Trump is not playing by your postwar-world rules
Occasionally you can see eternity in a speck of time, and occasionally you can see the logic of an entire historic moment in one event. And so it was with the Group of 7 summit last weekend in Quebec.
The failure of that summit wasn’t about trade, or even the Western alliance. It was about the steady collapse of the postwar order and the way power structures are being reorganized and renegotiated.
The postwar order was a great achievement. The founding generation built organizations and alliances to fight communism, create a stable trading system, combat global poverty and promote democracy.
But the next generation lost the thread.
European elites were so afraid of nationalism that they fell for the illusory dream of convergence — the dream that nations could effortlessly merge into a cosmopolitan Pan-European community. Conservatives across the Western world became so besotted with the power of the market that they forgot what capitalism is like when it’s not balanced by strong communities.
Progressives were so besotted with their educated-class expertise that they concentrated power away from the people at the same time that technology was pushing power toward the people.
Those who lost faith began to elect wolves to destroy it. The wolves — whether Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or any of the others — don’t so much have shared ideology as a shared mentality.
It begins with 1, some sense of historic betrayal. This leads to 2, an outlook that says the world is a nasty place, and 3, a scarcity mindset that says politics is a zero-sum game in which groups must scramble to survive. This causes 4, a sense of distrust, and 5, the rupture of any relationship built on friendship or affection, and finally 6, the loss of any sense that there is such a thing as the common good.
Wolves perceive the world as a war of all against all and seek to create the world in which wolves thrive, which is a world without agreedupon rules, without restraining institutions, norms and etiquette.
What you see then is not merely a disagreement about trade or this or that, but two radically different modes of politics, which you might call high-trust versus low-trust.
The Group of 7 is built in a high-trust age. It’s based on the idea that the members have shared values and historical accomplishments, have a carefully nurtured set of relationships and live in a community of general friendship. Canada and the U.S. are neighbors and friends.
But in the low-trust Trumpian worldview, values don’t matter; there are only interests. Friendship is a con. The low-trust style of politics is realism on steroids.
Trump is trying to transform the nature of relationships. Trump takes every relationship that has been based on affection, loyalty, trust and reciprocity and turns it into one based on competition, self-interest, suspicion and efforts to establish dominance. By destroying trust and reciprocity he creates an environment in which he can thrive.
This is a challenge to the way politics is done. What Trump did to the G-7 is the same thing he did to the GOP. He refused to play by everybody else’s rules.
It’s why he is more comfortable dealing with dictators like Putin and Kim Jong Un than with democrats like Justin Trudeau. He and the dictators are playing the same game.