I occasionally punish myself by listening to ABC Radio National, which is basically The Guardian on radio. I recently heard a panel of their foreign correspondents earnestly agreeing with each other that Trump was “upsetting the new world order”.
To which I shouted at the radio: “That’s the damn point!”
But, in truth, Trump is far less a revolutionary wrecker than he is steering America back to its foreign policy foundations, especially on trade. The only “order” Trump is busting is the “New World Order” of Bush and Obama. Which is why the globalist elite is so terrified of him.
That Trump’s rhetoric can be extreme, and in some instances erratic, is undeniable. But his administration’s approach is far closer to the mainstream of American foreign policy and more rational and defensible than its critics concede.
Nowhere is that clearer than in international trade. If there is a constant in American trade policy, it is the emphasis on commercial reciprocity and the willingness to use every means to secure it.
Indeed, the ink was scarcely dry on the American constitution when James Madison — a staunch free trader — urged congress to unleash “commercial warfare” against Britain, which had barred major US exports from its market.
Arguing that commercial reciprocity should lie at the heart of the republic’s foreign policies, Madison vaunted America’s strengths, which, he said, ensured that its adversaries’ interests would be “wounded almost mortally” in the trade wars of the future, “while ours are invulnerable”.
The US ought to seek liberal trade with every nation, but it should harbour “no fears of entering into commercial warfare” when that was needed to secure reciprocity, instead standing ready to “make the other nation feel our power”…it is no coincidence that the statute that underpinned America’s efforts to build a liberal trading system in the postwar era was called the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act.
The “New World Order” that Trump is upsetting, to the chagrin of ABC-style elites, is the collective protectionism of the EU, and Beijing’s deliberate sabotage of global markets via currency manipulation and rampant intellectual property theft. Such quasi-socialism might have appealed to – and benefited – the elite, who, as Mark Steyn says, get to enjoy “an increasing share of the wealth, with the cultural benefits of great restaurants and cheap nannies”, but it has been a disaster for the Western working-class. “You’re poorer than your dad was,” as Steyn says. “But without even the consolations of culture.”
It is also no coincidence that every successful round of multilateral trade negotiations has been preceded by the US addressing, typically through blunt unilateral action, what it regards as unfair practices that substantially damage its commercial interests…the abject failure of the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to credibly tackle China’s trade and exchange rate practices fuelled the reaction against globalisation and made the collapse of the Doha Round all the more certain.
The real aberration in American policy was Obama. Photographs of Obama bowing obsequiously to Middle Eastern tyrants shocked Americans. His determination to shackle America to the UN’s proposed International Criminal Court would have, as John Bolton astutely observed, made American citizens subject to a foreign power for the first time since 1776.
It is therefore simply incorrect to portray the Trump administration’s trade policies, with their unequivocal focus on reciprocity, as a sharp departure from the course of American history. And much the same holds for foreign policy more broadly.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/trump-is-living-up-to-a-long-us-tradition
When Trump held the blowtorch to America’s NATO partners, he simply underscored to EU shirkers that Americans are sick to death of being expected to be the world’s policeman, sacrificing blood and treasure and getting nothing but contempt in return. As Scott Morrison has reminded “Globalist Barbie”, Jacinda Ardern, the first duty of the leader of a nation-state is to the citizens of their own nation, not to some airy-fairy leftist fantasy of “Earthians” (to use Bob Brown’s bizarre terminology). Trump is doing the same: looking out for the interests of Americans first. As is his right and duty.