter, the old boy would no longer be doing his heirs much of a favor by staying on at home. Under May's rules, the value of the house could be used to defray the cost of his care, although (if he preferred) only after his death: Compassionate conservatism lives on.

People with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia can be relatively physically fit, at least initially. They can live on for quite a while, and the bill for looking after them can rise accordingly: A lifetime (or lifetimes) of savings could thus be wiped out by bad luck or a bad gene. On the other hand, be fortunate enough to be killed off, say, by cancer or a kindly coronary, and the state will still pick up the tab. The thought that some diseases were to be rendered more equal than others obviously didn't worry May's team overmuch. And the prospect of draining wealth from the wealthier they considered a feature, not a bug. May intends to drag the Conservative party to the left. A further slice of redistribution would not come amiss.

To believe this was either good politics or good policy was nuts. Voting turnout among the over-65s (some three-quarters of whom are home-owners) is high, and, at the time the election was called, they strongly favored the Conservatives. Well, they did: The "dementia tax" (which could hit millions of people) has triggered some of their deepest anxieties about what lies ahead in what's left of their lives.

Mrs. May might not have much time for Mrs. Thatcher, but she would have done well to remember the Iron Lady's reluctance—fueled both by fear of punishment at the polls and of damage to the country—to do anything that could hurt "our people." Our people save, our people own their homes, our people want to pass something onto the next generation. These were qualities that Thatcher rightly believed were good for the social and economic health of the nation, qualities that, as she also understood, attracted such people, our people, to her version of Conservatism.

And our people have already paid a disproportionate amount of tax to fund a welfare state that, if May got her way, might stick them—at a time when they were essentially helpless—with another, possibly monstrous bill, a dying-too-slowly tax, lest the death tax itself (Britain's inheritance tax) was not enough to do the trick. The richest could, in all likelihood, weather the costs. As is so often the case with redistributive taxation, those who would be hurt the most would be the aspirational, the middling successful: Our people.

The private sector can do only so much to defray the costs of long-term home care. It would be a challenge for insurers to offer affordable coverage against a risk that is so unpredictable and, potentially, so large, even to the young. Those foolish enough to have entered middle age (let alone anything grayer) by now would have a vanishingly small chance of finding the insurance they might need. Risks of this type are best very widely pooled. In Britain that means either extra funding by the taxpayer or cutbacks in government spending elsewhere: Whatever some may claim, there are places to look for the latter.

The last time that May's government took aim at our people (by attempting to increase FICA-style charges on the self-employed), it had to back down. And despite dishonest denials in recent days of a U-turn, that looks to be how it will go with the dementia tax. There will be a cap, although, significantly and cynically, May has not yet said how high it will be.

That evasion may be one reason to suspect that the majority she seems on course to win will not be too big. Which may be for the best. May's opponent, Labour's far-left Jeremy Corbyn, cannot be trusted with any degree of power. But the dementia tax is a reminder that the over-promoted Theresa May cannot be trusted with too much.

Macron’s Moment

National Review Online, April 24, 2017

The news that Emmanuel Macron, the nice centrist candidate, was going to win the first round of France’s presidential election was greeted with undisguised delight by the European Union’s ruling elite. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, is not meant to weigh in on elections that are still underway in EU member states, but rules are for little people. He was quick to pass on his congratulations and wish Macron well in the run-off against the National Front’s not-always-so-nice Marine Le Pen two weeks from now. Juncker’s ‘foreign minister,’ Federica Mogherini, gushed that seeing the EU and French flags fly at Macron’s victory celebration was “the hope and future of our generation.” Michel Barnier tweeted that, as a “patriot and European,” he was confident about Macron’s prospects on May 7, and added that “France must remain European.” What Barnier, the faintly sinister former European Commissioner and member of France’s defeated Republican party who will serve as Brussels’ chief negotiator in the Brexit negotiations, meant by “European” was that France must remain in the EU, something that Le Pen might well put in jeopardy. That’s what really mattered.     

Unemployment in France is approximately 10 percent, more than twice German levels. About a quarter of those between the ages of 16 and 25 are unemployed. French GDP growth has been sluggish for years, and government spending accounts for around 57 percent of GDP, compared with 44 percent in Germany.

Then there is terror: the Charlie Hebdo murders that began 2015, the massacre in Paris that ended it, the truck plowing into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice last year, and, most recently, the shooting in the Champs-Élysées that left one policeman dead and two other people seriously wounded just days before Sunday’s vote. These attacks are part of a wider Islamist assault on the West, but they are also symptomatic of failings in the effort to integrate France’s large Muslim minority, failings with consequences that have done more than their bit to contribute to the growth of the hard right. In 2016, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s General Directorate for Internal Security, told a parliamentary enquiry that he feared a “confrontation between the far right and the Muslim world.”

And Federica Mogherini is cheered up by some flags.

Observing the behavior of the Bourbons and their aristocratic entourage on their return to France after the fall of Napoleon, the French statesman Talleyrand is said to have remarked that the king and his entourage had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” For some reason that quip came to mind as I read those tweets and other celebratory commentary from, it seemed, every corner of Davosworld,

Looking at Emmanuel Macron, it’s not difficult to understand why. He is one of them — likable, clever, the son of a professor and a doctor, with degrees from the right places, impressive stints in both investment banking and government to his credit, and a fondness for the EU, free trade, and the politics of the Third Way or whatever the old Blairite snake oil is known as these days. As a Socialist minister of the economy, he put together the Loi Macron package of reforms in 2014 and 2015 as a modest — very modest, and it says something about French politics that they had to be forced through by decree — step in toward deregulation. At about the same time, he left the Socialist party, before quitting the government the following year amid speculation about the independent presidential run that duly came to be.

There’s another problem for the tale of populist retreat: Between Le Pen’s share of the first-round vote (roughly 21.5 percent) and that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, left-wing maniac and standard-bearer of France Unbowed (about 19.5 percent), four out of ten first-round ballots were cast for champions of the hard right and left. At 23.9 percent, Macron came out ahead of both of them, but not that far ahead. As establishment triumphs go, this looks a touch thin, even more so after you remember that neither of the two main parties managed to get their man into the final round. Former prime minister François Fillon, of the center-right Republicans, had looked at one point to be a strong challenger, but his campaign was dragged down by scandal. He is under criminal investigation, as is his wife, so the fact that he still managed to reach nearly 20 percent of the vote gives a hint of what might have been. As for the official candidate of the Socialist Party, poor Benoît Hamon, he was eclipsed by Macron and left with barely more than 6 percent of the vote.    

So what now? Le Pen will press on, as candidates described as far right so often do, with a mix of policies from both ends of the political spectrum, a mix that has not harmed her blue-collar appeal. Her tough line on immigration and Islamic extremism is accompanied by a somewhat protectionist economic platform designed to appeal to those who have found themselves struggling to keep up. This blend runs through into Le Pen’s Euroskepticism, driven from the right by nationalism and from the left by her suspicion of the EU’s attachment to what is, by French standards, an over-fondness for the free market. Oh yes, she’d also pull France out of NATO.

When Macron (who has been endorsed by Fillon and Hamon, but not, interestingly, by Mélenchon, who has said he won’t be endorsing anybody) wins in the second round — and he will — the next hurdle he’ll face is the parliamentary elections in June. No one knows how his fledgling party, En Marche! (echoes of Jeb!) will fare, but assuming that coattails and a honeymoon work their magic, enough of his team may make it into the National Assembly to form the nucleus of some sort of centrist coalition. But putting that together is still likely to involve horse trading of a type that won’t make it easy to build even on the meager reformist achievements of the Loi Macron, let alone address the mess in which France — statist, sclerotic, and stuck with the Euro — now finds itself.

Away from the economy, Macron appears to believe that there is not that much that can be done about mass immigration (climate change is, he explains — of course he does — one of its causes). This is not something that appears to worry him much, and it’s not only National Front voters who will find his lack of concern off-putting. As for doing a better job of integrating France’s Muslim minority, it’s far from clear that Macron has anything new to offer. The same may hold true of terrorism. “This imponderable, this threat,” Macron explained after the Champs-Élysées shootings, “will be a fact of daily life in the coming years.”

France’s next presidential election isn’t until 2022, but Marine Le Pen — or someone like her — will be waiting, and that wait may not be in vain.

Underrated: Mike Pence

Standpoint, April 1, 2017

If the stories are accurate, Donald Trump had last-minute doubts about Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and the person he’d just chosen as his running mate. If so, those doubts said more about Trump than Pence. The Donald would probably have preferred someone from his comfort zone: maybe Newt Gingrich, an eccentric whose glory days were decades ago, or New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a star eclipsed by scandal. He knew them reasonably well and, more importantly, understood that their last best hope of political advancement rested with him. They would know their place.

But Pence looked dangerously like his own man, an outsider foisted on Trump to reassure traditional Republicans and to bring decorum and a credible political track record to a ticket desperately short of both. To be sure, Pence faced a tough re-election fight for the governorship (which in the end he would have probably won), but he had also served six terms in Congress and had been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate for years. He had no need to jump aboard a Trump train only uncertainly connected to the rails. Worse, Pence had endorsed Ted Cruz and reportedly loathed The Donald. The Indiana governor denied that he felt that way, but it was hard to imagine a meeting of minds between a self-described “Christian . . . conservative and . . . Republican, in that order” and a chancer of no fixed party married to Ivana, Marla and Melania, in that order.

The Pence pick was enthusiastically received by GOP loyalists, and, however appalled they were by his hardline social — and not just social — conservativism, even the party’s opponents seemed somewhat soothed by the thought that, in the not-going-to-happen event of a Trump win, at least one pro would be in the new president’s vicinity. If there was a consensus, it was that Pence was a touch dull. There were mutterings too that he was not the brightest. Some of the latter can be put down to the lazy assumptions often made about religious types from flyover country, but, yes, Pence was a C student at high school and, yes, getting into law school had been something of a struggle. The vice president was not, one former associate told me, someone to get too deeply into policy details, but this former talk radio host was “good at messaging”.

That has not always been as true as it might have been. After his second (unsuccessful) attempt to make it into Congress, Pence apologised for running a campaign so negative that it backfired (that was then). A quarter of a century later, there was that looming re-election fight for the governorship. It looked trickier than it should have been, thanks partly to a battle over legislation designed to protect “religious freedom” (but seen by its critics as allowing discrimination against gays). Pence had annoyed both sides, initially by signing the law, then by agreeing to water it down.

That was unusual: Pence’s determination to stick to his principles, even if it meant defying a Republican president, had served him well in Washington after he won election to Congress in 2000. Grasping all the “legs” — fiscal, social and hawkish — of what Ronald Reagan famously described as conservatism’s “three-legged stool”, it wasn’t too long before he was on his way up.  The hardening attitudes on the Right that accompanied the financial crisis (Pence voted against the TARP bailout) and Obama’s election did him no harm either. He became a Tea Party favourite, largely without alienating more mainstream colleagues — no mean achievement. Chatter about a bid for the White House grew louder, but Pence opted to take aim first at the governor’s mansion, a shrewd choice for an ambitious legislator looking for the executive experience that could, if the opportunity arose, bolster a run for the presidency.

Four years later, an unexpected and rather different opportunity presented itself. Pence — more flexible than his reputation suggested — took it. There are dignified rationalisations, of course (patriotic duty, saw something good in Trump) for that decision, but it looks a lot like a brilliant contrarian bet. It would have been made easier to take by the prospect of that re-election fight at home and the thought that, if Trump lost, there was always 2020 and, in the interim, lucrative gigs on the conservative media and lecture circuit — a stint as a Palin, but with gravitas and a future.

Now Pence is a heartbeat, a scandal, or even a tweet away from the presidency. Quite how power is distributed in the Trump administration is opaque, but Pence is clearly much more than a state funerals’ veep, cold-shouldered onto the sidelines. He is out and about too, an ambassador for the administration: to Congress say, or attending the Munich Security Conference in February. He is professional, respectable, calming — no Spiro Agnew he, and, for that matter, no Trump either — and yet, a wise fellow, demonstratively loyal to his boss.

And if in the depths of the night, thoughts that are not quite so loyal come into this still sometimes underrated man’s head, I’m sure they are banished without more ado.

Trump’s Taiwan call: I wonder what he meant by that

Prospect, December 7, 2016

East 52nd Street, NYC, January 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

When Metternich heard the news that Talleyrand, the legendarily devious French diplomat and statesman, had died he is said to have asked “I wonder what he meant by that?” While the connection between Metternich, Talleyrand and Donald Trump is not obvious, China’s leaders may now be asking themselves a similar question about a series of tweets by America’s next president—and the phone call that set them off.

Let’s start with the phone call. On Friday, Trump’s staff announced that The Donald had had a telephone conversation with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, effectively, and publicly, ignoring a long-standing taboo. Officially at least, no American president (or, it is thought, president-elect) has talked to his Taiwanese counterpart since the 1970s, the decade in which the US recognized the People’s Republic as the sole legal government of a China that included Taiwan. Unsurprisingly, those in charge in Beijing were less than thrilled to hear about Trump’s chat with the head of what they see as a fugitive province.  “Solemn representations” were lodged with the US.

On the other hand, Beijing initially also seemed willing to put the whole incident down to inexperience and widespread suspicions that Trump simply did not know what he was doing were reinforced by a tweet he sent the same day:

“The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you!”

The caps looked defensive: the president-elect had merely taken a call from a president. Polite! Important! And the sense of defensiveness was underlined by the tweet that came next:

“Interesting how the US sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”

Trump was still stressing that Tsai had called him and that the call was about him (congratulations!). But the would-be dealmaker-president also took the time to point out that Taiwan is a good customer of USA, Inc. and, while he was at it, undiplomatically highlighted the extent to which America’s “one China” policy is a convenient fiction.

Over the next day or so, The Donald’s tweetflow moved onto more familiar territory: domestic politics, an attack on Saturday Night Live (“unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse”), support for an errant golfer (“Great to have you back Tiger – Special!”) and a spot of mercantilist menace (“Rexnord of Indiana is moving to Mexico and rather viciously firing all of its 300 workers. This is happening all over our country. No more!”), but concern over the call continued to bubble away. Grumbling that through ignorance, recklessness or bravado, the president-elect had done real damage to relations with China, America’s chatterati appeared as upset as the apparatchiks in Beijing.

So on Sunday Trump tweeted again on China:

“Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the US doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!”

If the call, which lasted for about ten minutes, had not originally been thought through, it was now being defended in terms that looked a lot like policy. There were hints of the trade fight to come, including over the yuan (formally designating China a “currency manipulator” could pave the way for retaliatory action) as well as more conventional strategic concerns over Beijing’s ambitions in the South China Sea. And note the implication contained in the tweet’s opening few words: The president who is going to make America great again is not going to ask any third country for permission to make a phone call or, for that matter, for permission to do quite a bit more besides.

Whether or not it was a blunder, the best guess is that the call was not an accident. It followed months of cultivating Team Trump on Taiwan’s behalf by former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who now works as a lobbyist in Washington. As for Trump himself, well, five years ago he tweeted this:

“Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough”

Team Trump may be downplaying the significance of the call with Tsai (Vice President-elect Pence has referred to it as a “courtesy call”) and Taiwan’s president, acutely aware of the perils of her neighborhood, has said that it should not be taken as an indication of a “policy shift.” “We all,” she told USA Today, “see the value of stability in the region.”

Nevertheless, despite the characteristic confusion and bluster, Trump was almost certainly sending a signal by taking Tsai’s call. The US has neglected the art of great power politics since the fall of the Soviet Union, firstly because it could (for quite a while it had no serious rivals) and secondly, after chastening in Iraq and the election of Obama, because it preferred to put its faith in an internationalist order—from the European Union to the United Nations and beyond—that allowed it to pretend that such selfish maneuvering could safely be consigned, as the lofty phrase went, to the nineteenth century.

Trump is clearly under no such illusion. He believes that America is number one, but he also appears willing to accept that there are other big kids on the block with interests of their own and little intention of playing by the globalist equivalent of the Queensberry rules. Put another way, he is comfortable with a traditional idea of great power rivalry, and engaging in the jostling that comes with it.

If reordering America’s trading relationship with China is high on Trump’s agenda—and it is—then he will be looking for leverage, and that may include the threat to cozy up to Taiwan. It’s a threat that comes with the added advantage that it is likely to please a Republican Party that Trump still needs to reassure. Taiwan, after all, is a friendly democracy, the People’s Republic not so much.

But diplomacy by tweet comes with hazards, particularly when those tweets are being generated by someone with remarkably poor impulse control. There’s a difference between what China can accept and what it can be seen to accept. Push too much and too publicly and Beijing might take a far harder line—be it on trade or be it on Taiwan—than might otherwise be the case. Calculating the right balance is a tricky task—but American voters have been led to think Trump can handle it. He is the self-proclaimed maestro of the deal, after all.

Whether he will succeed in doing so is an entirely different question. Chinese criticism of the call sharpened after Trump declined to back down.

That said, as I write, it’s being reported that Trump’s nominee as US ambassador to China will be Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who has got on well with Chinese president Xi Jinping since the 1980s.

That’s a signal too.

Trump Is No Loser, But Government Will Be Harder

You know the shot: “We finally really did it,” Charlton Heston contemplating the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Well, the Statue and what she symbolises will survive the Trump presidency but that scene from Planet of the Apes leapt into my mind as I sat in a Manhattan restaurant on election night with a crowd of startled Republicans, some pleased, some not, watching another compelling drama lurch to a conclusion that most of those there, including me, had not anticipated.

So, what had “we” done? Well, by voting for Trump, or hazy Gary Johnson, the Libertarian (as I did), or crazy Jill Stein (the Green) or, in many cases, by not voting at all, Americans had rejected Hillary Clinton, the direction the country was going, or both. But it was not that much of an endorsement of The Donald. Trump has his fans, to be sure, but, even allowing for the polarisation that such figures generate, he proved to be a most unpopular populist, the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in American electoral history. He was, however, the handiest brick to throw through the establishment’s window.

What we can now expect, absent some last astounding scandal, is that Donald Trump, bully, braggart, billionaire (presumed), and defendant (currently) in some 75 lawsuits, will soon take up residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the first president never to have held earlier elective office or served in the military. But that won’t stop him benefiting from the way that the legislative branch — and this is a bipartisan offence — has acquiesced for some time now in the transfer of power to the executive.

Barack Obama: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation . . . I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”

Trump will also have Congress — and a Supreme Court nomination — in his pocket.

Working out what Trump will do with the power heading his way is not made easier by his pronouncements over the years.  The Donald is always sure, but in sometimes inconsistent ways. In 1999 he was sure about a one-time “net worth” tax on the very rich to wipe out the national debt. He was also sure that the Republicans were “just too crazy right” for him to remain in the party. He was “very pro-choice” then; now he is “very, very proud to say that [he is] pro-life”.

Looked at kindly, this shows a willingness to change his mind; looked at less benignly, it shows a willingness to play to whoever is in the room, but running through it all is his conviction that he has the answers.  “Nobody knows the system better than me,” Trump told the Republican convention, “which is why I alone can fix it.” I alone: what’s right is what Trump says it is — I, I, I.

Party affiliation provides less of a clue than it might. Trump, a former member of the Democratic, Reform and Independence parties, enjoys an equivocal relationship with a GOP that he has hijacked, or at the very least exploited, taking advantage of its resources, its people and its brand when it suited him, bypassing them when it did not, helped by his money, social media, the power of celebrity — and the fact that his revolt against the GOP’s establishment actually increased his appeal to many Republican voters.

In an attempt to reconcile these contradictions he hired Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff on the same day as he picked Steve Bannon as chief strategist and senior adviser. Chalk meet cheese:  Priebus is establishment, Bannon is a bomb-thrower (there are harsher words), the executive chairman of the hard-right, sometimes dog-whistling Breitbart News and the former CEO of the Trump campaign. Bannon’s appointment announced that the revolution continues; choosing Preibus was a signal that members of the old regime were welcome to help ensure that it would be professionally run and, whisper it discreetly, be less of a breach with the past than some feared. As the old saying goes, people are policy. And, as I write these words, the news flashes across the screen that former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin “has been recommended by Donald Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury Secretary”.

Whether such recruits will be able to steady the controls on the Trump train must, however, remain an open question for now, dependent on who else is along for the ride, and who, beyond his immediate family, Trump will listen to. The operation of his fractious and chaotic campaign is not an encouraging precedent.

And how, once in the Oval Office, will Trump run his team?  One guess — the reassuring guess — is that he will set a general course and then delegate much of the day-to-day business to, maybe, his Vice-President, Mike Pence, a former congressman and current governor of Indiana, and, therefore, someone with both legislative and executive experience and good connections in Washington. He is someone who could, presumably, work well with Priebus.

Backing that up is the idea that The Donald is the dog that caught the car. In all probability, Trump never thought he’d be the Republican nominee (and nor, it’s credibly suggested, did he want to be). He almost certainly never thought that he’d end up in the White House, a job that promises the pomp he relishes, but circumstances that are a lot less fun than the billionaire frolics he has enjoyed for decades.

“If Donald,” wrote Colin Powell (no fan) last June, “were to somehow win, by the end of the first week in office he’d be saying ‘What the hell did I get myself into?’” On the other hand, Trump has sold himself — and quite genuinely sees himself — as the master of the deal. Thus he claims to favour free or, more accurately, freer trade, but not “stupid trade”, and stupid trade is, he jeered in 2015, the result of deals negotiated by “political hacks and diplomats”. The US has, he reckons, “the greatest negotiators in the world, but we don’t use them”. Something tells me that he considers Donald J. Trump to be one of those world-beaters, and that, when it comes to rewriting America’s trade deals, he plans on being very much involved. He has boasted of hiring the best and then letting them get on with it, “but I always watch over them”.

To be fair, this is what many Trump voters want him to do. The Donald has, for decades, marketed himself with remarkable success and occasional accuracy as mogul and wheeler-dealer. He has been hired as a businessman, to do for his country what politicians could not.

Trump the dealmaker will see politics as transactional and turn his talents to diplomacy, trying to rework Nato, say, or America’s poisonous relationship with Putin (“I think I’d be able to get along with him”) or with China, the last a relationship where trade disputes and great power rivalry could intersect in dangerous ways.

The greatest negotiators in the world are going to be busy, and if they apply the brinkmanship, bad faith and histrionics that typically come with big-ticket real estate transactions, the world will be in for sleepless nights, nights made more fraught still by Trump’s long-held belief that negotiation is a zero-sum game. There are only winners and losers, and Donald Trump is not a loser. 

But, for all this uncertainty, there are themes certain to be reflected in the policies that will be pursued by a Trump administration. Pre-eminent among them is his suspicion — shared by many Americans — that the US is being ripped off by its partners, whether in trade or in defence. As far back as 1987, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads in which he maintained that Japan (then regarded as America’s main economic challenger) was free-riding off America’s willingness to pick up the tab for the country’s defence. He argued for a different approach: “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend our allies . . . ‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America . . . Let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defence of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at any more.” 

Nearly 30 years later, Trump was making a similar case to the New York Times (and not only the New York Times), except that the list of freeloaders now included most of Nato, run on a basis that he described as “unfair”, an adjective that, with its synonyms, has long been a bad, bad word in the Trump lexicon. In keeping with The Donald’s paranoid style, it hints at hostile conspiracy. Remember all that talk of a “rigged” election? But back to Nato: the US, Trump complained, was paying a “disproportionate share” of the freight.

He has a point. Currently America pays a little over 20 per cent of Nato’s direct costs, a number which is adjusted regularly and based on a percentage of its share of the alliance’s collective GNP. That seems reasonable enough (and, as these things go, the number is not huge), but the real problem concerns something far larger. The US effectively accounts for more than 70 per cent of all defence spending by Nato members. Some of that mismatch reflects the global reach of American power, not all of which is of much benefit to other Nato states either directly or indirectly, but even so.

More damaging still is the fact that so few Nato states meet the organisation’s decade-old commitment to spending at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence, a commitment only satisfied by five out of the Nato 28, something that also led Barack Obama to talk of “free-riders”, and he was far from the first American president to grumble. The US shells out some 3.6 per cent, mighty Greece comes next with 2.4 per cent and the only other countries to hit the target are the UK, Estonia and Poland.  France comes close with 1.8 per cent, and the other Baltic States are, wisely, scrambling to catch up. The rest of Nato falls far short: Angela Merkel may be being hailed by some as the leader of the free world in the wake of Trump’s triumph, but her country only spends 1.2 per cent. Others are even stingier: Canada, home of Justin Trudeau, hero of Davos, coughs up just 0.99 per cent.

Trump has hinted that Nato countries that don’t pay their way might not be able to count on the US coming to their aid as required by the mutual defence obligations that underpin the alliance. He has since backtracked somewhat, and the optimistic take is that those remarks were simply an example of Trump the negotiator at work, putting pressure on partners in breach of their part of a deal. Maybe, but Trump is playing a dangerous game. Deterrence must be credible. Any suggestion that America would not protect a vulnerable Nato ally increases the chance that Putin might be tempted to try his luck. This only underlines the importance of Trump’s security and diplomatic hires. For Trump to pick hawks, like, say, John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, would send one message; recruiting former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who has described Estonia as “a place in the suburbs of St Petersburg”) quite another.

But Russia’s leader is more cautious than often understood. Much has, rightly, been made both of Trump’s need to win and — how shall I put this — poor anger management skills. Putin is unlikely to want to provoke The Donald, and, contrary to the fears of some critics, he can only go so far in wooing him. Yes, both men have strong authoritarian streaks (under Trump, America will be grateful for the checks and balances still built into its system), both see themselves as tough guys and both reject the attempt to create a supranationalist world order — in Putin’s case, by word and deed; in Trump’s, so far, only by word. “Americanism”, he has declared, “not globalism, will be our credo.” But these similarities will not be enough to transform Trump into Putin’s patsy. Trump evidently (and not unreasonably) doubts that Russia poses an existential threat to the US — he seems ready to co-operate with Moscow in Syria — but if Putin pushes Trump in ways that Trump thinks matter, Trump will push back.

But what Trump thinks matters will differ from what the US has thought mattered in the past. There is some point, he has said, beyond which America “cannot be the policeman of the world”, a line that resonates with those communities, many of them in regions that voted for Trump, who have lost so many of their own in wars where the US was doing just that. 

One corollary of Trump’s more modest view of America’s role is that US allies will — if they are serious about it — have to assume more responsibility for their own defence than in the past. Another is the implicit recognition that the global political system is multi-polar, something that Putin has long claimed and the Chinese have not even had to bother mentioning. That, in turn, may well imply a return to realpolitik that is closer to Nixon/Kissinger than Reagan’s loftier vision, let alone George H.W. Bush’s nutty “new world order”. The debate — and the pushing — will not be over the existence of spheres of interest, but over the location of their boundaries, something that may have grim implications for borderlands such as Ukraine.

Trump insists he is not an isolationist, and I don’t think that he is. He is planning a major increase in defence spending. Where he sees threats, whether it’s the Iran deal or IS, he does not wish them away. That said, he does not appear to have learned enough from seeing what Obama’s leading from behind has led to. When the US withdraws, the vacuum can be filled in dangerous ways. Trump is correct that America’s allies ought to pay more for their own defence, but an overly forceful insistence on this will lead to a fraying of both the transatlantic alliance and America’s partnerships in Asia. The consequences are hard to predict, but will inevitably involve a dilution of America’s ability to control what happens next.  That’s unlikely to end happily.

These consequences will be worsened by the new administration’s policies on trade and the environment, which, whatever their merits, will be seen as further evidence that the US is going its own way. And in Europe, at least, the more hard-edged side of Trump’s domestic agenda, not to speak of the spectacle of, to some, an ugly American beyond all caricature taking up residence in the White House, will do even more to stoke up the anti-Americanism forever soiling the continent’s intellectual and political life.

That won’t deter Trump. The president-elect has already appointed Myron Ebell, a leading climate change sceptic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, to oversee his environmental transition team. Reversing Obama’s climate change regulation, much of which he introduced by executive order (and what was brought to life by the pen can be killed by the pen) while initiating America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord (legally, a more complex process) are obviously, so to speak, in the pipeline. It’ll mean  yet more international opprobrium, so add it to the pile. Domestically it will enrage those who are already enraged by the prospect of a Trump presidency, but it will reassure many of his supporters — who are in for quite a few let-downs in the years to come — and, as a gesture of support to Team Trump’s symbolically important coal miners, will go down well with the Donald’s crucial blue-collar supporters. 

When in 2012 Trump tweeted that global warming was, in essence, a hoax (he later said that he was joking), he blamed the Chinese: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Conspiracies, always conspiracies, trade, always trade: when, 30 years ago, Trump was attacking the way the US paid so much towards the defence of its allies in the Far East, much of his focus was on the way that the money saved had helped build up economies that, he implied, had got too strong for America’s good. Asked in 2016 by the New York Times for his view on previous presidents, he replied that one he “really liked” was Ronald Reagan but  he had “never felt on trade we did great” in the Reagan era. 

Reagan was neither a purist nor naive (he believed in trade that was free and fair). He was not above pushing “voluntary” restraint on importers and imposing tariffs when he felt had to, but protectionism, he argued, was “almost always self-destructive”. He proposed a free trade pact with Mexico  in 1980, a forerunner of sorts for the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) passed a decade and a half later. Trump recently described Nafta as “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed  anywhere”. He had opposed it even before it was approved, reportedly on the grounds that US negotiators had cut a bad deal. What Trump actually meant was that he could have handled everything so much better. 

Trump has been harping on about trade for a long time and often in a way that, reflecting his zero-sum approach to negotiation, focuses on the failure to cut a better deal. This approach slips easily into a preference for mercantilism over free trade, a choice that fits neatly under the umbrella of America First, and helped deliver the voters who had found themselves on the wrong side of globalisation, voters, particularly in the Midwest, who took Trump over the top on election day.

Trump’s victory will finish off the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the EU, a deal already struggling even to be stillborn. The Trans-Pacific Partnership seems set for the knacker’s yard too. No new free-trade deals can be expected soon — even, I suspect with Brexit Britain. Reversing those large agreements that are already in place will be more difficult, however. Trump’s talk of imposing a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports if the People’s Republic doesn’t ease up on subsidies and other practices he views as unfair, would lead to higher prices in America and, eventually, slower growth, something he must understand. That 45 per cent should be seen as an opening bid in a long negotiation.

Similarly, Trump’s threat to pull the US out of Nafta (a move a president could make on his own) and impose a 35 per cent tariff on some Mexican imports risks major disruption to the supply chains of American companies, and could trigger a trade war, higher prices in the US, and, if the Mexican economy falters, a fresh surge of illegal immigration into a certain country to the north with an as yet unbuilt wall. Once again, sabre-rattling today is likely to be no more than the beginning of a negotiation that may be noisy, but will change relatively little.

But trying to rein in globalisation is to fight a war that is largely lost and, so far as the workplace is concerned, increasingly irrelevant. US manufacturing output stands at an all-time high, but manufacturing employment has declined to levels last seen in the late 1940s. Quite a number of Trump’s “forgotten men and women” (a phrase with Depression era echoes) lost good jobs and good pay, not to the Chinese, but to automation — to the robots. Many, many others will suffer the same fate, and no politician, left or right, establishment or populist, really knows what to do about it. This time round, Trump benefited from these fresh additions to the ranks of the early 21st-century’s left-behinds, but if he cannot come to their rescue (he can’t) they will look for help elsewhere, quite possibly to a Democratic party shifting rapidly to the Left.

Meanwhile, Trump’s answer to the economy’s woes is to propose what chancellors of the exchequer once called a dash for growth, combining Reagan-style tax-cutting and deregulation with a $1 trillion infrastructure package, much of which would be financed by the private sector, incentivised in turn by tax credits. As with a great deal of Trump’s programme the details are vague, but it’s a reminder that, even if Trump is again a Republican, he is attached to no one wing of the party. If tax-cutting and deregulation is Reaganesque, upgrading the country’s dilapidated infrastructure harks back to Eisenhower, architect, among other grands projets, of the Interstate Highway System and, as National Review’s Reihan Salam has argued, to Nixon, who (unlike Eisenhower) posed as an opponent of the elite, but, like the general, saw a role for big government. Similarly, Trump will defend the big entitlement programmes — from Social Security (pensions), to Medicare (health care for the elderly) to, perhaps with some tweaks, Medicaid (healthcare for the poor). He knows what his voters want, which is why he is already signalling that his repeal of Obamacare may not be quite as comprehensive as he has promised in the past. The way that Obamacare is structured may be unloved, and the way that it functions is flawed (sharp increases in Obamacare premiums probably played a part in Clinton’s defeat), but chipping away at its benefits will be a hard sell, unless the GOP can find a more credible replacement than it has managed to so far.  

How will all this be paid for? Trump is hoping for a supply-side miracle, with another boost coming, fingers crossed, from the repatriation of corporate funds stashed overseas after the sharp cuts in America’s corporate tax rate (on some measures amongst the highest in the world) that he has in mind. On the other hand, the GOP’s green eyeshade wing, headed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, will be less than convinced by Trump’s maths and with worries over the federal government’s nearly $20 trillion debt likely to increase as interest rates move up, there will be battles to come, battles that will be a reminder of deeper fractures that Trump has opened up on the right, battles in which Democrats, at least on the infrastructure plan, may find themselves in a very strange place, by Trump’s side.

That won’t be the case on immigration. Even if Trump is already backtracking on that wall of his (some of it will be fence, apparently), a much tougher immigration regime will be put in place. The president-elect has already announced that he would like to see the deportation of 2-3 million illegal aliens with “criminal records”, an exaggerated number, which also makes no distinction between different types of criminal past. Americans are uncomfortable with the thought of mass deportations and they are unlikely to approve of breaking up a family over a minor conviction from decades ago. If Trump’s immigration plans are not to be swept away by a tide of revulsion, he may have to go more carefully than he thinks, and not just in this respect.

Nevertheless, immigration, both in its own right and as a proxy for wider ethnic and demographic unease, goes a long way to explaining why The Donald will be moving into the White House. If the country can finally assert control over its borders (and the wall is not the best way of doing so), it can regularise the position of those illegals who remain (there are currently estimated to be a little over 11 million of them in the US). Then a long-overdue serious debate over immigration can begin.

November’s election result would only have been possible in a troubled, deeply-divided nation. Time will tell whether Trump’s victory is another symptom of what ails the country, or the beginning of a cure. I’m not optimistic. Then again, Newt Gingrich (after a job?) exults that “a Trump administration is going to be among the most extraordinary, creative, inventive, exciting periods in all of American political history.”

It’s going to have to be.

British libel laws: No model for the United States

Daily News, November 3, 2016

Union Station, Washington DC, August 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Even though Princess Diana is no longer with us, there is still quite a lot that Donald Trump appreciates from across the pond. There's that Scottish golf course of his, there's Brexit, and, judging by a recent interview he gave to Miami's CBS 4, there are England's libel laws.

Trump, claiming to be a "tremendous believer (in) the freedom of the press," is significantly less enthusiastic about the news media's ability, as he sees it, to get away with "terrible, terrible mistakes," mistakes made "on purpose" and intended to "injure people." If he's been wronged, he said, he should be able to sue and so should "anyone else."

In England, maintained Trump, "they have a system where you can actually sue if someone says something wrong." And: "You have a good chance of winning. And deals are made and apologies are made," deals (with Trump it's always deals) and apologies that the U.S. media do not have to make.

I'm British-born and usually pretty chuffed when I hear my native land praised for the way that it manages its affairs, but this time not so much. To be clear about one thing first: Trump is not really talking about "anyone" being able to win damages for defamation by the media. What's bugging him is that in America it's very difficult for a "public figure" (and, trust me, Donald Trump counts as a public figure) to do so.

Under U.S. law and well-established precedent affirmed by the Supreme Court, where public figures are concerned, it's not enough to show carelessness, inaccuracy and damage.

Public figures also have to prove that "actual malice" was involved. That means that the statement was either published by someone who knew it was false or, assuming it turned out to be false, didn't care one way or the other. That can be tough to prove.

Over in England, public figures have it quite a bit easier, although not quite as much easier as Trump, not always known for keeping up with what goes on in the world, may think. In fact, a year or so back, English defamation law, which can be rougher on the press than on those complaining about it, was modified in ways that will make it harder for plaintiffs to use litigation or the threat of litigation to muzzle the media.

Changes included adding the requirement that a statement is not defamatory unless plaintiffs can show "serious harm" (or the danger of serious harm) to their reputations. For businesses, that now means demonstrating that they have suffered, or face the prospect of, "serious financial loss." Additionally, most cases will now be decided by a judge rather than a jury, which ought to reduce costs and, probably, damages.

The press should also benefit from the fact that a still somewhat hazy "public interest" defense has been given statutory force (thereby reinforcing the principle that it's OK to publish something that is — or might reasonably be thought to be — a matter of public interest). But a public interest defense would be far less of an obstacle to litigation by public figures in England than they could, to Trump's obvious irritation, expect to face in the U.S.

Despite these reforms, England's new law retains one key difference with American practice that will appeal to The Donald. In the U.S., it's the plaintiff who has to demonstrate that he or she has been defamed. But in England, it's the defendant who has to prove that what was published isn't defamatory, an obligation that comes with a degree of risk that some editors, journalists and publishers won't relish taking, a risk that helps explain, to take one notorious example, why the sex crimes — crimes that stretched over decades — of the disk jockey Jimmy Savile, a major celebrity in the U.K., went unreported until after his death in 2011.

This chilling effect on what will be published has, as a more recent controversy over a book on Vladimir Putin's finances shows, survived the new law, at least to a certain extent. It's an effect that, I suspect, Trump would be delighted to see spread to the U.S., a country blessed — up to now — with far greater protections for free speech than my homeland.

That mustn't happen. The case can be made that public figures in the U.S. are forced to climb too high a hurdle to defend their reputations, but that is a part of the price that preserving free expression demands.

Donald Trump: always crashing in the same car

Prospect, October 20, 2016

Trump Tower, New York City, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Hillary and Donald didn’t shake hands. And nor did Melania and Bill. Expectations of a mudfight had been whipped up by Team Trump’s decision to bring along a number of guests designed to spook Team Clinton. These included four mothers of people killed by illegal aliens, the former fiancée (from the 1990s) of the US ambassador butchered in Libya, the (allegedly estranged) mother of another of the Benghazi victims, the wholly estranged half-brother of the current president of the United States, and a former TV reporter from Arkansas who has emerged in recent days to assert that she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton in the 1980s. Adding to the goodwill in the air, Trump had suggested last weekend that the two candidates should submit to a drug test beforehand. Hillary, he maintained, had been “all pumped up” at the beginning of the previous debate, but had appeared curiously drained by the end of it (“She could barely reach her car”).

But (slightly) less mud flew than anticipated last night and it was The Donald who did not seem quite himself. And this was not just because he came across as somewhat more prepared than usual. Uncharacteristically sotto, he gave an impression of being gently sedated, or at least of having listened to his more sensible advisers, except, of course, when he didn’t. He made the moderator (Fox News’ Chris Wallace, unquestionably the most accomplished performer of the evening) look like an accomplice by thanking him for asking Clinton a tough question. He probably irritated yet more of the female voters he desperately needs—against all the odds—to win over by referring to his opponent as “such a nasty woman.” He won’t have made a lot of new friends with his remark that there were “some bad hombres” among the illegal alien population. Mathematically (“some”) that must, I suppose, be an accurate enough observation, but, in just the latest of countless own goals, Trump managed to phrase it in a way that hinted at a racial animus not only disturbing to Latinos (like just about every minority group a largely lost constituency by now) but to many whites too. On some calculations, Trump will need the support of nearly two-thirds of white voters to win (compared with Romney’s 59 per cent in 2012). Good luck with that.

And then there was the way he dealt with questioning over his willingness to accept the result in November. Lest we forget, he has been complaining that the election is being rigged. After some toing and froing with Trump on this topic, Wallace asked this:

“There is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country—is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign…that at [its] end… the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”

Trump: “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?”

That answer (“horrifying”, declared Clinton) became the talking point of the night among the commentariat, and, I suspect, not just among the commentariat. It was, to put it mildly, a remarkable thing for a major party nominee to say ahead of the election. Voting fraud is not exactly unknown in the US, and some grumbling by the unsuccessful candidate—even after a presidential vote— about dodgy doings at the polls, sometimes legitimately (Nixon in 1960), sometimes rather less so (Kerry and those Ohio voting machines in 2004) is another American tradition, but a formal challenge by the loser to the result is not: The Florida debacle in 2000 was a genuinely exceptional state of affairs.

Clinton: “You know, President Obama said the other day when you’re whining before the game is even finished…”

Looked at one way, Trump’s allegation that the election might be rigged (a term he has defined in different ways: it has, for example, included his argument that media bias has distorted the process) against him fits neatly into his outsider narrative and adds to his outsider appeal. Looked at another way, it will have reinforced the impression of many Americans that (as Clinton was not slow to argue) Trump is “not up to doing the job.” It also sounded like the prexcuse of a man who cannot cope with defeat. As Clinton jeered, “There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged.”

Trump couldn’t contain himself: “Should have gotten it!”

“Always crashing in the same car,” as someone once sang.

To be fair, Trump acquitted himself better in this debate than in the first two—low bar—but he did little to avert what looks like a clobbering next month. According to a CNN/ORC poll, 52 per cent of viewers thought that Clinton prevailed, as opposed to the 39 per cent who judged Trump the victor. It says something for the debating skills of a man who prides himself on his ability to close a deal that that was his highest score so far. The best that he can hope for is that his performance will not have cost him too many votes. Best guess: It didn’t. Between them, both Trump and Clinton said enough last night on a wide range of issues including immigration, gun rights, trade, terrorism and abortion to assure Trump’s core supporters that they were in the right place. His problem is that those core supporters are not numerous enough to propel him to the White House.

To attract additional voters last night, Trump needed either to clean up his own image or to make more of a mess of Hillary’s. He didn’t try too hard at the former. Judging by the laughter that greeted his claim that “nobody has more respect for women,” that was, in all probability, wise. Instead he concentrated on trying to drag Clinton down, something that would be very much easier were he not Trump. He attacked the Clinton Foundation (“a criminal enterprise”). She countered with the Trump Foundation (“bought a six-foot portrait of Donald”). He raised sleaze. She talked about his taxes. He complained about the foreign policy fiascoes of recent years. She brought up Putin. He threw in Bill Clinton. She threw back Donald Trump. Yes, Trump landed some blows (those errant emails, allegedly evidence of dirty tricks) but not enough, judging by that poll, to make much of a difference.

And so today Trump tweeted this: “Why didn’t Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions—she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary.”

Always crashing in the same car.