Part of my project this summer, I realized half way through the season, was to try to drill down on just what the Trump moment means. I don’t mean along traditional partisan lines (or partisan moral lenses) necessarily. Just... what is it?
A few weeks ago I tried my hand at sketching out a prevalent mood — “barbarism,” I called it, a kind of truculent narcissism that seems to have turned particularly rancid lately. A lawyer famously described it (decades ago and in different circumstances) as “a gaping void opened within souls unhinged by the search for new values” — a search, I argued, that resulted from liberalism-as-organizing-principle coming up short for a lot of people. Trump’s politics are perfectly attuned to this mood. He repeatedly demonstrates the hollowness of it all, which paradoxically makes his supporters even more heady and drunk and beastly.
But I’ve also been thinking about the other side of the ledger. What are the illusions Trump shatters that may in fact need shattering? The way we talk about alliances ranks highly for me this week.
Last Wednesday, an additional 25 percent tariff went into effect with India, notionally as punishment for it buying and reselling Russian oil. The backstory is more complex (and more quixotically Trumpy). Negotiations had been picking up pace ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington in February, and the Indians apparently felt good about locking in a deal by this summer. They were hoping to keep various agricultural sectors shielded from American competition for domestic political reasons, but had reportedly offered other concessions.
But Trump dug in his heels and started making a fuss. After a short conflict between India and Pakistan burned itself out earlier this year, he became pissy with Modi for not thanking him publicly for helping mediate an end to hostilities. And he started slagging off the Indians more broadly, calling theirs “a dead economy.” He even publicly courted the Pakistanis, talking up the potential of their “massive” oil reserves — the existence of which was apparently news to the Pakistanis themselves.
It’s been a while since I leafed through The Art of the Deal, but I suspect one could find justifications for all of these moves in that text. And talking to India watchers last week, I got the sense that both Modi’s advisors and Trump’s advisors were treating all of this as regrettably necessary theater. Modi’s own rhetoric remained defiant thought not particularly antagonistic. Both sides were signaling they could walk away should they so choose.
These spectacular displays of staged defiance unfortunately peaked just ahead of a long-scheduled visit by Modi to China for a summit meeting that would also include Russia. This prompted a seemingly endless stream of breathless news analysis and commentary excoriating Trump for pushing Modi into Xi Jinping’s (and Vladimir Putin’s) waiting arms.
Here’s a representative snippet from a recent Wall Street Journal story:
The cordiality of the Tianjin confab will sound alarm bells in Western capitals, said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute think tank in Australia. “President Trump’s gentle treatment of Vladimir Putin has done nothing to pull Russia away from China,” he said. “His rough treatment of Narendra Modi, on the other hand, is pushing India closer to Russia and warming up its relations with China.”
There’s a kind of tic among Westerners to see alliance building and maintenance through the lens of friendship, as if states — especially democratic states — were people, or families led by a parent. If due respect is not accorded, feelings get bruised. But why would it be that Putin is so impervious to charm while Modi is so vulnerable to abuse? I doubt any analyst thinks Narendra is a soft and sensitive man. No one who has dominated his country’s politics for so long can be particularly sentimental.
It’s certainly possible that these bumpy negotiations could fail, that both sides have concluded that they can live with this failure, and that with trade stymied more distance will creep into the relationship between India and the United States. But it’s also true that India has always clung to its self-conception as an independent and non-aligned actor, so we should be careful about setting the baseline against which to judge any drift.
At the end of the day, transactionalists like Trump might say, it’s all about interests, and any bruises given or received in bilateral negotiations won’t change broader geopolitical balancing. “I do not believe that Trump approaches these trade issues as part of a broader Indo-Pacific strategy, or as inconsistent with U.S. and Indian joint strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific region,” Trump’s first ambassador to India Kenneth I. Juster recently observed.
And indeed, Modi might agree. He stopped over in Japan on his way to China, and in an interview seemed to try to contextualize the spat with Trump by praising the Quad — an alliance between Japan, the United States, Australia and India. “As vibrant democracies, open economies and pluralistic societies, we are committed to a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific,” he said. Of all countries, India is keenly aware that China is committed to none of these things.
On things like these, I see Trump’s approach to dealmaking as a healthy tonic for the public. The truth is that diplomacy has always involved all sorts of bullying and browbeating behind closed doors. It just seems like publics — and, worse, journalists who should know better — have come to believe that diplomacy really is a form of friendship.
Keeping the rough stuff out of public view may have been a vestige of the fact that diplomats used to be outwardly-genteel nobles. And we should admit that the kind of coarsening that Trump brings to everything certainly plays apart in furthering the barbarism I wrote about earlier. But on balance, I’m not sure we’re worse off remembering that a lot of the drama we see in foreign affairs is in fact transactionalism and a weighing of interests above all else. It helps us better assess where we stand.
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I've considered this as well, and its true from a purely rational reasonable POV, however narcissists are also capricious and what they want is not always what you think you are giving in a game-theory style analysis
"The truth is that diplomacy has always involved all sorts of bullying and browbeating behind closed doors."
Right, and among the results of this kind of diplomacy was World War I, a civilization-destroying catastrophe in absolutely none of the participants' interest, followed by a peace settlement so badly bungled that another, even more catastrophic world war was inevitable, followed by a long period of nuclear=armed tension during which one or the other of the nuclear-armed powers, through accident or misunderstanding, repeatedly came close to destroying organized human life. Traditional diplomacy has been an utter, disastrous failure. Is tht what you're recommending.
As usual, your tough-minded conclusions are exactly wrong. Only painstaking confidence-building, transparent at every step, and based on the explicit recognition that international competition is wholly irrational and that weapons of mass destruction are too dangerous to allow any state to possess, offers any hope of long-range survival.