THE US IN THE WORLD

The day after his inauguration, President Trump’s second term and its global implications was the subject of wide discussion at The Blavatnik School of Government.

In what felt like a mini-summit, Professor Pepper Culpepper moderated a discussion, the panel comprising Thomas Hale, Krzysztof Pelc, Yeling Tan and Philippa Webb, all professors at Blavatnik.

Professor Tan, Professor of Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, replied to a question whether China was essentially like Japan, and might ‘break out’ to avoid ‘containment’ thus invading Taiwan out of a deep impulsion.

But Professor Tan argued that the two countries are very different, with China so much larger that one of its big actions in recent years has been to bolster its domestic market, ‘increasing domestic demand and trying to reshore supply chains within China’. She added that the world is far more globalised now than in the 1940s and that China can see that some of its success rested on multilateral institutions promoting globalisation in the decades after World War Two.

Professor Pelc, Lester B. Pearson Professor in International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations then spoke about the fact that Trump’s deliberate threat-making to multiple actors ‘is bad in itself, it acts as a tax on transactions, a tax on trade.’ He noted that his own research showed that the threat of a tariff is half as effective as actually imposing it. The evidence is the number of US firms importing huge amounts of stock ahead of an anticipated trade wall, itself a distortion and ‘hugely inefficient.’ ‘Uncertainty is a huge cost for business,’ and ‘The mood changes away from cooperation.’ He compared it to the early 1930s when Congress imposed tariffs ‘for no good reason,’ contributing to the Great Depression.

A member of the audience asked what role hope plays here and Professor Pelc replied that history at least shows that we’ve survived previous rounds of this sort of thing, whether we point to Nixon in the 1960s or earlier, although he didn’t deny that World War Two lies there in plain sight and came partly out of the Great Depression, made worse by unnecessary tariffs imposed by the US Congress. The real hope, he suggested, might be just how well the global supply chain coped with COVID, where in the past one might have expected extensive famine, and again following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He likened the global economy now to a ‘dense network,’ and added that the British exposure to US tariffs was far smaller than Canada’s, where 80% of exports go to the US (compared to 15% of the UK’s). Some sort of encouragement if you are not in Canada, he suggested wryly, as a Canadian.

Turning to climate change Professor Hale, Thomas Hale, Professor in Public Policy (Global Public Policy), whose recent book Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time was mentioned, encouraged the audience to be realistic about the role of Executive Orders (on the day that Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords). He narrated the partisan warfare of all recent Presidencies including Obama’s, with roll-backs in one direction and reversals in another: the rise of the US as a major global oil producer occurred throughout. One possible silver lining to people worried about the climate, he argued, was that grid connectivity and net energy production sorely needs improvement and this will benefit renewables too. He also mentioned that dismantling Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will be more complex than it looks because it benefitted so many Republican districts. Ultimately the sheer federalism of the US, and how much takes place away from Washington DC, needs to be born in mind. Climate reform has not ended in the US just because Trump has signalled his rejection.

Professor Webb, Professor of Public International Law, Blavatnik School of Government, was asked if Trump was all set to undermine international laws and other norms, but she started by reminding the audience that Biden had also just pardoned his family, ‘so you know, not everything is Trump versus the rest of us, I think there’s disappointing behaviour on all sides.’

But she expressed concern nonetheless and agreed with Professor Pelc that almost as concerning as actual law-breaking is the intention to undermine it, which has a concrete impact irrespective of what actually happens. What is different this time round is that the technology ‘bros’, people like Elon Musk, are evidently opposed to a more general chaos that might be associated with the MAGA core led by the likes of Steve Bannon. She argues that they don’t want their social media platforms to go so far away from the truth that they go towards Truth Social, which never really gained traction; ultimately a platform has to be tethered in some version of truth, or reality, or people switch off. She argued that the same business leaders don’t want a complete free-for-all with AI, they just want the lightest possible regulations, that benefit them and not China.

Philippa used the example of the US withdrawing from NATO to make the point that such a thing would be intricate and take a long time. It will take real discipline to rewrite the world order. ‘I’m moderately hopeful that we’re not going to see that strategy.’

If there was one theme that seemed to predominate it was the necessity of critical thinking skills, an historical perspective and a degree of detachment; don’t confuse the bluster with the outcome. The rest, we’ll have to see.