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In the days since President Donald Trump declared his trade war on the rest of the world in the Rose Garden of the White House, he has behaved much like Chaplin playing with his global balloon. What Chaplin showed symbolically is happening in actuality with Trump: the future of billions of people is being determined with demonic frivolity by an ill-informed and unpredictable egomaniac.
The tariffs are in effect a sales tax on the American consumer which is likely to tip the US economy into recession in the next six months, unless increased government revenues are immediately spent on lower taxes. Since these are likely to benefit the better off, the poorer half of America’s highly unequal society face a sharp deterioration in their standard of living.
“The problem is that the only safe thing for senior advisers to do is to agree with the boss,” a highly informed Soviet diplomat in Baghdad told me in 1990 when I asked him why Saddam Hussein had taken the disastrous decision to invade Kuwait.
As shock has succeeded shock over the last 10 days, many people, including Trump-backing oligarchs, have realised too late that he is turning the United States into Magaland. Titans of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, previously confident that Trump would stick to the old Republican mantra of deregulation and lower taxes, whatever his populist blather about tariff walls and reindustrialisation, found that they had mistaken their man.
More losers than winners
Globalisation was already badly battered by political and economic storms and has now ended with a thump. More concretely, the model of export-led economic expansion – the great exponents of which are China, Germany and a host of South East Asian countries – has been holed below the water line.
As for the trade war with China, such conflicts seldom produce swift or decisive results even when a country is the target of an international embargo or sanctions.
Paradoxically, Russia may now suffer serious collateral damage as an indirect result of “liberation day”, because fear of a world recession provoked by Trump’s action has already led to a steep fall in the price of crude oil.
China is not only a tougher nut than Russia, but it has been preparing for just such a confrontation with the US since the last Trump administration. Beijing may well feel that, if a confrontation with the US is inevitable, it would prefer this to happen under Trump because of his ramshackle approach and ultimate willingness to do a deal.
Yet, easy though it is to point out Trump’s failings, it is important to keep in mind that the raw political, military and economic power of the US remains vast. Moreover, Trump won the presidency a second time because his opponents repeatedly underestimated him.
Any assessment of Trump’s strengths must take into account the inadequacy of his opponents, exemplified by the feebleness of successive Democratic Party presidential candidates. But much the same could be said of European leaders, who hold ceaseless meetings but have yet to agree a feasible plan either to win or to end the war in Ukraine as a serious alternative to Trump’s ceasefire talks with Russia.
In theory, the EU, China and other states might set up their own free trade area separate from the US, which only has 13 per cent of the global goods trade, but such a radical initiative looks unlikely to emerge from the baffled European elites.
Further Thoughts
A dozen years ago, I attended an institutional dinner at a university in the UK. I cannot recall just why I was there since this is not the sort of event I normally enjoy, but I do remember being surprised that all of the other diners, sitting opposite and on either side of me, were members of the university administration and not a single one was a member of the academic staff of the university.
Turning British universities into businesses has gone a fair way towards degrading the entire system, once among the finest in the world. Making a bad situation worse, many of those put in charge turned out to be not very good at business, spending money they did not have in the expectation of revenue that never came, which is why so many are now facing bankruptcy or heavy cuts in their academic staff.
It has somehow come to be regarded as normal rather than bizarre that British universities should depend on recruiting students from China, India and Nigeria. For the most part, these students are recruited by agencies, making the universities depend on them.
There is an excellent BBC File on 4 Investigates documentary – The International Student Scandal – describing the damaging consequences of this over-reliance on foreign students.
Beneath the Radar
I think that the debate about legalising or decriminalising cannabis tends to obscure the need to inform users about the risk of schizophrenia.
I was over-optimistic, and popular understanding of the risks involved for the 2.5 million people taking cannabis in Britain over the last year has lagged behind proof of its toxicity. One expert survey of the evidence says that research “has consistently found that cannabis use is associated with schizophrenia outcomes later in life”.
The great majority of those taking cannabis suffer no ill effects and may regard warnings about the drug’s dangers as exaggerated and alarmist.
“Ex-users who had only recently stopped (between one and four weeks) had nearly a seven-fold increase in the likelihood of developing psychosis compared to never-users,” reads the report. “After five to 12 weeks the risk for psychotic disorders dropped to a three-fold increase compared to those who had never used cannabis.”
Cockburn’s Picks
Patrick Cockburn has written a series of essays, illustrated by his son Henry, about the state of the UK. You can read his dispatch from Canterbury here; Dover here; Newcastle here; Herefordshire here; Salford here; and Barrow-in- Furness here. Patrick has also written an essay about the gig economy, which you can read here
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