Trump will never understand Putin and Xi.
A column by René Pfister (DER SPIEGRL), Washington.
The US president believes that world politics works like the real estate business in New York. It's a mistake that could ruin his second term.
If there is a bright spot in Donald Trump's second term, it is the amazing pragmatism of the US president. In the first weeks of his term, Trump flirted with the annexation of Greenland and dreamed of making Canada the 51st U.S. state to make. In his imagination, the Gaza Strip turned into a holiday resort on the Mediterranean Sea. And the "Liberation Day" was in Trump's rhetoric a first step to an America in which in Ohio and Pennsylvania smokes again and American seamstresses make T-shirts for American children.
But as it quickly turned out, reality does not simply want to bow to Trump's will. Denmark makes no effort to move the island out of the North Atlantic. Canada elected a prime minister whose promise is to defend the independence of his country. And many of the tariffs that Trump announced on his liberation day were either collected, put on the long bank or, in the case of Britain, dissolved in the favor of a trade agreement. The iron-hard trade policy of the US president turned into a wax-soft negotiation offer under the pressure of the falling stock markets.
Trump's amazing flexibility has just been packaged by FT columnist Robert Armstrong in the beautiful acronym Taco - Trump always chickens out, which means: Trump always gets cold feet. It is a description that the president did not like above all because it struck on the equally accurate and defamatory undertone that Trump has perfected with word creations such as "Sleepy Joe" or "Crooked Hillary".
The US president has never been a man of principles. "The Art of the Deal", as the book of the real estate juggler from the eighties was called, consists above all in negotiating with maximum demands, and then hoping that impudence will win. The latter has succeeded surprisingly well in the case of the Republican Party, which was rolled over by Trump's chutzpe like a tank.
But even Wall Street was not impressed by a trade policy, the logic of which even Trump's advisers could never explain coherently and which therefore needs to be constantly improved. And there is no evidence that Vladimir Putin and China's President Xi Jinping will bow to a US president whose words are about as reliable as the arrival times of the railway in Germany.
Especially in the left camp, Trump is often portrayed as a kind of modern Mussolini. But the comparison with the European fascism of the 1930s overlooks the fact that Trump is completely unideological. If there is a Trump doctrine, it is Donald First. Trump may be vengeful, but he has no mortal enemies, whom he pursues with eternal will to destroy. Marco Rubio, whom he once mocked as a competitor for the Republican presidential candidacy as "Little Marco", is now his foreign minister. Trump would never come up with the idea of declaring countries like North Korea or Iran the "axis of evil", as George W. Bush once did.
Trump maintained an almost intimate relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during his first term of office and ennobed him with a visit to the North Korean border. In 2018, Trump blew up the laborily negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran and announced a campaign of "maximum pressure" on Tehran - only to announce today how much he would now like to conclude a contract with the mullahs. Trump does not look at the world through the glasses of morality or even ideology. But he is constantly looking for the next deal.
However, this leads him to walk like a blind man through world politics. The bloodiest conflicts in human history were not fought over raw materials or money. If it was Putin's concern, he should never have invaded Ukraine. From an economic point of view, the war is a disaster that led to an exodus of educated Russians and brought the gas business with Europe to a large standstill.
For Putin, it is about making the old splendor of Soviet power shine again and creating a mystical Slavic ethnic community. "Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are all descendants of the old Rus, which formed the largest state in Europe," Putin wrote in the summer of 2021 in an essay entitled "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians", which provided the ideological superstructure for the later invasion of the neighboring country. If Chinese President Xi believed in the art of the deal, he would not toy with the idea of integrating Taiwan militarily if necessary.
A violent invasion of the island would not only bring China's export economy to a standstill in one fell swoop, but would also evoke the danger of falling into a war with the nuclear power USA. It is a calculation that only a madman would get into – or a politician who believes he can serve a higher goal. "Motherland must be united and will be united," Xi said in a speech in 2019. U.S. intelligence believes that the Chinese president has ordered his military to be ready for a war over Taiwan by 2027.
Trump was always remarkably hesitant when it came to using violence. Behind his bombastic rhetoric was always the fear of escalation. "I have never believed that enemies always have to remain enemies," Trump said in a speech in Saudi Arabia in May. "I'm different than many people think."
Probably that's not even wrong. Probably Trump, the Taco president, is much more predictable than we want him to admit. His only problem is that he is not surrounded by businessmen on the world stage, but by ideologues who do not measure their success in dollars and cents.
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