It’s not (quite) as bad as it seems

In a particularly bad week for wrecking behaviour, Donald Trump trashed the Nato summit, declared the European Union a ‘‘foe’’, undermined Prime Minister Theresa May’s attempts to get a soft Brexit for Britain, sucked up to the Russians and betrayed his own intelligence services. But his actions made it clear that the Nato alliance is of limited relevance and that a new military confrontation with the Russians would be pointless folly.

He didn’t actually say either of those things in that memorable week – although he has said them both in the past. But despite the usual blizzard of off-the-cuff, contradictory Trumpian statements, a couple of truths did become obvious.

One is that Trump is Russia’s man in the White House. It is not clear what kind of hold Moscow has on him, but it clearly has one. The other is that there is almost no military dimension to the ‘‘Russian threat’’ in Europe, so Nato does not need to spend more money.

Trump likes to sound tough. ‘‘Get ready, Russia, because [American missiles] will be coming, nice and new and smart!’’ he tweeted over a transient crisis in Syria three months ago. After last week’s Nato summit, he claimed to have bullied the Europeans into spending much more on defence – against the Russian threat, of course.

But he never fired those missiles, although the Russians didn’t back down. He didn’t really get any new promises from the Europeans last week to spend more money on Nato. And when he went to Moscow on Sunday, he declared that America was to blame for the poor state of Us-russian relations.

After a two-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin with only translators present, Trump announced that he accepted Putin’s denials about Russian attempts to use social media to influence the 2016 US election. ‘‘They [the US intelligence services] think it’s Russia,’’ Trump said. ‘‘President Putin just said it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.’’

Now, let’s pick this all apart and try to make sense of it. Trump’s betrayal of US intelligence services was a natural and necessary part of his campaign to discredit them, because he fears that they have or will discover evidence that links him to Russian intervention in the US election.

There was a huge backlash in the US because even Trump’s own supporters were dismayed to see him value the Russian dictator’s words more highly than those of American intelligence professionals. Within a day he was forced to admit, for the first time, that there had been Russian meddling in the US election process in 2016.

He also had to backtrack on his claim that the US was to blame for the heightened tension with Russia, tweeting that ‘‘We’re all to blame’’ and that he held ‘‘both countries responsible’’. But actually, he was right about that the first time.

If the US had treated the badly wounded postsoviet Russia less brutally in the 1990s, nurturing the fragile new Russian democracy instead of taking all the Eastern European countries into Nato and pushing the alliance’s military frontier right up to the former Soviet border, there might never have been support in Russia for an aggrieved nationalist like Putin.

It’s too late to fix that now, but Russia is still not a major military threat. It has lots of modern tanks and missiles, because that’s what nationalist leaders do, but its economy is only the size of Italy’s and it could not sustain a prolonged military confrontation with Nato. That’s why Putin concentrates on non-military initiatives like his interference in the 2016 US election – and apparently in Britain’s 2017 Brexit referendum.

So it makes perfectly good sense for Nato’s European members to spend 2 per cent or less of their resources on defence. Nato is about defending Europe, and Europe doesn’t need much defending.

The good news is that though the populists and ultranationalists are on the rise in the West, including Russia, raw military power still plays a minor role. Hacking and the other digital dark arts are playing a much bigger role, and it is proving hard to get them under control. But which would you prefer?

NZ First is the ‘‘bad boy’’ flatmate. It decided not to continue with university and now works as a sales rep.

hen Shane Jones declared last week that mining would be part of the West Coast’s future, Labour and the Greens must have struggled to keep their eyes from rolling all the way back into their skulls.

Jones, a NZ First MP, is, after all, a Cabinet minister in a Labour-led government. Less than a year ago that government set a very different tone on mining in the speech from the throne, prepared by Labour Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. That vision has been reinforced by Jones’ ministerial colleague Eugenie Sage, minister of conservation and a Green MP.

There’s one way to describe this situation: government by flatmates. If that seems a shallow comparison at first, then bear with me. When you think about it, the current arrangements really do resemble three unrelated adults sharing a house.

Labour, a postgraduate student, is the leaseholder and the longest-standing housemate. It gets the master bedroom, complete with en suite, and pays the most rent. As the senior occupant, Labour is in charge of overseeing the chore wheel that sets out who will be responsible for what on which days. Of course, when it suits, Labour will ignore the chore wheel – though it’s usually pretty careful about keeping it on the down low.

The Green Party is an undergraduate student. The youngest of the three, it doesn’t have a lot of worldly experience. It pays a good share of the rent but is relegated to the smallest bedroom on the coldest side of the house, which it has plastered with posters for woke and fashionable causes. The Green Party is mostly pretty good with the chore wheel, though it can sometimes be a bit passiveaggressive about it.

NZ First is the ‘‘bad boy’’ flatmate. It decided not to continue with university and now works as a sales rep. It gets the second-best bedroom, just down the hall from Labour, even though it pays about the same share of the rent as the Greens. NZ First travels up and down the country quite a bit