Is Donald Trump Really A Deal-Maker?
As Donald Trump surveys the current state of his relationships with China, Iran and North Korea, with all of whom he has recently engaged in a somewhat confrontational way, even someone as resistant to self-doubt as the US President might conclude that his supposed expertise in doing deals might leave something to be desired.
His imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports seems to have back-fired as American business (and the world economy) begin to count the cost; his tearing up of the deal with Iran to the effect that sanctions would be lifted in return for their renunciation of any ambitions to develop nuclear weapons has likewise led to a sharp increase in tension in the Middle East; and his much-touted agreement with North Korea has been met by a resumption of the testing of missiles with nuclear capability by Kim Jong Un.
Someone with a little more self-knowledge than Donald Trump might be given pause for at least a moment by these responses to his efforts at what might laughingly be called diplomacy. It is clear that the author of The Art of the Deal has much to learn about international diplomacy – that the tactics of threat and bluster and waiting to see who blinks first may or may not work in private business but have a poor record in the sphere of international relations.
Even in private business, there must be major question marks over such high-risk tactics, if the story told by his tax returns over more than a decade is to be believed. Those tax returns show that, rather than the successful businessman he claims to be, he actually lost more than a billion dollars over the period (with the convenient result that he paid no tax).
It is not just the obvious damage that has been inflicted on the American economy and on wider American interests that must be entered into the balance sheet in evaluating Trump’s initiatives in international relations. What must also be taken into account are the lost opportunities, flowing from Trump’s refusal to accept a leadership (or any) role on issues like climate change and even on specific issues like requiring the social media companies to take a more responsible approach to the publication of hate speech. And that is to say nothing of his bewildering apparent subservience to Putin’s Russia and his readiness to alienate his Nato allies.
It is one thing to take chances with one’s own money – as the record shows that Trump is more than prepared to do. It is quite another knowingly to take risks with the nation’s interests. His willingness to do so is persuasive evidence that it is not the nation’s interests that are his prime concern.
Rather, it is his chances of re-election that are top of his agenda. He seems to calculate that if he can posture as an American hero – Captain America, no less – the voters of “his base” will applaud and flock to his banner. He must also calculate that, provided he can dominate the message they receive, “his base” will not bother to worry about the true cost to American interests of his diplomatic failures.
As for world peace and stability, these are even further down the list of priorities – if they feature at all. Trump’s focus is entirely on issues much closer to home.
Bryan Gould
14 May 2019
Sharing With Our Feathered Friends
My wife grew up in suburban London – not an environment that was conducive, one might think, to developing an interest in wild life. But her father was a bird lover and he helped her, too, to develop a love for the birds that inhabited their garden.
When we moved (in my case, back) to New Zealand, it took her a little time to adjust to the absence of the robins and blue tits and other birds that were familiar inhabitants of an English garden. But, over time, she developed an equal interest in New Zealand bird life – and she taught me, too, to appreciate those wonderful creatures.
I was led into this train of thought as, sitting on our deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean one morning, we watched the welcome swallows wheeling and dipping and soaring as they criss-crossed the sky in front of us – and I began to think about the important part that our birds play in our enjoyment of life in the natural world.
We are truly fortunate in the variety of native birds which share our garden with us. We have come to know the majestic kereru as they strip the kowhai trees of their young leaves, and the ever-active tuis as they splash in our bird bath. And a walk around our property would not be complete without the accompaniment of the fantails, joining us – not for the pleasure of our company – but in the hope that we will disturb some of the insects on which they feed. And what a pleasure it is to catch a flash of iridescent blue as a kingfisher takes off from our ngaio tree.
That is not to say that we are bereft of English imports. We enjoy the songs of the thrushes and blackbirds and chaffinches, and we are never far from a cheeky sparrow – though we are not impressed by one of the unlovelier of the sparrow’s habits – the way in which, having chased down a cicada and taken it to ground, their first move is to rip off its wings so that they can eat it at leisure.
There are other foreigners – like the quails and pheasants and peacocks – that offer us the assurance that, in an emergency, we would not go hungry. Yet other imports, like magpies and mynahs, are less welcome; they seem to see it as their duty to challenge the tuis for pre-eminence – but, thankfully, the tuis seem able to hold their own – and then there are the harrier hawks, constantly wheeling high above us in the hope of detecting an unprotected quail chick.
We love the smaller birds too – the wax-eyes who see it as a challenge to beat us to the ripening figs on our fig tree, and the little grey warblers whose cheerful trilling lifts our hearts, and the yellowhammers who search our lawn for insects, but who are often outnumbered by twenty or thirty goldfinches engaged in a similar pursuit.
We have sometimes been blessed with the visits of less common birds. We enjoyed, for a time, nightly visits from a morepork (ruru) that would park itself, as dusk gathered, in the lower branches of our ngaio and venture out on little sorties in search of unwary insects.
And we have even had a solitary visit from a falcon, resting no doubt from its supersonic exertions. Sadly, we were also favoured with a visit from a shining cuckoo which managed to knock itself out by flying into one of our windows, but which then was able to come to, and fly off, having allowed us to inspect the intricate patterns of its plumage and its elegant long tail.
And all the time, the ancient pohutukawa tree behind us is alive with twittering and bird movement; it is like a village, complete in itself. It reminds us that there is another world beyond our own – that we are privileged to share our habitat with other creatures who have an equal claim to its riches.
And, as we celebrated this month International DawnChorus Day, we reflected that this is a pleasure that is not delivered to us via a screen but is a slice of real life. Little wonder that British scientists have found that listening to birdsong brings us great psychological benefits.
Bryan Gould
4 May 2019
A New Crime of Ecocide
Two developments over the past week or so demonstrate how serious is the existential crisis we now face, in terms of the damage we are doing to our planet, and how far we are from facing up to our responsibilities.
First, was the UN report on the millions of plant and animal species that have been, or are about to be, lost for good as a consequence of human activity over the greater part of the earth’s surface.
And secondly, and disappointingly, was the government’s publication of its environmental targets, which fell far short of anything, especially with reference to methane emissions, that could legitimately be described as effectively grappling with the issues that inevitably arise in the wake of the human-led degradation of our planet.
None of this should come as any surprise. Wherever one looks, there is unmistakeable evidence of a “business as usual” response to the alarm bells that are now ringing insistently. There seems to be a deliberate attempt to downplay the urgency of the situation, exacerbated in our case by a typically Kiwi “she’ll be right” attitude.
Yet, wherever one looks, the evidence of growing crisis cannot be ignored. In terms of climate change, there seems little understanding of how close we are to a “tipping point” – and that’s assuming that it hasn’t already been reached – a “tipping point” that arises as the great polar ice caps melt away. The danger is not just the consequent rise in sea level that threatens the survival of coastal and island communities around the world; it is, rather, that the loss of the ice caps will generate a huge change in the various balancing factors – in terms of ocean currents and temperatures – that have maintained the climatic stability we have enjoyed until recently.
And then there are the continuing projects to destroy vast areas of natural habitat, and to replace it with commercial crops. Again, the threat, from such as the palm oil industry, is not just to the survival of creatures (like orang-utangs) whose homes are being destroyed, but also to the natural balance that is needed to maintain the conditions for human survival.
Depressingly, one must then add to this catalogue of impending disaster, the cavalier attitude that we humans continue to demonstrate on issues that reduce the chances of survival of species that are already threatened. By continuing to use fishing methods that predictably mean the persistent depredation of marine mammals, such as various species of dolphins, the trawler industry demonstrates how little we care about such “trivial” issues and how much priority we give to our own (supposedly more important?) short-term search for profit.
The common characteristic of these attitudes is that everything pales into insignificance when measured against the commercial exploitation of the world’s natural resources and creatures. If, as I suspect is the case, the general response to this phenomenon – even from the perpetrators – is a shrug of the shoulders and the question “what else do you expect”, then it shows how much we depend on government to intervene in what is otherwise the over-riding pursuit of profit by private commercial interests.
If, however, governments demonstrate (as our own government seems to have done) their unwillingness to act decisively and their impotence in facing down, in the interests of the planet’s survival, the business lobby, where else are we to go?
If big international corporations have enough muscle to whip governments into line (as the fossil fuel industry has seemingly done with Trump’s administration in the US), what other remedy or discipline is available to ordinary citizens so as to ensure that proper responsibility for the earth’s survival is recognised?
A clear answer to that question is being offered by a campaigning British lawyer. Polly Higgins has launched a campaign to create a new international crime; following the precedent of the emergence of genocide as a crime that could be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court, she proposes a new crime of “ecocide” – that is, the crime of acting in such a way as to destroy the world’s ecology and natural balance.
Her proposal would make the “rapers and pillagers” criminally liable for the harm they do to the rest of us and would create a legal duty of care to protect the environment.
Her argument is that governments have demonstrated their impotence in the face of the large-scale rape and pillage of our natural environment; so why not, she asks, pray in aid the provisions of international law. Why shouldn’t ordinary citizens, alarmed for example by the large-scale destruction of areas of rain forest by commercial interests, be able to launch a prosecution against the perpetrators that would mean that they could be found guilty of a crime against humanity – just as they would do if they were responsible for a murderous attack on a particular group of people?
Her campaign is gathering momentum, although she herself has suffered a setback, having been diagnosed with cancer. She is confident, however, that her campaign will survive her, and will eventually succeed. She has set up a group called the Earth Protectors to carry on her work. We must hope that she is right. As a former teacher of international law, I can only applaud. Our children need some protection against the destruction of their future.
Bryan Gould
10 May 2019
Can Joe Biden Pull It Off?
The announcement by former Vice-President Joe Biden of his campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election will – for those with long memories – bring back recollections of a famous instance of plagiarism which had repercussions on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1987, the British Labour Party was led by my old friend and colleague, Neil Kinnock. The voters’ reaction to Kinnock was at best mixed, but no one could doubt, as befitted his Welsh origins, his oratorical gifts; at his best, he was the finest and most effective platform speaker in the country.
He made a particularly moving speech at the Welsh Labour Party’s Annual Conference in that year. Why, he asked, am I the first Kinnock in a thousand years to go to university? And why, pointing to his wife, Glenys, is Glenys the first woman in her family to go to university? Is it because, he asked rhetorically, all the earlier members of our families were thick?
He went on to make the argument that social discrimination and economic inequality were the factors that had held their families back and to advance the case for making sure that those factors were counteracted by political action.
The speech was widely commended and evidently did not pass unnoticed on the other side of the Atlantic. Joe Biden, then the promising young Senator from Delaware, announced later in that same year, that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the forthcoming presidential election. He made an effective speech in which he asked the same rhetorical questions as Kinnock had used – even to the extent of pointing to his wife, as Kinnock had done, and asking the same question about her.
When sharp-eyed and sharp-eared commentators detected the plagiarism, Biden’s campaign was holed below the water line. His career eventually recovered and he duly became a well-regarded Vice-President to Barrack Obama – and the episode stimulated a friendship between Biden and Kinnock which led to Kinnock being invited to Biden’s inauguration, when Biden welcomed him jokingly as “my speech-writer”.
Joe Biden is today recognised as one of the most popular, experienced and able Democrats, and reports have it that his candidature would be greatly feared by Donald Trump. That is not to say that his campaign has got off to a winning start; it has instead been dogged by allegations from a number of women of inappropriate touching, though nothing in the same league as Trump’s self-confessed (and notoriously boastful) groping.
For those who look to 2020 as offering a new start for a USA that has lost its way, the Biden candidature nevertheless looks promising. He has made a strong start in identifying the 2020 campaign as a battle for “the soul of America”.
We must hope that, in modern America politics, the revelation or recollection that a candidate is possessed of the odd human foible will not be a fatal handicap. The calamity into which a Trump presidency has plunged the country is so all-embracing that almost any escape route must be given constructive consideration.
If, as Trump’s own assessment seems to suggest, Biden has the beating of Trump in 2020, then we must hope that Biden can again overcome setbacks and can win the battle for a more generous and inclusive America, an America that again can play a full and constructive part in resolving issues, like climate change, that matter to the world as a whole, and one that is led by someone who deserves the respect of those who are asked for their votes.
We have surely had our fill of someone who lies and blusters as a matter of course, who entirely lacks a moral compass and any sense of social justice, and who deliberately exacerbates the fault lines of ethnicity and religion that threaten to disfigure and disable the world’s greatest and most closely scrutinised democracy.
Someone with Biden’s record – not perfect and humanly fallible – may be just the kind of candidate who can remind the American people that politics is best conducted by those who are real people and not just constructs of reality television shows. I hope he has some great speeches left in him and does not need help from unwitting “speech-writers” – however good they may be.
Bryan Gould
28 April 2019
Forty Years Since the Advent of Thatcherism
On Friday next, the 3rd of May, it will be 40 years since Margaret Thatcher won the British general election of 1979 and became the UK’s first woman Prime Minister.
For her devoted followers, it will be an opportunity to celebrate, marking – as they see it – the dawning of a new era. For most of the rest of us, however, it will be seen in retrospect as the date that ushered in what is today called “neo-liberalism” – the belief that government should have only a limited role, that individuals should be free – and encouraged – to pursue exclusively their own interests, irrespective of the damage that might be caused to others and to our environment, that there is no place for Keynesian demand management, that trade unions are incompatible with a free market, and – famously, as Mrs Thatcher had it – that “there is no such thing as society.”
Whatever the merits or otherwise of these tenets, we should be careful not to elevate “Maggie” Thatcher to the status of world-changing pioneer and innovator. The truth is that her role in bringing about the neo-liberal revolution was that of time-server and hand-maiden rather than heroine and prime-mover. The doctrines she made her own were on the whole the product of other people’s thinking.
Her senior colleagues in her own party – Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley, for example – were more important thinkers than she was and had done much to prepare the ground before 1979. And Friedrich Hayek was probably the most important single contributor to the acceptance of the doctrine that – as Ronald Reagan was proclaiming in the USA at the same time – “government is not the solution to the problem – government is the problem.”
Where Mrs Thatcher came into her own is that her very limitations as a thinker made it easy for her to drive through the programme that others had devised for her. She was not assailed by the doubts that might have given pause to a more thoughtful person. Her strength was her strength – the simple force of her personality that allowed her to dominate a male Cabinet – best exemplified by a Spitting Image skit of the time when Thatcher and her Cabinet were dining in a restaurant and the waiter asked Thatcher what she wanted. “I’ll have the steak”, she said. “And the vegetables?” the waiter enquired. “They’ll have the steak as well,” Thatcher replied.
Whether the ideas were hers or not, however, her supporters will maintain that their implementation made a huge difference – and a difference for the better. Even today, her supporters will argue that her tenure as Prime Minister heralded a national revival and reversed what would otherwise have been a national decline.
Sadly, these romantic notions have no foundation. Her espousal of monetarism, her removal of exchange controls (in partnership with Reagan), her disregard of manufacturing industry, and (despite her antipathy to the idea) her inability to resist and reverse British membership of what became the EU, all intensified and hastened the decline of British manufacturing and left the country ill-equipped to face an uncertain future.
On the wider canvas of the world as a whole, her contribution was equally negative. Her collaboration with Ronald Reagan (hardly an intellectual giant) helped to convince onlookers that neo-liberalism was the way of the future and that it could not, and should not, be resisted. Their joint decision to remove exchange controls was a major step – indeed, the major step – towards a global economy – one in which global corporations no longer needed to pay any heed to elected governments, but could insist on getting what they wanted by simply threatening to move their investments elsewhere, to regimes that offered lower costs and rules and regulations that were less effective to protect local workers.
In New Zealand, Rogernomics and the “mother of all Budgets” were the direct progeny of those Thatcherite certainties – the distant echo of those certainties still influences our politics today and serves to inhibit the ambitions of reforming governments.
Even as a standard-bearer for feminism, she was a disappointment, She apparently espoused what R.H.Tawney called “the tadpole” philosophy; when she finally made it to the lily pad as a frog, after all the other tadpoles had fallen victim to predation, she croaked “There’s nothing wrong with this system – I made it!”
Yes, we should mark and understand the significance of the forty year anniversary – but whether it is something to be celebrated is much more open to question.
Bryan Gould
28 April 2019
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