Triangle of disruption will shape our world in 2019

Our fortunes in the coming year are at the mercy of three agents of chaos.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Theresa May — the three great disrupters of 2018 will determine the shape of the world in 2019. Never have three less likely revolutionaries strode the global stage.

A flame-haired Manhattan real estate mogul with a foul mouth and an inability to keep staff has completely upended US politics and confused, if not transformed, the global system. The ­effects of his presidency would be even more ­profound if anyone could work out their likely consequences.

Across the world a dour, red, Leninist princeling has abolished Chinese constitutionalism, put an end to term limits, or apparently any limits on his own power, and is making a sustained effort to completely recast the global order.

While in London a prim daughter of the manse is hurtling her government and her nation towards a Brexit destiny that even now, exactly three months before B-Day, is unfathomable.

History, surely, never repeats itself but, as Mark Twain suggested, sometimes it rhymes. If there’s a modern era where key dynamics rhyme with today, it’s the 1970s. Trump’s weird presidency combines elements of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, the two iconic presidents from that low-down, rotten decade.

Unlike Nixon, Trump is not facing likely conviction in an ­impeachment trial for serious criminal activity, but his administration is beset by chaos and ­constant legal challenge. This is set to get much worse after next Thursday when the Democrats take control of the US House of Representatives. Yet like Nixon, Trump has significant foreign ­policy and even economic policy achievements to his credit.

As the US government labours through its partial shutdown — brought about because the President wants $US5 billion ($7.1bn) to build his wall with Mexico and the Democrats in congress won’t give it to him — Trump is without a permanent chief of staff, a permanent defence secretary, or a permanent attorney-general, while a swag of cabinet secretaries face congressional investigation or legal challenge.

The one feature Trump shares with Carter is a great desire to withdraw US troops from South Korea. Carter was the last president before Trump to have that as an official administration goal. He hasn’t been able to do it, but having just withdrawn the much smaller US force from Syria, Trump seems to have returned to his campaign idea about strategic retrenchment, an idea he shares with Carter and Barack Obama.

On the other hand, the Trump administration has produced a plethora of official strategic documents and policies that affirm the most important US alliances. Trump often says pro-alliance things. But then he says anti-alliance things. NATO is “obsolete” one day and “beautiful” the next.

Although Trump gets angry at his critics, at one level none of the chaos and controversy around his administration, nor its constantly changing lines on key issues, seems to bother the President. He operates according to different dynamics and measures his successes by different metrics.

Watching Trump interact with CNN in 2018 was fascinating. Trump and CNN are like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the old musicals. You can’t ­imagine one without the other. They are in the same business: ­entertainment. And they use the same measure of success: ratings.

CNN has become an appalling news network. Its business model is Trump. Its programming is all Trump, all the time. It has one dominant program template — constant, endless, repetitive, ­emotional, excessive, mocking, outraged denunciation of every element of Trump.

It has lost all interest in objectivity, fairness, balance or ­proportion. The high moment for the network in 2018 came when its reporter refused to surrender the microphone at a presidential press conference, and pushed the young female White House staffer away so he could rudely keep arguing with the President.

Trump pretended to try to bar the guy from the White House. It was perfect for Trump and CNN. Each could show their base they were waging the good fight against the enemy.

CNN unceasingly denounces Trump’s affront to civility by ­constantly insulting him. Its news broadcasts have the objectivity of North Korean state television.

This is important not because CNN is important, but because it suggests that, politically and aesthetically, Trump 2019 will be much like Trump 2018.

He thrives on this chaos and confrontation. He does not want to win over the likes of CNN. He ­relies on them riling up his base. Trump derangement syndrome, it has been rightly observed, ­afflicts Trump haters as well as Trump supporters.

One lot can see no good in the vile Visigoth of coarseness and corruption, the other lot can see no error in the courageous, homespun, billionaire of the ­people, the Manhattan magnate with the soul of Joe Sixpack.

The truth is Trump is so difficult to analyse because he has done so much good and so much bad. He has brought back the ­defence budget, one of the most beneficial acts any president could accomplish. He has cut taxes and deregulated the economy, producing an economic surge, although also exacerbating debt and deficit. His instinct to pull back from US ground troop commitments in the Middle East is sound, and would be lavishly praised by The New York Times and CNN if carried out by a liberal Democrat.

He has called out China for its trade malpractice, its cyber theft of intellectual property and its ­strategic aggression. For a president, Trump is surprisingly ignorant of the details of foreign policy. But he possesses a core, elemental knowledge. It is demonstrated in the TV series Game of Thrones, a Trump favourite.

In a key scene in the show, Lord Petyr Baelish, an oleaginous figure of feline cunning known as Little Finger, comments to Queen Cersei: “Knowledge is power.”

She replies: “No it isn’t. Power is power.”

Presidential power is indeed real, hard power. And the limit to it is what you can get away with. A lot of US presidents have understood this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he conspired, virtuously, to get America into World War II.

Trump uses presidential power. Just ask the Chinese. Their president, an orthodox Leninist after all, also understands that power is power. And they have felt Trump’s power in the tariffs he has levied on them and the sanctions and restrictions he seems set to impose on their hi-tech firms.

But although Trump’s visceral understanding of power is a ­formidable element of his dealings, this one insight may be leading him to a serious miscalculation about power.

Trump thinks alliances are entirely transactional and have not generally been good for America. But the US benefits from its alliances, as well as benefiting allies. It was much more powerful, for example, when the US, Britain, Australia and other allies stood together to call out Beijing for using its intelligence services to engage in massive data theft than it would have been had the US done it alone.

Trump’s failure to understand the force-multiplying quality of alliances may be leading him to sacrifice a source of long-term US power.

Take North Korea, the most extravagant and theatrical episode in Trump’s 2018 diplomacy. Trump did two distinctive things. He looked like he really might go to war, which frightened everyone in North Asia. And then he held a face-to-face summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

But where has Trump ended up? Kim has not conducted any nuclear tests or missile tests since late last year. However, technical boffins believe North Korea has done all the tests it needs and is now in the business of producing substantial numbers of nuclear weapons. Trump claims Kim has promised to get rid of his nuclear program and says the cessation of tests is due to the pressure the US President brought to bear. Further, Trump says he has negotiated a deal with Kim that will guarantee peace in the future.

Yet so far there is not one skerrick of evidence that Kim has done anything at all towards denuclearisation. Fissile materials, missiles, nuclear scientific and industrial sites are rolling on unhindered in North Korea. China and Russia, and to some extent South Korea, have relaxed sanctions.

Yet Trump has not relaxed US sanctions, as even he could not possibly claim that Kim has done anything that would justify removing them. But Trump has got a political win of sorts. The theatre of it suited Trump perfectly — all highly personalised.

Yet for all that the final position is pretty close to where most responsible presidents would have ended up. War is off the table. US sanctions remain. The US is deterring North Korea and has promised to defend itself and its allies.

But to get to that reasonable outcome, Trump’s theatricality has exacted a price. Kim has been given the legitimacy of a summit with the US President. Much more important, South Korea has been given every reason to doubt the steadfastness of US commitment to its security. Trump cancelled military exercises with South Korea without telling Seoul first. He virtually forced them into the arms of the Chinese. He has weakened, perhaps permanently, the US-South Korea alliance, a key part of the structure of US influence in Asia. That was neither shrewd nor necessary. There’s a touch of Jimmy Carter in it.

In most respects, Xi has been a successful President of China in his own terms. But he has reversed the direction of China’s political, social and economic development. In abolishing term limits he has effectively made himself dictator for life. In pioneering pervasive social media scrutiny of the citizenry and reflecting political orthodoxy in a social credit score, he is attempting to create a modern totalitarian state, to give life to George Orwell’s dystopian vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Politically, Xi’s regime has crushed all dissent, persecuted religions, imprisoned perhaps a million Muslim Uighurs, put the whole human rights law profession in jail. Economically, he has stressed the dominance of the state and of state-owned enterprises, but he has elided the distinction with privately owned enterprises by insisting that each must have a Communist Party committee at the heart of its leadership. And internationally he has sought geostrategic influence everywhere, opening China’s first foreign military base in Djibouti and ruthlessly using development funds for geopolitical purposes.

Xi is a vastly more successful Chinese leader than was Mao, but like Mao his leadership now embodies a cult of personality.

The only thing that has given Xi any real pause is Trump.

Does Trump here represent a new and enduring American consensus, or will the purpose inherent in Trump’s approach to China be lost when his presidency ends? How will domestic dynamics interact with geostrategic realities? Will Trump be tempted to do a deal with Xi, to parade another victory as hollow as his victory with Kim? Or will the opposite dynamic take hold, with Trump seeking foreign disputes to rally his nationalist base at home?

And then there is Brexit. It is astonishing that three months before B-Day we have no idea whether Britain will leave the EU with no deal, leave with May’s deal, delay leaving to get time to negotiate a new deal, or vote not to leave after all. Or will Britain get its first quasi-Stalinist prime minister in Jeremy Corbyn?

Yet Britain is a centrally important member of the Western alliance, overall perhaps the second most important after the US. In the 70s Britain endured a series of unsuccessful prime ministerships — Ted Heath, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. It was a decade in which Britain looked tragically broken, until Margaret Thatcher came along.

The 70s were as messily disrupted as today. The good news is that its chaos gave way to a Western restoration under Ronald Reagan, Thatcher and pope John Paul II. There’s no sign of that right now, however.