We are living in a world of profound confusion. Despite many of our best wishes, Donald Trump’s promise of a trade war was no April Fools’ Day prank. The follies were merely postponed. ‘History repeats itself,’ wrote Marx: ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Tariffs may prove him right, though the current deterioration may be more dangerous than farcical.
It is unlikely that Donald Trump has heard of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act 1930, the legislation which took the US behind a tariff wall, weakened the world economy, undermined liberal democracies and created opportunities for evil political forces. Even by the standards of the 1930s, that was a grave error. We should not draw the comparisons too tightly, but the West today is a lot weaker than is comfortable. Meanwhile America, the banker of last resort, the economic dynamo of last resort and of course the superpower of last resort, is showing no signs of taking up the responsibilities and burdens which previous presidents – even if they sometimes grumbled – took for granted. How will this end?
The staunch conservative and arch-hawk John Bolton might provide an insight. A man who delights in horrifying the international bien-pensantry, Bolton was appointed as National Security Adviser during the first Trump Presidency. That might have sounded like a fruitful partnership: not so. Bolton thought that the Donald was too soft on North Korea and Iran. After 18 months, he resigned. He has remained a critic of Trump, asserting wearily that he has no understanding of foreign affairs and sees everything through the needs of his own personality.
If one accepts Freud’s psychological terms, it seems obvious that in foreign affairs, the logically organising energies of the ego should dominate the uncoordinated, instinctual needs of the id, although this is not a licence for egotism. But Trump is a creature of the id. Paradoxically, John Bolton finds some reassurance in that judgement. He believes that America’s moral strengths will enable it to resist Trumpian vainglory and that good sense will reassert itself. Let us hope that he is right. However irritated he may have become with European liberals, Bolton knows that, ultimately, Europe needs America and America needs Europe. This may sound absurdly optimistic, but I suspect that Vice President Vance could be persuaded to a similar conclusion: again, ultimately.
Retrospection can be a melancholy affair. In the mid-1990s, when the laurels of the Cold War victors were still fresh, it seemed that there could be a rapprochement with Russia. Moscow and St Petersburg were full of bright youngsters eager to question every visiting Westerner about how they could do things better. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn…’ In a cautious, dithering way, even the young Vladimir Putin seemed ready to make peace.
Credit where it is due. At least one senior British diplomat, John (later Sir John) Scarlett, sometime head of MI6, never bought any shares in Putin. But some of us thought, to paraphrase Yeats, that too long an exposure to watching Sovietism could make a stone of the heart. Alas, Scarlett was right to be stony. Equally, and later on, it seemed to many of us that David Cameron and George Osborne had been right to buy Xi Jinping a pint. From Richard Nixon’s visit to China onwards, there had been moves towards a cautious rapprochement. Why not continue with the laudable aim of trying to entice the Chinese into an international legal and economic order? Beer therapy did not work, so almost everyone now says that they were wrong. Hindsight is always easy. Yet one day, that broken baton will have to be mended. Messrs Cameron and Osborne were right to make the attempt. Nixon, that consummate realist, would have applauded the effort and offered consolation after the failure.
Where does that leave us in the UK? Keir Starmer has emerged as the alpha/gamma Prime Minister. Thus far, apart from the absurdity that is the Chagos deal, it is impossible to fault his recent conduct of foreign affairs: undoubtedly alpha and statesmanlike. There is only one problem. In dealing with Trumporama, mere statesmanship may not be enough. But as for the domestic record, gamma would be generous, starting with a Budget that is easy to summarise. Wherever possible, it placed a tax on a vital engine of growth: animal spirits. Anyone who wanted to build up a business – including that crucial business, farming – and employ workers found only discouragement and hostility. It is no use dumping all the blame on Rachel Reeves: Starmer also stood with her.
Rishi Sunak’s government made mistakes, especially in its rhetoric – or rather, absence of rhetoric. Yet by the end, the economy was improving. Even if ministers were hopeless at articulating this, there were grounds for cautious optimism. In come the new lot. Caution and optimism are both discarded. Their best hope now is to blame Trump, which will depend on how much chaos he continues to create. Beyond that, there ought to be further cuts in welfare and rapid moves to exploit new oil supplies plus measures to mine coal which could be used to smelt weapon-grade steel as we build up defences. If Ed Miliband does not resign over all of that, sack him. Somehow, one suspects that all this is unlikely. Starmer will likely stumble on. In a dangerous world, we have a weak government. At a moment when the public need cheering up, we have a Prime Minister who does not do cheering up. Yet let us be hopeful on one point: that April Fools’ Day will continue to happen only once a year.
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