Before we had a row about tariffs, we had a row about free speech. Before that, a row about Ukraine. So which of Donald Trump’s predilections can we expect to dominate the next week: forced deportations? The attempted dissolution of Nato? Being bullied to pick a side in an intensifying US versus China trade war?
Beyond all the terrifying drama and dark humour of the recent — now at least partially averted — global economic meltdown, as Donald Trump went full Liz Truss and met his final boss in the bond markets, it struck me that the American president is doing more than just wreaking impulsive havoc. Trump, whether he means to or not, is stress-testing our entire way of life.
This applies not just to America, but also to all its allies, those of us who live (or lived) under its security umbrella, operate within its trading system and inhabit its cultural imperium.
Trump is a highly effective populist. Populists lie and dissemble and exaggerate. They are often corrupt and self-serving. But they can also play a valuable role by exposing cant and double standards. They identify elite hypocrisies and use them to cultivate popular anger and frustration. All of the above applies to Trump.
This is all very unsettling — at times downright scary. Is our long-settled prosperity being torched by tariffs? Will Europe end up with an emboldened and revanchist Russia on its right flank? Could America come to blows with China? All these things seem possible.
Trump is a disruptor and will dismantle and damage things we care about. But approached in the right way, he also represents an opportunity. He offers a chance for us in Britain and Europe to re-examine who we really are, what it is we truly stand for and what we are willing to suffer to defend.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine, one of America’s founding fathers, in a famous 1776 pamphlet. By questioning so many of the assumptions and arrangements that underpin our international order, America’s current president is holding up a mirror and forcing us to examine our own souls. This will not be an enjoyable process but it might end up being a valuable one.
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Ukraine is a good example. Clearly, America under Trump will no longer supply sufficient weaponry for Ukraine to continue its long and stubborn resistance to Putin’s invasion. Clearly, Trump is comfortable with a deal that gives Putin much of what he wants. And it is also now obvious that America is unlikely to continue underwriting European security in the way it has since 1945.
This puts the onus on Europe to make some tough decisions. Will Germany forgo its debt obsession and properly rearm again? Can Britain and France stop arguing about scallops long enough to sign a proper post-Brexit security pact? Are we willing to risk our own lives to put boots on the ground in Kyiv? And would we really cut funding to the NHS in order to do so?
All of these questions ultimately get at the same deeper point: does Europe have the strength and will to stand alone and protect its way of life? For all their crass derision, Trump and his Europe-baiting vice-president, JD Vance, are forcing us to confront this question and our own complacency towards it. By the time the 21st century is over, we may be glad that they did.
Free trade is another example. Trump’s tariff bazooka has sent us back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the great progenitors of free exchange. It has reminded us that the invisible hand of the market has made us richer, healthier and more free. America turning away from free trade will be painful and expensive, but we don’t necessarily have to follow suit. There is an opportunity for Britain, along with Canada, Australia, Japan, Europe and others, to renew our own commitment to working and trading with each other.
But Trump’s attack on free trade and globalisation has also highlighted some of their more egregious flaws. The EU, after all, is indeed a protectionist trading bloc. And China has indeed played a double game on trade since it entered the World Trade Organisation in 2001, grafting its way towards economic parity with America through illegal state subsidies and sneaky technology transfers.
Trump and his voters are also right that the benefits of globalisation have not been distributed equitably. They have reminded us that if you don’t share the spoils of prosperity reasonably, and if you don’t respect those on the losing side of change, then you open the door to populism and a sharp reversal of course. This is another useful (if painful) lesson, as Brexit was too.
Although their commitment to it can be highly inconsistent, free speech is another arena in which the Trump administration is giving us a stress test. Is it right that we have a 150-metre ban on any kind of protest or statement, even silent prayer, outside abortion clinics in this country? JD Vance certainly doesn’t think so.
On balance, given how settled support for abortion is in this country, and given how vulnerable a moment it can be for those entering the clinics, I think it probably is right. But Vance’s critique has forced us to interrogate this assumption.
And on other free speech issues, he may have a point. Should the Northampton childminder Lucy Connolly have been given a 31-month prison sentence for publishing an awful and inciteful tweet before last summer’s riots? I would argue not.
Immigration is likely to be another Trump test. There is a growing consensus across the West that immigration has been too high and should come down. But how far are we actually willing to go, how many of our laws and values are we willing to discard, in order to achieve this? Trump’s willingness to go to extremes may help us determine our own course.
Across all these fronts and others, what’s painfully apparent is that the world is in a period of rapid, disruptive and potentially destructive change. Donald Trump is an agent of this change, a kind of presidential Loki, the Norse god of chaos and instability, a charismatic manipulator tricking and prodding us into a generational Ragnarok.
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But good may still come of it all. During the Second World War, the Allies didn’t explicitly fight to stop Nazi genocide, but a new moral order was forged out of the ashes of Auschwitz, a legal architecture built on the (patchily applied) premise of “never again”.
Similarly, the American Civil War didn’t begin as a war to end slavery, but it did result in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the US constitution being passed, abolishing slavery and creating (at least theoretical) equality under the law.
Eric Foner, the great historian of the post-Civil War reconstruction, described the passing of these amendments as the “second founding” of America. “As history shows,” he wrote, “progress is not necessarily linear or permanent. But neither is retrogression.”
I sincerely hope that our current trial is nothing like as cataclysmic as either of those two wars. But if we view this difficult moment as an opportunity and not just a misfortune, we may yet emerge from it better than we went in.
Matthew Syed is away
