Does Trump’s foreign policy help Britain’s interests?
John Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, told this newspaper yesterday he will not be voting for Mr Trump in November’s presidential elections. A lifelong Republican, he backed the president in 2016 but feels unable to do so again.
Most people reading this article will not, being British, have to face Mr Bolton’s dilemma themselves. But his new book does raise a question for us: does President Trump’s foreign policy help the interests of Britain?
It is a surprisingly hard question to answer. There certainly is a plus side in the Trump stance. Whereas Barack Obama made a point of distancing the US from its traditional friends, trying (and usually failing) to placate America’s natural enemies, Mr Trump has been clearer which side he is on.
The president is well disposed towards Britain, partly because of his mother’s Hebridean upbringing. Almost alone among world leaders, he has supported Brexit. He wants the bilateral trade deal over which we are now negotiating. We are “at the front of the queue” with our biggest export market.
In the Middle East, Mr Trump is robustly pro-israel, rather than courting consistently anti-western
Arab powers. He rightly exposed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as an unmerited cloak of respectability for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He was the first to challenge China’s corruption of the world trading system.
The minus side is strong, however. Mr Trump seems to have no settled sense of what the West’s interests are. Instead of trying to re-energise the enfeebled rules-based international order, he seems to prefer a misrulebased international disorder. Instead of pursuing a consistent, tough policy on China and Russia, he prefers almost random deal-making with dictatorial bigshots who know a lot more than he about the situations they are dealing with.
Mr Bolton is a rare leading US figure who understands how the EU has weakened the West, so if he has come to the conclusion that Mr Trump will not strengthen it, I am inclined to listen.
Another problem, though: if the best the Democrats can come up with is a 77-year-old with “cognitive issues”, might we be better off sticking with Donald Trump’s “character” ones? At this point, it is truly hard to decide.
The then US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said, of the Iraq war: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” He was much mocked, but actually his words made perfect sense.
Mr Rumsfeld, however, left out a category which dominates our poorly educated culture – unknown knowns. By this I mean facts that are easily obtainable, yet completely unknown to zealots who wish to rage about something or other. An obvious example, unrecognised by Black Lives Matter, is that Britain abolished both slavery and the slave trade throughout its empire.
Such avoidable ignorance is shocking, and one wishes to help correct it. On the other hand, I often find myself giving thanks for it since it means the maniacs don’t know where to look. I can think of numerous beautiful objects, munificent benefactions, decent families, worthy businesses, educational institutions or charities that have some sort of link with slavery or empire. I usually shut up in the hope that the iconoclasts simply won’t notice them.
Let me, however, point out something that ought to be staring the activists in the face. In the United States, they are starting to pull down statues of Christopher Columbus. Why stop there? Surely the greater, more pervasive offence lies in the very word America.
It takes its name from the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Financed by the King of Portugal, Amerigo reached what is now Brazil in 1501. He seems to have originated the phrase “new world”. He never visited what is now the US. Cartographers were so impressed by his work that they decided to name the new places they could put on their maps as “America”. The authenticity of some accounts published in Vespucci’s name has been questioned. When he died in Seville, he left five slaves to his wife. How does this very dead white male get to stand for an entire continent?
Time, surely, for Black Lives Matter to demand the renaming of the Land of the Free, and all the Americas, north and south. That should keep them busy.
Millions of us have to live by Zoom at present, but it has its hazards. In recent days, I have heard of a school’s online classroom being “Zoom-bombed” by a mob shouting insults and threats and a Midlands rural parish whose online Sunday service was interrupted by images and words of extreme obscenity.
It is important to make sure users have secure links to keep out the intruders. Even that, however, might not be enough. One must remember that much of Zoom’s work is done in China. The company recently closed down Zoom groups that were commemorating the 1989 massacres in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. So perhaps, if the all-seeing Xi Jinping wants to Zoom along and start shouting in the middle of your Matins in Much-binding-in-the-marsh, there is not much you can do about it.