Set ’em running

The Donald speaks, and how they panic. This is not how diplomacy is done: but then diplomacy has done little in our day but produce atrophy, leading to war. America’s interests meanwhile have been sapped ready to be lost entirely. Their interests are ours too.

Big Kim in Little North Korea has the world’s attention because he has no regard for the rules. A state of enslaved, starving people, with less economic strength than Bristol, can command the attention of the globe. It is a lesson Donald Trump understands.

The art of the deal starts not with concealment of your strength, but showing it, and leaving the other side to think you might just use it. It must be realistic: never threaten anything you will never be able to do, as they know it and you will never be believed again. You can though threaten that which they know you might. The art of the Donald is the art of the deal, and his play starts with letting everyone know that he is just crazy enough to do it.

The Americans may have whistful thoughts about the Panama Canal, their territory for 76 years until handed over, and muse over rectifying territorial concessions that might not have been made. (That election they had in 2008 when the more deranged of Mr Trump’s party tried to doubt that Barack Obama was American-born: they pass over the fact that their own candidate was born outside the USA, in the Panama Canal Zone.) The Canal would not be worthy of the blood and treasure required in this particular case – but who can tell whether Trump will see it that way?

(If the Canal is inadequate, or the Americans are being overcharged – build a new one, or a decent rail link, as the Mexicans are planning, and let competition do the job, or sail by way of Stanley and the Cape.)

Greenland – well, they effectively control its destiny already. it should not take too much pressure to win sufficient concessions to ensure mutual defence, while allowing the Danes to take the cold and thankless tasks across the wastes and the inexplicably ungrateful people.

Of course it would never happen, but then – is he crazy enough to do it?

Stepping back and seeing the world, the neat model of a rule-based international order that our foolish Foreign Office still tries to believe in is thoroughly exploded. The international tribunals are no more that political instruments, and those who wish to ignore the rules are doing so with impunity. It goes beyond India throwing ambassadors in prison and states confiscating investors’ property at will. There is no ‘international law’ to Russia or China or Iran. Each does what it likes. We should not be surprised: China and Iran were ancient civilisations when my ancestors were unlettered tribesmen warring amongst the swamps or carving hills into forts against the tribe across the river. What right do we, mere children of a culture, to impose our ideas upon them? There are no laws – only strength and national interest. Against Chinese behaviour and that of their client-states, strength and national interest are the measure to be applied.

Over here, there is no balanced appreciation of Donald Trump: the media and political class are caught up in a game of ‘Hunt the Hitler’ that is directed at anyone unusual – whether tyrant or libertarian, whether radical or conservative – and unable to see anything else; any nuance. We perhaps take Trump too literally, or but if we stop and ignore his wilder words, will that be a worse mistake? You see, maybe his is just crazy enough to do it, and maybe, on occasion, the world would be a better place if he does (not in Panama or Canada or Greenland), or is believed to ready to. That is the art of the deal.