US politics

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“Manners Maketh the Man”

In 1487 William Caxton wrote “according to an old proverb he that is not mannered is no man for manners maketh the man.” Now, it is as pointless to berate Donald Trump for the absence of manners as it is to berate Vlad the Impaler for cruelty, or indeed, water for being wet.

The White House press conference, however, went far beyond bad manners. It was a trap set by President Trump and Vice President Vance (VP) to goad, belittle and embarrass President Zelensky, an attempt to present him as an ungrateful recipient of US support whilst simultaneously demanding more for his country.

The Vice President led the attack with an inappropriate and untrue claim that President Valentsky had never thanked the US for their support to date. When he pointed out that he had indeed thanked them many times the VP shifted ground to he hadn’t done it today in the Oval office. Petty? Duplicitous? Inappropriate? I think we can award Vance a hat trick on this.

Putting rhetorical questions to him, making false statements about him and his country, not allowing him to answer, shouting over him, pointing and waging their fingers at him like an outraged school master of yesteryear. Their behaviour was shameful. Even on the grounds of basic common decency and manners there actions plumbed new depths of outrageous behaviour. It will be interesting to see what the bulk of American citizens felt about this extraordinary display by their Commander in Chief, the representative of their country.

As part of a diplomatic process the angry hectoring was something that has not been see since the start of World War Two when the doctrine of “might is right” was last so obviously in evidence. They clearly reveal President Trumps approach to dealing with those who have little or no power. Or indeed, to those who simply have less power than the most powerful country in the world.

But then it seems strange that precisely because of the power disparity between the two nations it was felt necessary to behave in such a loud and aggressive manner. President Roosevelt was often heard to say in relation to diplomacy that you should “speak softly and carry a big stick”. The US has the biggest stick on the planet. Why did they have to behave in that way? Is it simply Trump’s mercurial character or were they frightened of something?

Whatever the answer, there is not excuse for the behaviour.

There are a lot of people around the world trying to excuse, explain or even, simply make sense of what comes out of the Trump White House. It is difficult to do this as often what comes out of his mouth appears to be the first thing that pops into his head, with little engagement with the brain on the way through.

There are, however, some worrying areas of consistency, and the relationship with President Putin is one of those. It seems clear that there was a concerted effort by the Kremlin to support Trump’s first candidacy in 2016 with fake news, social media campaigns. When in office Trump met with Putin in Helsinki and afterwards defended the Russian leader against claims by the US’s own intelligence services that he had authorised such a covert programme of social media support for Trump. Indeed Trump made a habit of private meetings with Putin without advisors present and keeping the translators notes of the meetings during his first term in office.

After a recent discussion with Putin he came out rehearsing Russian talking point about the war in Ukraine including the charge that Ukraine started it? A classic example of newspeak. His actions since culminating in todays suspension of military aid make clear who’s side President Trump is on in the current war. There can be no mistake, he is not an impartial arbiter.

Few things in Trump world are consistent. But all those that are, are inimical to the interests of democracies wherever they are, to equality of any kind, and, without hyperbole, the existential future of the planet.

Europe may have to speak to President Trump with a soft voice, but they need to work furiously to build a big stick. Trump is not an unreliable ally that is confused or does not really understand the implications of his actions. Rather, he displays all the characteristics of an enemy and he is certainly aligning himself with all those that are opposed to liberal democratic values.

If anyone thinks a strategy of, wait until he is gone, is sensible, I think they underestimate where Trump might be taking America. We are less than three months into the new Administration and constitutional conventions have been breached willy nilly, indeed some of the clauses of the Constitution have been challenged, like that guaranteeing American citizenship to anyone born in America.

Article 2 Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States confirms that, once elected President, “He shall hold his Office during the Term of Four years,…” The Constitution, did not set a limit on the number of terms an individual can hold the office. Amendment 22 however, ratified on 27 February 1951 states, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…”

If the current presidency does not collapse under the weight of it own hubris, which is a real possibility, I fear Amendment 22 might be subject to challenge. Indeed it may simply be ignored by an incumbent who has filled all the key posts of government and the judiciary with yes men, including the leadership of the armed forces, which already seems to have started. The doctrine of “might is right ” may be applied at home as well as abroad.

The European political elite seem to be focused on placating Trump. One can only hope this is to buy time for them to establish a credible set of bargaining chips to defend, democratic, liberal and humane values. No one should underestimate the threat he represents to civilised order nor to the future viability of the planet as a place for human beings to thrive. There has never been a more dangerous challenge to the world than a Trump presidency.

There is a saying oft quoted by parents and teachers to their children. “Good manners cost nothing but mean everything.” If Trump ever heard this I am pretty sure he stopped listening as soon as he got to “cost nothing”. Anything that costs nothing must be worthless in Trump’s transactional world. No wonder values pass beneath his radar without causing a flicker.

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Bad and Badder, Dumb and Dumber

The Conservative leadership process has whittled the runners down to two. This may be as a result of an incompetent attempt to game the process or it may be the will of the Party but the two candidates are vying with each other to appear farthest to the right. The continuous drift in that direction over the past decade has resulted in a number of bizarre decisions. With “One Person Toryism” exemplified by Boris Johnson removing the whip from such giants of “One Nation Conservatism” as Michael Heseltine and perhaps culminating in the appointment of Liz Truss as Prime Minister. Someone whose blind ideological fervour was only excelled by her gross incompetence and lack of personal insight.

At one time this drift to the right would be seen as a strategic mistake. The orthodox view being that there were bedrocks of political support on the right and the left and in order to win, parties had to extend their appeal as far as possible in the direction or their opponents to secure the floating voters who would determine the outcome of the election. This had a moderating effect preventing parties drifting too far away from the centre ground.

It may be argued that this balancing process reasserted itself at the last election. However other “theories” are available to explain this landslide shift. The “pendulum theory” which suggests the electorate just feel its time to give the other side a go. A theory based on young children’s universal appeal to fairness when they have not “had a turn” on the bouncy castle yet. Another is that a party which has been in government for a long time has “run out of steam”. They are “exhausted” and unable to come up with new ideas to address the evolving challenges they face. Again it relies on an analysis which simplifies and anthropomorphises a complex social/political reality.

My own guess is the main driver of the last election was, above all, the complete lack of credibility of the Tories, informed by their spectacular incompetence in managing, public services, the economy, a global pandemic, the national finances, in fact, pretty much anything they turned their inattention to.

Supporters of the Labour party may rejoice at the options being put forward for the Conservative Party leadership. They may feel the option of bad or badder for their opponents is a positive thing as both candidates seem set to push the party further away from the “centre” where elections are supposed to be won.

This view may be too optimistic. If we look across the Atlantic we have in the Republican Party a situation which could be characterised as dumb and dumber but none the less may have a winning strategy. A strategy based on moving the bedrock.

Donald Trump is certainly not the sharpest knife in the draw. His record demonstrates he does not have the moral insight, the intellectual capacity nor the personal interest to address the fundamental problems facing the United States at the moment. His shortcomings are well documented and largely come out of his own mouth.

He does have one real strength however. He has, inadvertently, acted as a lightening rod for the broad discontent which has been building across America for at least the last two decades, but with roots going much further back. The growing awareness that the age of the American Dream has passed and the sense that history might be moving East has created a level of uncertainty about the future which has not existed previously for many Americans. Whilst the Dream may never have existed as promoted, there was a long period of sustained and significant growth in the US which meant it was normal for parents to expect their offspring to be better off than they were.

The tectonic plates of growing inequality, a concentration of economic power and willingness to use this to exercise political influence/control, ignored by both Republicans and Democrats, began to reveal themselves in tensions and fissures in the body politic. This process exploded into sharp relief in the earth shivering event which for short hand was called the credit crunch in 2007/8. The credibility of the political elite was significantly undermined by its response to this crisis created by the purely profit motivated innovations of the banking and wider financial sector. To address the rapidly building catastrophe Main Street was sacrificed to Wall Street. Millions of hard working Americans lost their homes and their life savings whilst the banks were bailed out.

Prolonged austerity, “difficult decisions”, technological change and globalisation seemed to be leaving huge numbers of Americans behind. Low wage, short term jobs replaced the blue collar jobs that had sustained decent lifestyles for millions, their circumstances becoming increasingly challenging and, indeed, desperate if any members of the family fell ill. A widespread feeling they were the victims of processes they did not understand but a strong feeling of unfairness, being ignored and left behind.

Fertile ground for someone to come along with slogan simple solutions. Particularly, ones which focused the blame on foreigners in general and immigrants in particular. This approach has manifest risks both for the United States (indeed their very unity) and the wider world given the pivotal role the nation plays in global economics and diplomacy.

To blame the current problems of the United States just on Donald Trump, even accepting the wide range of personal failings he suffers from, is unfair. The leadership of the conservative right in the US has to accept a substantial proportion of the blame. They have remained dumb when some of their number have turned their back on bipartisan politics and the conventions which resulted and sustained that approach. The refusal of a Republican Senate to confirm appointments to the Supreme Court of the sitting president was a particularly egregious example of this, which happened before Trump was elected.

When you start down this road you are faced with having to rationalise and make sense of statements and policy proposals which are incomprehensible, inconsistent or even contradictory. A lot of very clever people have to race around trying to minimise the damage being done. Ultimately you end up having to support a convicted felon as your candidate for the White House.

Remaining dumb in the face of a clearly unqualified candidates ramblings, or “weavings”, results in a spiral into a realm of dumber and dumber actions which may have existential implications not just for the United States and not just for countries around the world but indeed for the future of the planet.

The party political system has many functions. One of its key functions in the past has been to train and develop political leaders. And, perhaps more importantly to winnow out those who are simply incapable of doing what is a very difficult task. On both sides of the Atlantic the parties of the right have failed in this critical function. Their desire for power has overwhelmed all other considerations. Leaders and political policies have become judged first and foremost on whether they will secure power not whether they will contribute to the welfare or wellbeing of their citizens.

Such a value free environment is set I fear to end badly. Conservatives who should and probably do know better need to stand up and be counted. Easier to propose than to do. Liz Cheney, a person of impeccable right-wing conservative credentials took a very public and brave stance against Trump and paid the price as her party turned against her and ousted her. Indeed there are many Republicans who have made a stand but the Republican party machine is so much in awe of Trump’s ability to shift a bedrock of voters that they continue to boost his credibility by backing him.

Going back to the theory about how the floating voters in the centre of politics are a reassuring stabiliser against extremist positions. This mechanism breaks down if the bedrocks of political support move and the centre ground is shifted to the right or indeed the left. What The Republicans have done in the US has been to shift the centre to the right. This process has been going on for many years however it became supercharged when Donald Trump came to dominate the political landscape. His character, or lack of it, has raised the stakes significantly. His challenge to the rule of law, constitutional conventions, the very notion of rational argument and, indeed, any view of the world other than his own has changed the very nature of politics.

This same process of the centre right being undermined from the far right is evident in the the United Kingdom but has not had a character as egregious as Trump to supercharge it. However problematic they are bad and badder do not constitute the same level of threat to democracy as the dumb and dumber issue that the States face… yet.

It may seem odd for someone on the left to be concerned about the health of the right. However, democracies have to be based on compromise. There needs to be a broad degree of agreement of what is acceptable and what the aims of government, in the broadest sense, are. When this breaks down, whatever the longevity or sophistication of its institutions and conventions might be, democracy is at risk. When this is combined with an unstable demagogue much worse may happen. If Donald Trump is elected in November the Republican Party will have to take responsibility for what follows. They may regret this for a very long time.

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Nation Building Begins At Home

Earlier this year in an interview with the Washington Post about his recent book, “After the Fall” Ben Rhodes, National Security Advisor under President Obama, outlined what he felt was the first and overarching point of the work – “… we need to get our own democracy in order, […] the democratic example that America is setting and the way that that ripples out around the world is the most consequential thing, and people in foreign policy can lose sight of that.”

His words carry a particular poignancy in the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle. Twenty years commitment, two trillion dollars of treasure and the blood of two and a half thousand US troops, and the net result? A Taliban led government within days of the last US evacuation. It is unsurprising many Americans are asking, “what was it all for?”

There are certainly lessons to be learned about how one supports a nation with the transition to democracy. Probably the strongest being to stamp down hard on corruption particularly amongst the political elite you have installed and sustain but also with the domestic organisations tasked to assist the nation being helped.

It is almost certainly the case the Afghan army collapsed as quickly as it did because their material support was depleted by corrupt diversion of resources, and their morale undermined by knowledge their political and military masters were doing this to them. There is a succinct outline of this in the ever insightful FT podcast “The Rachman Review“.

The war on terror sparked by the murderous attack on the twin towers was always long on rhetoric and short on strategy. Mission creep turned into mission sprint, but then degraded into the marathon crawl of a forever war. When he came into office Biden did not have a good option. It could be said he played a bad hand badly, however, it is very difficult to see how there was ever going to be a good outcome.

It remains to be seen what it does to his poll ratings in the longer term. Whilst currently the population is smarting at the national humiliation there has long been a solid demand to get out of Afghanistan. As the scenes in the airport fade the performance of the economy will, as so often, prove to be the bellwether of political support.

Whether you see the promotion of democracy as the cynical attempt to extend US power around the globe, or a principled attempt to extend the freedoms it promises to the oppressed, its execution is fundamentally, if not fatally undermined, if it is not working back home.

A society which is convulsed with racism; which locks up a greater proportion of its population than any other on earth; where hundreds of thousands live below the poverty line; where the rule of law is bent to create Guantanamo no law zones; where mass shootings are common place; where the Seat of the Legislature can be invaded and temporarily taken over; its difficult to present this as a City on a Hill.

To act as a beacon the US needs to present a model of a way forward. A guide to a better way of organising things for the benefit of all. At the moment the beacon is diminished with implications for democracies around the world and those striving to achieve them. The fear is it is extinguished.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made. Ben Rhodes. Bloomsbury Publishing 2021.

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Is Oil Being Removed from the Wheels of Change?

For the past 40 years the oil industry has been engaged in what the tobacco industry had been engaged in before it. The manufacture of doubt.

Eventually, the scientific evidence overwhelmed the spurious arguments and pseudo science generously sponsored by tobacco companies. They quietly refocussed in parts of the world where less informed consumers could continue to provide them profits through their deaths.

Doubt for the oil industry, however, was, in many ways, an easier sell. Firstly, the link between harm and product was less tangible. People using an enormous amount of oil did not die from using it. Second, the damage it did was to one of the most complex systems in the world, climate, so demonstrating the link was open to far more challenge. Third, the essential benefits of using it were manifest, not least in the internal combustion engine and the freedom it provided.

In addition to this the scale of the industry was and remains daunting. The world uses approximately 100m barrels of oil per day. The current price of oil is around $50 per barrel. This means oil sales every day are worth about $5bn, or $1.8trn per annum. This compares to the the roughly $800bn per annum for the tobacco industry.

All this means there are enormous levels of vested interest in oil production and comparable levels of resource to be applied to defend it. The application of the interest and resource to political influencing has been documented by many.

Jane Meyer notably charts the relationship between the “Dark Money” of oil wealth and direct political lobbying, and the more insidious funding of law makers supportive of the industry with enormous campaign donations via the Political Action Committee (PAC) system in the United States.

In America both Democrats and Republicans were targets of the oil industry but it certainly found a more welcome and eager advocate in the GOP. The logical conclusion of which was a president who was a climate change denier, withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, downgraded the Environmental Protection Agency and opened federal lands to carbon fuel explorations.

However, the growing traction of public concern is starting to impact the oil industry and other fossil fuel companies. It is now clear major changes needed, like the adoption of electric cars, are beginning to become real.

Uncertainty is the greatest fear of all major industries as has been made clear by the Brexit debacle in the UK where most businesses got to the point where they did not care whether we were “in” or “out” as long as it was clearly one thing or the other.

This craving for certainty partly explains the support for Joe Biden’s clear statements about climate change and the inevitable consequences for the motor industry from the industry itself. When they know there is a date for the abandonment of the internal combustion engine they can develop a strategy to achieve this. For all businesses, once the writing is on the wall, the job of the CEO is to read it.

Similarly, savvy investors can hear the change in the music and are starting to evaluate their strategies accordingly. Stranded assets, like oil that cannot be extracted if we are to avoid run away global warming, flash red light risk. What are the oil companies doing about it? How credible are the strategies?

Black Rock, one of the world’s largest asset manager’s with some $8.6trn of assets in management, has made clear it sees climate change as “investment risk”. Its Chairman and CEO Larry Fink states future investment decisions will be guided by how those seeking cash can demonstrate their business models are compatible with net zero emissions by 2050.

Much as the response of Boris Johnson to the pandemic has come to be seen as belated and lacking urgency at a critical time, so also, in the future, the response of the fossil fuel industry may come to be seen in a similar light. The timescales may be different, 12 months and 30 years, however so is the scale of change needed.

According to Bill McKibben’s book “Falter”, it was the oil industry itself which first identified burning fossil fuels as leading to changes in global climate back in 1977. After a brief period of transparency and cooperation, vested interest determined a revised approach of secrecy and “doubt manufacture” which has lasted for the best part of 40 years.

However, as scientific evidence piles up, real world weather starts to illustrate climate challenge and impacted populations begin to campaign the industry can see the “manufacturing of doubt” strategy has run its course. Having flipped once on the reality of climate change and it is not inconceivable, in fact, it is highly likely, the industry will flip again. Indeed there are all sorts of signs the change is happening.

As it happens the industry will no longer wish to support politicians who are swimming against the tide of history and creating uncertainty. They will want to develop new strategies within a clear national policy framework. Instead of impeding change to net zero they may well become powerful advocates for it. Ironically, this may be a rare case where oil lubricates a process more by its absence than its presence.

All of this adds to the current woes of the GOP in the United States. If the above has any relation to reality their wagon is firmly hitched to the wrong team. The “Dark Money” which has been flowing into their coffers may start to dry up as the wells are capped. What is more this may happen much quicker than they anticipate. We can live in hope!