Over the years, I’ve attended many meetings in which
one attendee or another has set out his or her (usually his) views on whatever
the issue is and then simply assumed the agreement of everyone else, sometimes
even leaving immediately after speaking. ‘The boss (even if he wasn’t the boss
in any formal sense) has spoken’ as an approach to ‘consensus’. Perhaps we’ll
never know exactly what happened at the meeting
between Trump and Rutte yesterday, but it sounds a lot like the same sort
of thing: Trump has expounded his views and assumed agreement – in his mind, ‘sorting
out the detail’ is all about agreeing the precise terms of his takeover.
Certainly, Rutte cannot have agreed to any handover, or even a framework, or
even the concept of an idea for a framework (to use the convoluted language which Trump seems to favour), for any handover; he simply doesn’t
have the authority. All the indications are that Rutte has done little more
than spell out to Trump the terms and detail of existing treaties, all of which
His Orangeness will have forgotten by tomorrow.
The threat of using force and imposing extra tariffs
has been removed, a statement greeted by a huge sigh of relief all round, but
whether that threat has really been removed remains to be seen. After all,
until a few days ago, Trump supported the handover of the Chagos Islands to
Mauritius. In Trumpland, any statement or agreement is valid only until it isn’t.
Maybe it’s true, as some have suggested, that Trump has backed down because of
the impact of his actions and statements on the stock market. Stock markets are
an extremely poor indicator of the success of any economy, and are generally
thought to be over-valued anyway, but to Trump, stock markets seem to be his
main, or even only, indicator of success. To billionaires whose wealth is
measured by the ‘value’ of their stock holdings, there’s a certain logic in
that. Maybe one of the wilder stories I’ve seen – that he had ordered the military
to prepare plans for a Greenland takeover only for the order to be refused as
illegal – is true, although it seems unlikely to me that he could not find at
least one general prepared to act on his instructions.
Or perhaps another basic truth has been demonstrated
empirically – bullies back down when faced with strong united push-back.
Certainly, one of the few tariff battles on which Trump has caved was that with
China, which stood up to him resolutely. It would be nice to believe this version
of events, with its corollary that Starmer and others have learned that
resistance is better than appeasement. The problem with unpredictability is
that it’s unpredictable; even if something ‘worked’ once, that doesn’t mean it
will ‘work’ again. The biggest takeaway from Davos was surely the speech by
Mark Carney of Canada and its message that countries need to stand together rather
than be dominated individually. Whether the sort of international agreement and
co-ordination which that requires can be achieved in a suitably rapid timescale
is an open question, but signs that Starmer and others recognise the need and
are working in that direction are sadly lacking at the moment. Carney was
talking primarily about ‘middle-sized’ countries, but for those of us living in
smaller countries which may not all yet be independent, the Carney approach
offers us more hope for the future than any alternative currently on the table.
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