Trump specified “Saudi Arabia giving $25 million, Qatar, all of these countries. You talk about women and women’s rights? So these are people that push gays off . . . buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money.”
Trump’s flip-flop on the Saudis after the election showed how little he understands the Middle East by comparison with Hillary Clinton. As secretary of state, Clinton had a nuanced and deep understanding of the complexities of the Middle East and how all the governments there in some way support terrorists. In an email from February 14 that was revealed by WikiLeaks, she wrote that “we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
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Donald Trump proposed to cut more than $14 billion from the $50 billion State Department budget, a 29 percent reduction. Only the Environmental Protection Agency was to be cut more. The Trump budget would essentially end foreign aid, most of which benefits American companies by buying goods and services from them and giving them to poor countries. While Congress is unlikely to approve such cuts, their significance lies in showing where Trump would put federal money. He asked for $54 billion more for the military.
Trump’s first budget proposed cutting by more than half the $3.1 billion the United States contributes to United Nations Peacekeeping operations. It eliminated all funding for the Africa Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership. The rise of Muslim extremism in Africa had been a concern of the Obama administration. It persuaded Congress to spend nearly $900 million between 2009 and 2014 to train and equip more than a quarter million African peacekeeping troops and police officers and some support personnel, including engineers. The program also provided medical care, aircraft maintenance training, and communications gear.
In 2014, the United States started providing $110 million annually to help Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda maintain and quickly deploy peacekeepers in “response to emerging conflict, a concept that holds powerful life-saving potential.”
This strategy helped locals counter African affiliates of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and to intercede in mass crimes like the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, which Trump called a “radical Islamic terrorist” organization.
A major benefit of this strategy was that it did not require the involvement of American or other Western troops, taking a propaganda tool away from radicals who preach hatred of America. Just five days after Trump took office, the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs issued a fact sheet detailing the benefits of helping poor African countries to develop trained forces to quell violence and equip them with transportation, without direct American involvement.
The Trump budget statement asserted that it was eliminating duplicative and wasteful diplomatic efforts. “Reform is needed to create not only more efficient and accountable peacekeeping operations but also ensure that each mission’s mandate reflects realities on the ground and is supported by the necessary political will and structures to achieve its objectives.”
An African rapid response team for peacekeeping, which would reduce the chance that American troops would have to become engaged at enormous cost, came to about a nickel a month per American.
The Trump administration’s budget plan also proposed cutting support overall for United Nations Peacekeeping, which ran even bigger risks of increased American military involvement unless Washington withdrew from its role as the global police department. The administration said the budget “sets the expectation that the UN will rein in costs by reevaluating the design and implementation of peacekeeping missions and sharing the funding burden more fairly among members.”
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But what may matter most from Trump’s first foreign trip was how his conduct helped Saudi efforts to suppress news that was not strictly controlled by its government and those of its allies.
Qatar is ruled by the Al-Thani family, put in full charge in 1972 when the British gave up their protectorate. The emir installed by the British, Khalifa bin Hamad, created a television channel, something of a breakthrough at the time that showed his bent toward the West. In 1995, his son deposed him. The new emir, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, launched Al Jazeera, Arabic for “the Peninsula.”
Using satellite technology, the cost of which was falling fast, it began beaming unofficial news into homes throughout the Middle East. It would develop into a sophisticated and remarkably professional worldwide news operation, including Al Jazeera America, for which I wrote a weekly column for two years until it was shut down in early 2016.
While Al Jazeera had plenty of critics, none was more vociferous than the Saud family. They blamed Al Jazeera for stirring up people through the Middle East and fostering the Arab Spring uprisings. For the Saud family, with 28 million people they must control or placate, the Arab Spring was a serious threat to their reign. One option would have been to embrace change and allow more freedom and steps toward an open society. Instead the Saud family organized the other Gulf Cooperation Council members to boycott Qatar. That Trump would be inclined to help these Gulf States in their demand that Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language channel be shuttered was obvious. Trump admires Vladimir Putin’s popularity in Russia, which is due in large part to his control of state media. He also admires Turkey’s Erdoğan, who has moved to control news in that country.
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Trump’s remarks attacking Qatar and aligning himself with the Saudis touched off angry diplomatic complaints from a variety of countries. Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil chief executive who had become secretary of state, and James Mattis, the general and military scholar who became defense secretary, had to get on the phone to calm anger over Trump’s visit by other Middle East countries, especially Qatar.
The blundering in Riyadh came a month after Trump telephoned Erdoğan in Turkey to offer praise on his winning a referendum that vastly enhanced his powers. Trump was the only leader of a democratic nation who called Erdoğan with praise. The referendum passed by a slim margin, almost certainly because of fraud, according to international election monitors. The referendum gives Erdoğan powers to crack down on political opponents and close news organizations that do not genuflect to his rule.
Denunciations of Trump’s call to Erdoğan were also widespread, especially since Erdoğan was moving to replace almost a century of secular democratic government in Ankara with an authoritarian Islamic regime.
Evan McMullin, a former CIA operations officer who ran against Trump as an independent, winning almost half as many votes in Utah as Trump, succinctly captured the criticisms in a tweet: “An American president should never support a foreign dictator’s power grab. A simple gesture like this can weaken liberty here and abroad.”
Gestures concerning trade have enormous impact, too.
Trade
One day before the G20 meeting of leaders of the world’s largest economies began in Germany in July 2017, Donald Trump stopped briefly in Warsaw. He delivered a speech to an enthusiastic crowd organized by Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party, a populist, nationalist, and rightist movement not unlike the one that had provided his margin of victory in America. The crowd was unified in its support of Trump. That was not because all Poles loved Trump, but because police kept protesters far away to foster the impression of solidarity between the new American president and people of Poland.
Poland was in fact torn by conflict because the Law and Justice Party was moving toward authoritarian rule. Jarosław Kaczyński, the party chief and the de facto leader of the government, made Trumpian calls to prosecute political opposition leaders, though with more subtlety than the “lock her up” chants at Trump rallies. Kaczyński also spread wild conspiracy theories and attacked Muslims, saying they spread parasites and disease.
What television viewers
saw was reality political television, not fair and balanced news.
Trump’s speech served another purpose. It diverted the attention of American news organizations from something much more important, something of enduring economic significance, that was taking place the same day. Had that event been the focus of the news, it would have highlighted the growing disconnect between Trump’s inaugural promise to always to act on behalf of the forgotten men and women who work and his conduct on trade.
Trump spoke of how beautiful Poland was, how beautiful his wife was, how beautiful Krasiński Square was. His speech even put the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and beautiful in the same sentence. All this was prelude for a sudden turn into his dark view of the future, an extension of his inaugural remarks less than six months earlier about “carnage” in America and his promise to restore law and order and always to champion working people.
“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Trump declared.
That line came out of the blue with no context. It also dominated the news that day. It was not preceded as most grand pronouncements are by a buildup to prepare people for a jarring or monumental observation. Nor did it turn out to be the first step in a campaign to save Western Civilization from imminent or even possible extinction. That’s because its purpose was something quite different, something that distracted from much more important business taking place that day eight hundred miles to the west in Brussels.
Trump ticked off a long and eclectic list of challenges. It began with a theme of aggression without reconciliation, a theme in many Trump speeches when it came to racial, ethnic, and religious matters: “We are fighting hard against radical Islamic terrorism, and we will prevail. We cannot accept those who reject our values.”
To many people around the world the idea that Western Civilization faces extinction seemed not just surprising, but paranoid. But this speech was not aimed at people with a rational and fact-based view of the world. This speech was intended for the audience Trump counts on to maintain his power, an audience represented in the White House by his very close advisers the speechwriter Stephen Miller and, at the time, his chief adviser, Steve Bannon.
Trump’s repeated references to “our civilization” and his ten references to “the West” were not about the West in any geographic or even cultural sense. They were subtext about religion and ethnicity.
He was assuring those who did not want to accept refugees from the Middle East, who did not want to have to look at a mosque or believers entering it, that he was one with them. He was speaking to those who feel aggrieved because they want to live only among neighbors who are white-skinned and at least nominally Christian with, perhaps, a tolerance for Jews.
But while Trump was doing his best in Poland to appeal to those who feel aggrieved and imagine acts of violence will make them feel good, the latest of his many appeals to the worst in people, he was not involved in a civilized event of lasting economic importance to American workers.
A new trade deal was being signed that day in Brussels. It lowered tariffs and other barriers to trade between the European Union and Japan. The twenty-eight European countries had a larger economy than America, and if this deal worked as planned the mutual exchanges between Europe and Japan stood to make both economies measurably larger.
Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, called what was created that day “the world’s largest free, advanced, industrialized economic zone.”
Japan anticipated a nearly 30 percent increase in exports to the European Union, principally Japanese-made cars. The EU, in turn, expected to sell far more food to Japan, a boon to Europe’s farmers and ranchers, growing its total sales to Japan by a third. There also would be plenty of high-tech industrial and consumer equipment going both ways.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, the EU parliament, said the Euro-Japanese agreement “shows that closing ourselves off from the world is not good for business, nor for the global economy, nor for workers. As far as we are concerned, there is no protection in protectionism.”
The president of a closely related organization, the European Council, Donald Tusk, could not resist getting in a dig at Trump. Just as Trump delivered his Warsaw message to those in the know, bewildering others, Tusk’s statement assumed his audience would get the point without being jabbed. “Although some are saying that the time of isolationism and disintegration is coming again,” Tusk said, “we are demonstrating that this is not the case. The world really doesn’t need to go a hundred years back in time. Quite the opposite.”
This was not the only major new trade deal in the works. Another was taking shape that would enhance the influence of China, the world’s largest economy and a country that Trump told voters was responsible more than anything else for America’s economic problems.
Days after taking office, Trump had killed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, which would have created a trading alliance among a dozen Pacific Rim countries but not China.
The Chinese, knowing on Election Day that Trump was likely to fulfill his promise to dump the TPP rather than present the treaty for Senate vote, got busy promoting their own trade deal. Their sixteen-nation Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership left the United States out, but brought in India.
Chinese diplomats calmly and steadily worked to persuade Eastern Pacific governments that theirs was the country of the future, guided by serious people steeped in economics and history, and with a deep appreciation for science, unlike the erratic poseur that the Americans had made the head of their country. Stop operating in the shadow of Washington, China told the other fifteen governments. Turn toward the country of the future, not one whose leader keeps talking of restoring a mythical past.
With Trump giving speeches like the one in Warsaw, among other actions that the leaders of many countries found bizarre, the Chinese emissaries did not have a hard time selling the regional plan.
Trump’s protectionist instincts, growing out of his dark vision of an America run by what he called stupid leaders, included at least two other actions that helped the Chinese in promoting their plan to dominate trade on the eastern rim of the Pacific Ocean.
Two months after the Warsaw speech, he tweeted that he might end the American–South Korean trade agreement that took full effect in 2012. He said its terms tilted toward Seoul. The pact indeed favors Seoul, as I reported after I went there to investigate in 2012. The deal was especially unfair regarding cars and helped explain how Hyundai and Kia were able to capture almost a tenth of the new car market in the United States while American car sales in South Korea could be counted in the hundreds per month.
But the damage done by that agreement occurred before Trump became president. Gutting the South Korea trade agreement in 2017 would only embolden the North Korean dictator, whose taunts got under Trump’s skin and whose hills looking down on Seoul held an estimated 15,000 heavy cannons capable of quickly leveling that city of ten million.
Trump also said that said any new trade deals would be bilateral because he felt better deals were made between two countries than among a group of them.
One possible exception to this bilateral-deals-only policy was floated by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. He said that the Trump administration might be open to the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe.
That would, of course, be an agreement with countries whose residents were mostly, like Trump and his fan base, white. The countries China was wooing to its trade pact hardly needed be reminded of this Trumpian tilt.
On trade matters, Trump was not entirely out of step or wrong in his concerns.
The canceled Trans-Pacific Partnership was deeply flawed. I was one of its most vigorous critics, partly because it was negotiated in such secrecy that even members of Congress could not see it unless they left their cell phone, pen or pencil, and paper outside when they entered a secure room. More significantly, the agreement gr
anted even more power to corporations to raise prices, thwart competition, and use litigation rather than marketing skill to make money.
But the TPP, if modified through further negotiation, could have become an important tool to advance American influence in the Pacific Rim and blunt the transformative ambitions of Beijing. Seen in strategic geopolitical terms, even with its flaws the TPP was better than the void Trump created.
And while China was not included among the twelve nations in the TPP, it was America that was not included in China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. The net result of Trump’s killing the TPP and not coming up with a new plan to counter China’s was bad news, especially for American workers in exporting industries.
By abruptly withdrawing from the TPP with no plan for a better trade deal, Trump did more to help the Chinese fulfill their ambitions of becoming the twenty-first-century superpower than anyone else. Further, his attacks on Mexico for supposedly sending murders and rapists north created ill will not just in that country, but also in Chile and Peru, which were also part of the TPP.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that China pushed would mean much more trade among economies on the rise. By the time Trump took office, China was the world’s largest economy, according to the CIA’s annual World Factbook. The European Union second, America third, and India fourth.
Japan was fifth, its economy stagnant for three decades because of a low birth rate, an aversion to immigrants even greater than Trump’s, and a population aging faster than America’s. But unlike America, Japan had in Shinzo Abe a leader who knew how to make trade deals. The one he signed with the European Union would mean growth for that nation in part at the expense of American workers, who would not share in the Euro-Japanese exchange.
It's Even Worse Than You Think Page 17