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...?
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