TRUMP’S NEW FRIEND

You have to hand it to Donald Trump, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. His tough-guy strategy pays dividends. His critics had a fit when he scolded Nato allies for scrimping on defence: he was endangering the Atlantic alliance, they said. Yet by inducing the allies to spend more, he has actually strengthened Nato. Now the same is proving true with his tough line on trade. Back in May he imposed tariffs on EU steel and aluminium exports; and when the EU responded with levies on Harley-davidsons and orange juice, he went a step further and threatened to impose steep tariffs on European cars. “Tariffs are the greatest!” he tweeted shortly before the European Commission’s president, Jean-claude Juncker, arrived in Washington last week, on a mission to defuse the looming trade war. And guess what? By the end of their talks, Juncker was planting a kiss on Trump’s cheek and Trump was hailing “a very big day for free and fair trade”.

It was Trump who triumphed, said Irwin Stelzer in The Sunday Times. Juncker essentially did what his “paymaster”, German chancellor Angela Merkel, had told him to: he persuaded the president not to fire the big gun – 25% tariffs on German cars – “aimed directly at her economy”. (A big chunk of German car industry profits come from sales to the US.) Trump, however, got all he wanted and more: the EU has agreed to work with the US towards eliminating tariffs and barriers on all non-auto industrial goods; to import “massive” amounts of US Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), thus reducing Europe’s dependency on gas pumped in from Russia; and to buy lots more soybeans from American farmers, who, as a result of the US trade war with Beijing, can no longer sell to China. Better yet, the EU will join the US in its efforts to put a stop to the illicit trade practices (industrial subsidies, theft of intellectual property) China indulges in, not least by helping reform the World Trade Organisation.

The only problem, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker, is that all these wins are illusory. France will never open itself up to an invasion of US food. EU states won’t start buying “vast amounts” of LNG from the US while gas from Russia and Norway is cheaper. And the same politically powerful groups – farmers, aircraft manufacturers, military contractors – that stymied President Obama’s efforts to negotiate a transatlantic free-trade treaty will come out of the woodwork again. What we actually witnessed last week, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post, was that familiar dance: “the Trump two-step”. It kicks off with him hurling insults at the other side (Juncker claims that Trump had described him as “a brutal killer” back in June) and threatening all manner of harm. Then comes the backtrack: Trump hugs his adversary and triumphantly announces he has saved the world from a crisis his own rhetoric and actions have brought about. It doesn’t cost him anything, “because his words are weightless”. But it does huge damage to the reputation of the US, which is now being seen as “erratic, unpredictable and fundamentally hostile to the global order”.