Sad to say, Donald Trump cannot be blamed for everything. Watching the US president lavish praise on autocrats, throw up trade barriers and disdain global rules and institutions, it seems a fair conclusion that he wants to upturn the liberal international order. Much of this work, though, had been done before he reached the White House. Mr Trump is as much emblem as cause of the descent into disorder.
Sad to say, Donald Trump cannot be blamed for everything. Watching the US president lavish praise on autocrats, throw up trade barriers and disdain global rules and institutions, it seems a fair conclusion that he wants to upturn the liberal international order. Much of this work, though, had been done before he reached the White House. Mr Trump is as much emblem as cause of the descent into disorder.
The west misread the collapse of Soviet communism. It was not, after all, the end of history. Happy assumptions about the permanent hegemony of laissez-faire capitalism and the historical inevitability of liberal democracy were rooted in a hubris that invited nemesis. For all that, the end of the cold war did produce a big idea. Now, as we are daily reminded by Mr Trump’s Twitter feed, it is being swapped for a very bad idea.
Communism’s demise promised, in a favourite phrase of my Chinese friends, a world of win, win.
The revolutionary thought was that the selfish interests of rich and rising states could be accommodated if everyone played by the rules. The deep interdependence woven by globalisation would square the circle between competing national interests and multilateral obligations.
In Europe, where borders had long been blurred by the EU, the idea gave impetus to further integration. Europeans embraced what the British diplomat Robert Cooper called a “postmodern” view of state relations. Elsewhere, national sovereignty was more highly prized, but the new order seemed enough to prevent a return to Hobbesian conflict among the great powers.
The rules and institutions were necessarily imperfect, not least because they had been written largely by the rich nations. There was too much triumphalism in the west and insufficient recognition of the redistribution of global power to the south and east. The goal, though, was a good one: China, India, Brazil et al would rise in a fashion that did not collide with established powers. Robert Zoellick, then a senior official at the US state department, coined the phrase “responsible stakeholders” to describe their role in the existing order.
The fashion now is to dismiss such assumptions as naive. China may have been the biggest winner from the west’s design — its entry to the World Trade Organization was the seismic geopolitical event of the early 21st century — but Beijing was never going to accept a second-fiddle place in a US-led system.
Xi Jinping, now installed as emperor-president for life, is held up as proof. Mr Xi judges the time has come for China to expunge two centuries of humiliation. The aim of the Belt and Road Initiative is to shift the centre of global gravity to Eurasia. The Middle Kingdom can then take its rightful place centre stage.
What is less clear is what Mr Zoellick and others could have sensibly proposed as an alternative to positive engagement. Should the west have sought to halt China’s rise — declared it an enemy and locked it out of the WTO and other global institutions? Would such containment have extended to a naval blockade of the South China Sea? These are not approaches likely to have safeguarded the international peace.
In the event, the US has turned out to be a bigger enemy than Beijing of its own grand design. Washington has seemed more determined to throw away the big idea faster than Beijing has been to challenge it.
Wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq sapped America’s moral authority. The attempt to impose democracy at the point of a cruise missile undercut faith in political pluralism. The 2008 financial crash put paid to the consensus that liberal, open markets were a certain route to prosperity.
Mr Trump is picking up where others left off. If the west was careless in the defence of the rules-based system, the present occupant of the White House flatly repudiates it. Mr Trump lives in a world of winners and losers. He blames the postwar structures built by America and its allies for western weakness. He is allergic to multilateralism. “I do bilateral”, he said the other day. Everything in Trumpworld is zero sum.
So the only surprise about his decision to slap higher tariffs on imports of steel, aluminium and a range of other goods is that anyone should have been surprised. Mr Trump has few deep-rooted beliefs, but economic nationalism has always been at the centre of his worldview.
He blames weak leadership in Washington for allowing others to challenge US pre-eminence. Protectionism is his only remedy. When Mr Trump rails about unfair trade as often as not he is making a general point rather than aiming specifically at, say, China, Canada, or Mexico. His target is the system.
The problem is not simply that trade wars are a very bad idea. History tells protectionism is virulently contagious. Europe has its own populists. These mount-the-barricades nationalists hail from both extreme right and extreme left. Their demands for trade barriers could soon enough secure them a larger following. The snag with zero-sum games is that win or lose can quite quickly turn into lose, lose.
A dwindling band of optimists among my American friends tell me that Mr Trump is as bad as it gets — whoever comes next will rebalance US policy. Maybe.
But Mr Trump is setting a direction that other nations feel compelled to follow. Beijing now belongs to nationalists. Europe has its own nativists. There will not be any winners. Before long all those cynics may realise that Mr Zoellick was right after all.
