Donald Trump: it’s going to be a wild ride for the world

Defense Secretary-designate James Mattis in Washington.

Roll up! Roll up! Roll up! Here comes Donald Trump and all the world’s agog.

Everyone gets a change, like it or not. Mexico gets a wall. Russia gets a possible reset. Maybe the sanctions go and there’s a new partnership against jihadists in Syria.

As for Islamic State, it gets the proverbial bombed out of it.

Britain gets a new trade deal if it wants it. Germany’s Angela Merkel gets a lecture, bound to be repeated, on her “catastrophic mistake” in inviting so many illegal immigrants into Europe.

China is going to face some trouble. Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, says China is “the most protectionist country” in the world.

Rex Tillerson, Trump’s man to be secretary of state, lambastes China for its territorial aggression and illegal and militarised island-building in the South China Sea and declares that its access to these islands should be blocked.

BMW is told that if it builds a car plant in Mexico and tries to export cars to the US, it will pay a 35 per cent tariff.

Is this the end of free trade?

“I love free trade,” Trump said last week, “the problem is the US always get taken advantage of.”

Changes in China policy are certain and they seem to have no limit. Taiwan might get the end of the one-China policy, which cramps its international space, though Trump is willing to negotiate on that.

NATO is obsolete because it was designed so long ago, Trump has said repeatedly; it doesn’t devote enough resources to fighting terrorism and its members, apart from the US, don’t pay their way.

But don’t despair, because as Trump also says: “I love NATO.”

Iran has plenty to worry about. In the past Trump has promised both to rip up the Iran nuclear agreement and to enforce it ruthlessly. But he does not retreat from describing it as a terrible deal.

Despite the best efforts of Malcolm Turnbull and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership, there is absolutely no indication that Trump will reconsider his opposition to the TPP.

As Trump declares, he won the election because of his stance on trade and strong borders. While he has certainly shown an inclination to turn on a dime when it’s to his advantage, he would be declaring war on his entire voter base if he now embraced the TPP.

Trump says on day one, meaning Monday, he’s going to move to get the wall with Mexico started. He’s also going to start reversing many of his predecessor Barack Obama’s executive orders.

One will be the order that illegal immigrants who came to the US as children are allowed to stay, though Trump may simply create an order that puts an end-by date on this Obama measure, so that congress has the chance to legislate on the issue.

What does all this add up to and how can we make sense of it?

Is Trump just a tough-minded unilateralist succeeding a peculiarly weak and ineffective multilateralist? Is he a classic foreign policy realist replacing the liberal internationalist who succeeded a neoconservative?

Is he, though a democrat, best understood as a strongman who will get on well with other strongmen, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, so long as they’re prepared to make a deal? Is he a classic populist who will be much stronger campaigning against something than campaigning for something?

How will the paradoxical prolixity of his Twitter streams interact with the traditional strategic weight afforded to the words of a president? Does his recent stoush with US intelligence agencies have any long-term implications?

We genuinely do not know the answers to these questions. And that is perhaps as Trump wants it. In his book The Art of the Deal, not disclosing your strategy to your adversaries and often even your partners in a deal is an elementary part of the game.

And indeed no one predicted anything correctly about Trump. Even those rare pundits who anticipated his victory did not foresee that he would win the electoral college while losing the popular vote by three million and winning a string of big states by the barest possible margins.

Nonetheless, Trump won fair and square. Those foolish left liberals, from congressional Democrats boycotting his inauguration, through Hollywood starlets denouncing him and even the politicised heads of a couple of intelligence agencies, who are all trying to demonise him in advance of his getting started in order to render his presidency illegitimate (a process the same sorts of folks undertook against George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan), are ultimately providing Trump with a great reservoir of political ammunition to use in the future.

If Hollywood and The New York Times, CNN and San Francisco, all hate Trump, that probably helps him hang on to his core voters.

In predicting how he will behave internationally, apart from Trump’s extreme tactical flexibility, there is the question of what all the other international players will be doing in anticipation of the Trump years.

But there are some powerful limitations, as well as some strong institutional forces, which we can understand and which will help shape the international behaviour of the Trump presidency.

First, he still has 4000 positions he needs to fill. Some of these are critical. He has announced all of his cabinet picks, but an administration is generally run effectively by its deputies, and in national security and international relations, Trump’s administration has very few deputies.

Even assuming Tillerson is approved by the Senate, there has apparently been an internal war within the Trump camp over who the deputy secretary of state should be, and that is the person who runs the State Department day to day.

The hardliners want John Bolton, though many of his interventionist instincts clash with Trump’s views. More pragmatic Trumpers want the veteran diplomat and moderate Republican Richard Haass. He would be a quintessential establishment pick.

The bigger indication of how a Trump administration will behave is the identity of the people Trump has announced for cabinet slots. In Defence, retired general James Mattis is a hugely consequential figure of vast experience, sophisticated mastery of policy and a history of getting things done.

Trump cannot speak too highly of Mattis, one of whose jobs will be to build up the US military, a move that will be welcomed by all US allies. Yet in his confirmation testimony this week, Mattis almost directly contradicted Trump by describing NATO as “the most successful military alliance in modern world history”.

Mattis strives repeatedly to reassure allies. He famously repeats: “Nations with strong allies thrive and those without them, wither.”

Tillerson, while lacking a diplomatic background, was warmly recommended by all the royalty of the Republican national security establishment and as the long-time ExxonMobil boss is certainly a highly competent individual.

He used some pretty robust language to describe the sort of response the Trump administration should make to Beijing in the South China Sea, but there was really no specific proposal for military action. He too said many reassuring things, among them: “An America that can be trusted in good faith is essential to supporting our partners, achieving our goals and assuring our security.”

Throughout his business career Trump has often managed his operations with warring advisers all competing for his attention and favours, offering different versions of the deal he might do. But the only senior national security figure he can easily sack as President is his national security adviser, retired general Mike Flynn.

When Mattis and Tillerson take office, they immediately acquire immense institutional power and a measure of independent political capital.

As against that, Trump keeps saying his son-in-law, property developer Jared Kushner, will work out a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, a feat beyond all previous special envoys or the like, and a task that is in any event almost certainly not helped by Trump making such a bold announcement.

At the moment, the biggest internal foreign policy influences on Trump are said to be Kushner, chief of staff Reince Priebus and former Breitbart boss Stephen Bannon.

But this will surely change over time as the cabinet secretaries become established. One big danger for the incoming administration is that it could be challenged very early — by, say, North Korea or Iran — before many of its people are in place.

Trump’s feud with the intelligence agencies will surely end amicably. In the period since the election, Trump has fiercely fought what he rightly regards as a sustained effort to delegitimise his election victory. To the utter shame of Obama, high-placed officials in some of the intelligence agencies were actively complicit in this campaign.

For Obama’s CIA director John Brennan to get into a public slanging match with Trump was institutionally disgraceful and extremely irresponsible.

In a democracy, politicians get to criticise intelligence agencies if they want to. The heads of these agencies don’t get to criticise politicians. Rather, any political advocacy they need should be provided by the democratically elected office-holders they serve.

The intelligence chiefs cannot claim Trump is unfairly criticising them for being politicised and simultaneously engage in political criticism of Trump. If Trump wrongly criticises the intelligence agency chiefs, it is up to voters and Trump’s political opponents to exact a price, not the agencies themselves.

The trend towards the politicisation of these agencies, the misuse of their institutional credibility for partisan purposes, has been going for a long time. There is nothing really in Trump’s record to suggest it will stop under him.

However, within a few weeks he will have his own team running all these agencies. They will then become part of his rock ’n’ roll show.

The biggest single determinant of Trump’s international success will be how the US economy performs under his stewardship. If it does well, both internal politics, and international relations will be much easier for the President.

In any event, you can surely bet the world is in for quite a wild ride.