It is now a well over a month that this part of the UK at least has been basking in sunshine. It’s not been overly warm, but the month of March has been, not that’s its been headline news, just as sunny as the extraordinary period at the beginning of lockdown in 2020. I hear no complaints other than from farmers who are in need of rain and for the most part the extreme anticyclonic gloom that lay over us for a protracted period in December, January and up to the end of February have been forgotten. Economically and politically, however, the gloom continues with no imminent end in sight.
I was struck by a piece written by the – he’ll kill me for this – veteran Australian business journalist Michael Pascoe that he shared with me and which he had written for The Saturday Paper. Bearing in mind that Michael’s political instincts are left of centre and that Australia is facing general elections in May, this is how he began an article titled “Trump is not an aberration”:
“It would be comforting to think Donald Trump is an outlier, that this, too, will pass. Alas, while Trump is abhorrent, he is not an aberration. His administration is the fulfilment of conservative America’s drift further and further right into populist nationalism and isolationism. It is not coming back. Conservative America, the one controlling the United States, is a different country. The clichés that have embroidered the chaining of our wagon to the US – ´shared values, ´cultural affinities´, ´the international rules-based order´ – no longer apply. They are lies.”
He continues: “When it comes to liberal/democratic values and attitudes towards international cooperation, multidecade World Values Survey research shows this America is more closely aligned with Putin’s Russia and Erdoğan’s Türkiye than with ´the West´. The values held by various European conservative parties – in Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom – are closer to the Australian left than they are to the American right. The Chinese have more liberal values than America’s ruling Republicans. The instinct of our political duopoly is to not want to believe it, to look the other way and hope to be spared the massive inherent challenge. The election campaign is to be fought within a mutually agreed illusion that, while Trump’s tariffs are a problem, our world has notbeen turned upside down, that we just have to ´manage´ the US president, stay calm and carry on.”
He is pretty scathing, and his observations and his core opinion is encapsulated in the words “It is a matter of self-respect not to join the conga line of ring-kissers at the White House begging for a tariff favour. To reject conservative America’s global view is to preserve some form of soul.” But even Michael stops short of the ultimate conclusion which is that the constant moan that this is not a way to treat one’s allies fails to acknowledge that in the mind of many, if not most, of President Trump’s inner circle, we are no longer America’s allies. MAGA has no allies.
Bit by bit, leaders who had been marked as sitting on the side of Trump such as Georgia Meloni in Italy will have to acknowledge that their countries will not somehow be spared the full force of “Liberation Day”. Italy is a member of the EU, is a fully paid-up part of “freeloading” Europe and, as they’d say in Rome, “Basta!”.
The UK, not being a member of the EU, still harbours hopes that it can dodge the MAGA bullet. The President loves the King and the monarchy and has already been invited for a very rare second state visit to this country but when a stick of dynamite is tossed into the water it’s not possible to determine which fish are to be killed and which not. The Signal chat room affair showed up not only the cavalier way in which the inner circle plays with highly sensitive information but the staggering lack of maturity in the way the gang thinks and acts.
Also this weekend I spoke to a former British diplomat who reckoned that the total lack of government experience of many of those now in power is reflected in the way they behave rather like the characters in The West Wing or other TV and movie renditions of Washington for that is all they know. MAGA, so it would appear, has no care for collateral damage.
And that is where MAGA will fail. By the time it does, however, the “rules based” international order will have been dismantled and there will be no way of reconstructing it. To misquote Churchill, it was far from perfect, but it was better than the alternatives. And it is those that we are apparently about to taste.
As Pascoe goes on, albeit from an Australian perspective: ”Treasurer Jim Chalmers warned of ´a new world of uncertainty´, saying ´the pace of change … when it comes to rewriting the rules of global economic engagement has quickened´”.
The rules aren’t being rewritten. They’ve been scrapped – and not only for “economic engagement”. The pendulum might swing back a little bit – it always does – but it is not bound for the pre-Trump resting position.