The US President trumps his critics
Asked to account for the detente that led to yesterday’s meeting of Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s foreign minister said: “Credit goes to President Trump.” That will infuriate his critics. To them he is a blustering fool, and some Britons intend to protest when he visits the UK in July. They should stay at home and watch Wimbledon instead. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump personally – and there is much to object to – Britain needs the friendship of the most powerful man in the world. Especially given the sense of possibility he is bringing to the global order.
The visit is scheduled for Friday 13, when there will be a partial solar eclipse, leading to lots of jokes about the end of the world. But prophecies of doom regarding the Trump presidency have not come to fruition. There is evidence, in fact, of sensible continuity. His low tax agenda is akin to that of John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and Britain could learn from it: America’s economy grew much faster than ours in the past three months. And several presidents, even the ever-cautious Barack Obama, have had to confront North Korea.
That said, no one beats Mr Trump’s record for inflammatory rhetoric, and he has very different priorities from Mr Obama. As far back as 1999, Mr Trump told an interviewer that “the biggest problem this world has is nuclear proliferation” and that North Korea must be contained. Moreover, he has brought to his office a businessman’s approach to negotiations. Mr Trump’s position on tariffs, for example, might be economically unwise, but it has been used to extract concessions from the Chinese, in exchange, no doubt, for US conciliation later on. It takes a long time to change the world. Mr Trump is shifting it by inches with forceful rhetoric, and this is more likely to succeed than Mr Obama’s attempt to move it through flattery and best wishes.
Anyone who still refuses to accept Mr Trump’s election victory risks making themselves irrelevant to the changing times. Clever leaders are now working with him. It’s remarkable that French President Emmanuel Macron, who was elected in repudiation of conservative populism, is Mr Trump’s closest European ally – and without any compromise of Mr Macron’s principles. He told Congress this week that his goal is to change Mr Trump’s mind on Iran and the environment. And yet it was Mr Macron who was the first foreign leader to get a state visit, a quid pro quo for inviting the Trumps to dinner atop the Eiffel Tower. By contrast, last year British MPS debated barring Mr Trump from a state visit to the UK, and John Bercow vetoed a presidential address to Parliament.
It has taken absurdly long for Britain to welcome one of the few politicians in the world who has enthusiastically embraced Brexit – a sign of how political correctness has bred timidity even in the Conservative leadership. The Government must see that the people willing Mr Trump to fail are the exact same people willing the same fate for Brexit. They would prefer to leave Britain cut off from its historic ally rather than parley with Mr Trump. They are not thinking in the national interest. This is the politics of the student union, where speakers with disagreeable opinions are banned. The goal is to turn Britain into a giant “safe space”.
Excising from reality things one cannot deal with is common among the Left. The Right gets such a bad historic press because history is written by Left-wing academics. While Kennedy is celebrated for standing up to the Soviets over Cuba, Reagan is painted as reckless. Even when the Soviet Union fell, liberals were reluctant to give the Republican president any credit – even though his stand against Communism did so much to hasten its demise. And Mr Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize less than one year into a presidency that accomplished very little. If Mr Trump wins peace in the Korean peninsula, will the Nobel committee recognise his efforts?
Of course, that is a big “if ”. North Korea still has a lot to do to prove it will disarm. It is a vile, unreliable regime, a tragic hangover from the Cold War. Whatever happens in the future, Mr Trump at least deserves credit for calling it what it is – and such regimes are best contained by a strong alliance between democracies. Virtue signalling has never brought a dictatorship to heel.