Threats work in Trump's mind, even if they really don't

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Reports suggest that Trump is considering using the UK’s possession of the Falklands/Malvinas as a lever to compel the UK government to spend more on armaments. This post isn’t going to get into questions around the legality or morality of the UK’s continued possession of such a remote outpost; that’s a whole other subject. In any event, questions about legality or morality never enter Trump’s mind; everything is about naked power and the ability to apply it. What impact a change of US policy would have is unclear: successive UK governments haven’t exactly demonstrated a willingness to be swayed by international opinion on the question of ownership.

Trump’s end game on the issue seems to be primarily about raising UK spend on armaments, and has little to do with the status of faraway islands about which he knows nothing. Defence spending is already a hot topic in UK politics, although parties are arguing primarily about the timetable for implementing any increase. The concentration on spending as a proportion of GDP is one which I’ve never really understood. Surely, if, or to the extent that, the UK needs to up its defence capacity (another whole other subject), it’s about the nature and scale of that capacity, not about how much it costs in relation to GDP? As the UK has ably(?) demonstrated over many years, increasing defence expenditure is easy – incompetent procurement and project management can add massively to costs for no perceptible increase in capacity.

I do wonder, though, whether Trump really cares whether the relationship between arms spending and GDP makes any sense or not – or even whether he really cares about defence anyway, especially for countries other than the US. I suspect that his real concern is what it’s always been: money and power (mostly his own). He believes (with considerable justification, in the short term at least) that increasing spend on armaments primarily benefits US companies, and that means his billionaire ‘friends’ (whose ‘friendship’, in turn, is more about what they can get out of it than any liking for Trump) and donors. He doesn’t even believe that the Russians (the bogeyman being used in Europe to support preparations for war) are any sort of threat, given what he sees as his own excellent relationship with Putin.

I suspect that the warmongers currently running the UK are going to increase armaments spending anyway, regardless of what Trump says, even if their own blind adherence to wholly arbitrary fiscal rules causes a degree of dithering along the way. And when they do so, even if the Trump threat over the Falklands/Malvinas has had zero impact on the decision, Trump’s simplistic mind will see a cause and effect where there is none, which will reinforce his tendency to resort to threats and blackmail. Trump’s madness and impulsiveness form a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape.