Trump is really, really bad at the "art of the deal"...

I've been on Facebook lately -- perhaps a mistake, but I've been posting my Japan photos (which I may copy here as well). Following all of the latest crazy news makes me want to write out my own analysis. I'm not sure anyone is particularly interested, but I know that there's one person who will be interested: future me!! So I will write my thoughts here on my blog.

I just want to start with the obvious: Trump is really bad at negotiating because he's really dumb. I'd like to explain a bit because I've read a lot of analysis, but I haven't seen quite this angle:

Trump wants to believe that he's a good negotiator -- it's important to his personal identity -- but he's bad at it because his view of deal-making is too simplistic.

Trump sees deals only in one-dimensional terms. When he's the buyer, he wants the price to be as low as possible while the seller wants it to be as high as possible. If he gets the price down, he won, otherwise the seller won. And the only tools in his toolbox for this are (1) trying to charm the seller, or (2) trying to pressure/threaten/bully the seller.

A smart negotiator can see deals in multiple dimensions. The various parties in the negotiation don't necessarily want exactly the same thing, and in any negotiation there are typically more than two interested parties. To get the best deal, you find someone with a common interest or with a reciprocal interest.

A reciprocal interest would be when I have something that's more valuable to you than it is to me, and you have something that's more valuable to me than to you -- so we both win by trading. A common interest would be like "Trump is threatening my economy and he is also threatening your economy. Let's protect both our economies by finding which things we were selling to / buying from the US that we could trade between ourselves instead."

Having a reputation for being trustworthy is valuable because people are more willing to make deals with those they can trust to play fair. You get a reputation for being trustworthy by being trustworthy. Having good friends and allies is also valuable. You help them when they need it and they help you -- that's essentially been the basis of human society since the beginning of human society.

The US has invested heavily in its reputation and alliances for the past century or so -- and has reaped huge rewards in terms of influence and good will -- not to mention the incredibly lucrative position of having the primary reserve currency of the world. Sadly, America's reputation and alliances have been on kind of shaky ground for a while, and Trump appears to have flushed them down the toilet because he didn't recognize them as valuable.

Right before picking a fight with China, Trump did the dumbest thing possible and terrorized America's most loyal friends and allies -- not just threatening them economically but threatening their security and sovereignty.

No country has had a better friend and ally than America's best friend Canada. And out of the blue, for no reason besides stupid arrogance, Trump threatened to break Canada's economy in order to forcibly annex them. Maybe he didn't really mean it (if something he tries to do isn't possible, then it was just a joke, eh?), but Canada is taking the threat very seriously.

And Europe's big security fear at the moment...? Putin's territorial ambitions could lead to full-scale war. Ukraine is holding the line. America's military might dwarfs that of Europe, and Europe's dependence on US military aid gives the US huge leverage over Europe.

Apparently, however, Trump's plan to "end the Ukraine war on day one" was to hand Ukraine over to his buddy Putin by cutting off military aid. Now that Europe knows they can't count on help from their friend anymore, they're in emergency mode scrambling to build up local military might to make up for the loss.

This destroys America's leverage. I've seen it likened to shooting the hostage and then asking for ransom. Threatening to annex Greenland also doesn't help. If Trump decides to take Greenland through a military invasion, what's Europe going to do?

This is how Trump decided to lay the groundwork for his trade war with China. Xi has read his Sun Tzu -- he knows that the enemy of my enemy is my ally. Trump opened the game by handing Xi a lay-up of being able to credibly say to America's best friends "Let's stand up to this bully together."

These are countries that normally would prefer to help pressure China to be less authoritarian. But when your big best friend suddenly morphs into a big deadly-dangerous bully, anyone who can help starts to look good by comparison.

I'm actually starting to see friendly memes about cooperation show up in my Facebook feed -- from the Chinese embassy in the US (and I don't think I did anything to encourage them). My feed is also drowning in pro-Canada memes and in AI images about the beautiful friendship between Canada and Mexico. I haven't been actively "liking" them -- I think I'm getting them because I once googled whether there are any new bilateral trade agreements between Canada and Mexico, and I clicked on some articles about how they're increasing trade between themselves and with China. (Curse you lack of data privacy!)

I guess everything I've written here is obvious. It's just that I was flabbergasted to read a few posts by a pro-Trump Facebook friend who argued that the worldwide tariffs (and his later pause on the tariffs) were brilliant moves that served to "divide and conquer" the world, isolate China, and put the US in a position to lead a new global economy. The friend apparently got these ideas from Fox News, but I'm still astonished that anyone could seriously believe any of that.

You would need to (like Trump himself) be incapable of seeing things from anyone else's perspective.

And I haven't even mentioned the thing about rounding people up and sending them (without any due process) to secret and/or foreign prisons -- which should be the worst thing, but it's hard to rank the worst things these days.

In a sense, however, Trump has been very successful in his own goals. Using his charm alone, he managed to convince a multitude of [insert appropriate adjectives here] people to give him the most powerful position in the world -- where he has the opportunity to rob them blind by selling his influence to anyone who will funnel money into his otherwise-failing businesses.

It feels like this has to turn around at some point. Because almost every story has an arc where the protagonists learn something and everything is more-or-less OK in the end. But maybe that's just because stories are told by people who are currently surviving...?

Yes, this

I hate to post a link to an article unless I have some of my own commentary to add, but this article is more-or-less exactly what I've been saying for years.  Here's a teaser:

Put simply, we've learned a lot since 1787. What was for the Founders a kind of providential revelation—designing, from scratch, a written charter and democratic system at a time when the entire history of life on this planet contained scant examples of either—has been worked into science. More than 700 constitutions have been composed since World War II alone, and other countries have solved the very problems that cripple us today. It seems un-American to look abroad for ways to change our sacred text, but the world's nations copied us, so why not learn from them?

Road Trip!!!

I think I don't have to tell you guys how much I love traveling by train. (If there's any confusion, please review my trains topic.) However, in the interest of allowing my kids to form their own opinions, we decided to take them on a good old-fashioned American road trip!!!

At my last job in Switzerland, my American colleague and I used to love to swap culture notes with our Swiss colleagues! We explained to a Swiss colleague that getting a used car and driving around the U.S. is a popular adventure for young adults to take, but that the dream -- if you have a little more money -- is to fly to Europe, get a rail pass, and backpack all over. He told us that they have an equal and opposite adventure for young adults in Europe: normally you get a rail pass and spend a few months exploring all over Europe, but the dream -- if you have a little more money -- is to fly to the U.S., buy a used car, and drive cross country!

Naturally, I shouldn't be surprised. Getting in the car for a road trip was the economical family vacation I remember from my childhood, whereas (for me) railway travel was an exotic adventure! I guess it kind of depends on what you grew up with.

Why not take a road trip across Europe? Well, they don't have the (socialist) interstate highway system like here, so it's not nearly as convenient. It's the same as the reason why nobody dreams of exploring America cross-country by train: it may be theoretically possible to do it, but good luck! lol

I've heard that one of the motivations for setting up the (socialist) interstate highway system was a strategic one. Upon realizing how easy it is to wipe out a compact city with a nuclear bomb, the U.S. government decided to deliberately encourage sprawl in order to spread out the potential targets. This is a very real consideration, BTW. For example, if someone managed to take out Paris entirely, France would be in very serious trouble. That said, the disadvantage of the sprawl strategy is now becoming painfully clear: transportation through the sprawl net is incredibly inefficient, so if your energy supply is in question, then you're in very serious trouble.

Military strategy aside, our family's road trip was loads of fun for us and the kids (details and pics soon!) and we've arrived in our little apartment-for-the-semester in New Jersey.

p.s.: Sorry for being AWOL from the Internet while on the road. I didn't mean to post something controversial just before setting off, but I should have known that if I post any remark that's even obliquely critical of homeschooling, woah Nellie, watch out! ;^) But seriously, give me this evening to relax and get my family settled in, and I'll read all of the comments carefully tomorrow.

Steal this idea: Greetings from the opposite of America!!!

Reading commentary Americans write about how things work in France is incredibly frustrating. It tends to be a random mix of stuff that's right with stuff that makes me go "What the...? Where did that come from?"

Then one day it finally dawned on me where it's coming from. Most of the time when North Americans write about France they're not actually writing about France at all -- they're writing about America.

Whenever an American wants to write an essay describing the American way of doing something, it's important to set it off with a contrasting example of a first world country where things are completely the opposite of the way things are in the U.S. That country is France. Always. Whether things really are done differently in the real-life country of France is quite irrelevant. There are two ways of doing things, the American way, and the opposite of the American way, and to put a human face on "the opposite of the American way" we like to add a beret and horizontally-striped shirt and call it "France."

And so with that background I want to talk about an amusing article that was sent to me by Æsahættr: Hillary equals France.

I don't want to be too critical of this article since it's obviously a humor piece (and one that's nice to the French for a change...), but it fits the standard model pretty well: When comparing the French to the Americans, the author (Bill Maher) got some stuff right and some stuff wrong, but the one point where he was truly right on the money was a point about Americans.

Each culture has its own set of shared assumptions, and one of the most deeply held assumptions by the American people is that the American way is the best way; that all great ideas, advances, and innovations come from America, and the rest of the world is watching with envy and scrambling to copy "the American way" of doing just about anything.

You may be saying "Come on, Chanson!! The people of every country think their own way of doing things is best!!!" And I will respond with all sincerity: Not like the Americans do. The other half of you are probably saying "The reason Americans think that is because it's true!!!" And I'll grant that there's more than just a grain of truth to it -- there's a boulder of truth to it. That's probably why this belief is so popular. ;^)

Nonetheless, there are many cases where this unquestionable article of faith is wrong. And in those cases, it's a big stumbling boulder in terms of solving problems and improving things in the U.S.

Talking to the average European-on-the-street, as horrified as they are by Bush, there's still a strong sense that America leads the way -- largely in technology, but in other areas as well -- so there's no shame in watching closely and adopting practices seem to be working on the other side of the pond. (Case in point: Sarkozy -- who just won the French presidential election by a wide margin -- is perceived as the "Americophile" who will be leading France in a more American direction.) On the American side of the pond, by contrast, there's a perception of Europe as the "failed system" -- the standard example of how not to do anything.

Now let's look at this in purely mathematical terms: even if it's true that more innovation comes from America, who has the advantage? The people who use your ideas only? Or the people who use your ideas and their own as well? The American founding fathers weren't above having a two-way exchange of good ideas with other countries (notably France, as pointed out in the article), and America is all the better off for it. So why scrap this fine tradition?

Bill Maher gives an excellent modern example: Health care. Why is U.S. health care in the state it's currently in? Why, it's because American health care is the best in the world!!! And la-la-la I'm putting my fingers in my ears and not listening to you if you say anything different!!!

But seriously, (from a snail's eye view at least) the health care system here in France is excellent. As someone who grew up on U.S. healthcare, I am constantly impressed by the quality and comprehensiveness of the French healthcare system. I talked about the contrast a little bit in my post about those wacky health insurance companies!!! Just to take three day-to-day quality of life issues that are important to me -- healthcare, transportation, and public education -- all three are far superior in Europe. Now if you're about to remind me of the taxes, I'll just put it in crass capitalistic terms: sometimes you pay more for something that's better.

I've been hesitant to talk about the above in lo these many years of blogging because I don't want to alienate my American audience (or unduly worry them with the fear that those evil European socialists gotten to me and melted my brain). If you disagree with me, that's fine -- I welcome dissent here, and I don't claim to be an expert on economics. But I'm not speaking as a knee-jerk "France is always best" cheerleader -- I'm as willing and happy to criticize French folly as I am to criticize anyone else's (recall grammar police among others).

Regarding some of the other points made in the article:

The French do indeed like to swap gossip about their leaders' personal lives. Of course I heard about the fact that Royal never actually married the father of her children and I heard the rumor about Sarkozy's marriage being on the rocks. My husband even told me he'd read that Sarkozy's wife didn't bother to vote in the election, so notably she didn't vote for her husband. Now, one reason Royal's non-marriage was a non-issue was the fact that it seems like half of France is in the same boat. Not just my generation and younger either -- it looks like whether you've legally married your S.O./co-parent has been viewed as something of a minor technicality for some time.

Mahler is right, however, that politicians' personal lives don't show up as serious election issues. I talked a little about the relationship of the French with political sex lives in my post about Hillary Clinton. I think part of it is the fact that more than a hundred years ago there was a French president who died while receiving a B.J. from his mistress, and French politicians since then...? Well, they've had a hard time topping that one.

Another point for Americans to be aware of is that French history doesn't start right around the time of the French Revolution and cover France exclusively as a republic. From what I understand, it starts with "Our ancestors, the Gauls..." and runs through quite a bit of monarchy before that whole enlightenment-and-democracy thing. And since nobody's going to tell the king that it's not okay for him to maintain a mistress or two, it turns out that "the king's mistress" is a frequent stock character in the French history books. Obviously people will have somewhat different expectations for democratically-elected leaders, but still I think this sort of thing affects the public expectations about how leaders are going to behave.

Regarding the claim that "there is no Pierre six-pack" -- that's a funny line but... The author seems to be claiming that in France everybody's an intellectual and there's no political pandering or voting on the basis of emotional/symbolic issues. That's an interesting theory, but let's try to stay here on the planet Earth with us please...

That said, what I saw and read of the presidential debate here in France seemed fairly serious: The main issues covered were apparently economic theory and energy policy, and in particular how reliant France is (and should or shouldn't be) on nuclear power. I didn't see any discussion of how the candidates measured up in terms of pronouncing the word "nuclear" so I suppose they both did okay on that point. Y'know, for French people.

The last point I'd like to mention -- touched on briefly in the article -- is immigration. I'd like to devote a separate post to immigration and race issues in France -- how they are similar to related issues in the U.S., and how they're different. I've avoided the subject up until now because it's even touchier than anything I've spoken of in this post, and unfortunately it's a subject whose analysis suffers from more wrong-headed "France is the opposite of America" rhetoric than any other issue I've seen. Plus I'm not convinced that my readers are actually interested in this issue, so I hate to get myself mired in controversy for nothing. But I'll write up my ideas on the subject if you guys are interested.

Until then, this is Pierre six-pack signing off!!! :D