Trump’s tirades miles from Kiwi politics

For political junkies (guilty as charged) it is day by day harder and harder to tear your eyes off the United States and focus on the game at home.

Even as I was tapping out this column, social and mainstream media has been alight with President Donald Trump’s ‘‘plans’’ for a 20 percent tariff on imports from Mexico to pay for his wall – a move that would hit everything from petrol to avocados, and mean that US consumers would in effect pay for the barrier, not Mexico.

Then came the the ‘‘clarification’’ it was just one idea, not established policy. And in any case it might only apply to countries with which the US had a trade deficit.

It followed news of a mass walk out of senior staff at the State Department (equivalent to our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but without Murray McCully at the helm).

Then there was the New York Times interview with Stephen Bannon, a former executive at ‘‘alt-right’’ Breitbart News and now Trump’s chief strategist, telling the media it should be ‘‘embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while’’.

Some facts, some ‘‘alternate facts’’ and a worrying call for a mute media all in the space of a few hours of the Washington pantomime. It’s hard to know what it’s more like. Watching a snake as it lines up a family pet or poking your tongue into a painful cavity?

Without wanting to set off the smugometer, every day it reinforces the sense of genteel and level-headed politics at home – even allowing for the salvo of insults between Gareth Morgan and Winston Peters at Ratana Pa. His ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ versus his ‘‘toothless sheep’’.

It’s hard to know whether ‘‘grateful’’ for our politicians and politics is the right word, yet it’s close.

But the maelstrom around trade policy in the US, including Trump’s move to formally pull out of the TransPacific Partnership, drew in even the preternaturally level-headed Bill English at his first post-Cabinet press conference as prime minister last week.

Trump just that day had floated bilateral – he called them ‘‘one-on-one’’ – trade deals with TPP nations like New Zealand. There was none of the usual diplomatic rhetoric about ‘‘win-win’’ arrangements between nations but the blunt message that they had to benefit the US more. Significantly more.

Oh, and if any other country wanted a ‘‘one-on-one’’ deal, the US would insist on a 30-day notice period if, in its view, that other country had ‘‘misbehaved’’. Perhaps the real estate mogul sees trade deals as akin to tenancy agreements, that can be terminated at short notice, but English was clearly exasperated.

The absurd notice period, and the unequivocal US-first stance, had him close to ruling out a deal with the US – while dispatching Trade Minister Todd McClay to Washington to check out the slope of the playing field.

But even if we wanted a bilateral deal and could get one that looked anything like fair dealing, we would surely be well back in any queue.

We were too small beer for the US before the TPP – even without the impediment of the nuclear issue.

But any of the alternative attempts to resurrect the TPP – clearly English’s preference – seem equally fraught.

Japan, at first apparently interested in a TPP-1 (without the US) quickly backed away and now seems keener on a bilateral with the US. That’s hardly surprising. The US was always the main draw card for Japan and the reason Prime Minister Shinzo Abe defied domestic opposition to join the TPP talks.

Canada and Chile have expressed reservations as well.

As for the pie-in-the-sky idea of plugging China into the TPP gap left by the US? Well forget it. It is far more interested in promoting the Sinocentred Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

The best option for the remaining 11 TPP nations may be to cryogenically freeze the deal and wait out the Trump years, though it seems unlikely it will ever rise again from the slab in anything like its current form.

As professor of strategic studies at Victoria University Robert Ayson has pointed out, ‘‘by jettisoning the TPP, the Trump administration will relinquish the Asian economic integration initiative to China’’.

It’s not just in terms of geopolitical influence that the US will concede more ground to China by pulling out of the TPP.

Whatever your view of the TPP and its ‘‘non-trade’’ elements – which many saw as two-edged swords – RCEP will not have anything like its potential influence on labour laws, intellectual property and environmental standards.

The US may also have set back progress towards equalising those ‘‘nontrade’’ standards (and potentially costs) between itself and its trading competitors.

Ironically, the biggest losers from that may be the very blue collar workers Trump has championed.

But if Bill English was on uncertain and shifting ground in the trade arena last week he was on more familiar territory treading in the footsteps of John Key over setting the election date.

Like Key he will give plenty of notice and will likely make the date known in the next few days or weeks, perhaps as early as next week’s all day caucus meeting at Premier House.

Before Key quit most people had put a ring around September 23 as fulfilling the medley of criteria; including avoiding school holidays, major international conferences and All Black tests.

There is no real reason for English to move away from that date, roughly three years on from the 2014 election, although it is apparently not yet set in stone.

Go very early or much later and you risk looking nervous or self-serving.

Better to exude stability and certainty, which has its own rewards. It’s in short enough supply elsewhere.