Planning for an American collapse

Trump, in short, is ripping up American soft power, handing China a series of sudden and perfect vacuums to fill with its own influence. As to the threat of 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, loudly announced during the campaign, it has not happened.

When they calculate national power, Chinese officials work to a mathematical formula. A country’s “composite national strength” is said to be the combined total of its GDP, military might and scientific prowess, divided by a factor for internal dissent, plus reserves of soft power, level of democratisation and quality of strategic leadership.

On almost every one of these metrics Trump is reducing America’s score. Let’s start with the “quality of strategic leadership”: appointing a bunch of amateurs to key positions on day one, sacking seasoned regulators and attempting to nominate the Assad fangirl Tulsi Gabbard as director of National Intelligence does not look like quality on any measure.

Appointing an anti-science loon to run the health department does not instil great confidence that America’s scientific prowess will be marshalled coherently for the nation’s good.

Sure, if Trump’s tariffs work – and that’s a big if – they will incentivise onshore production over offshoring, and boost GDP; so will unrestricted fossil fuel extraction. But the long-term consequences will be enormous.

As for Europe, for the first time since 1945 America’s major security partners on this side of the Atlantic are having to consider seriously what they would do if Trump slapped punitive tariffs on Denmark over the Greenland issue.

It is of no comfort that 90% of Trump’s pronouncements could be showmanship. In the world of national security planning, even a 10% risk of something crazy happening makes it an urgent, important planning issue. No general, civil servant or responsible politician can wave away the question “what do we do if he invades Greenland?” as conjecture. Their standard operating procedures require them to take his mind-garbage seriously.

As a result, simply by words alone, Trump is inflicting severe damage on the cohesion and resilience of the Western security architecture. When words turn into actions, and things inevitably go awry, there is unlimited potential for further damage.

A Chinese saying, often quoted by scholars charting their country’s rise, says: “Close neighbours are dearer than distant relatives”. Chinese strategists note that, in the ancient period, the most powerful states were in Eurasia; while during modernity a succession of world powers originated in the Euro-Atlantic area. Despite the competition between European states over the past 500 years, Chinese scholars note that the result was Europe’s collective rise. The lesson is: if your closest geographical neighbours are not outright hostile, seek win-win relationships with them.

Trump is doing the opposite. In an almost comic manner, he has decided to slander and destabilise the political elites of Canada and Mexico simultaneously, while attacking their economies with tariffs. While China constructs its Belt and Road Initiative, using diplomacy and soft loans to build relationships of dependency among its trade partners, America is metaphorically taking a dump in its own backyard.

For certain, China has – using its own algebra – big problems of its own. It has the demographics of an ageing nation, but the economy of an emerging market. Its military might is big on paper but untested in conflict. And its elite live in constant fear that a social explosion could tear them off their pedestals just as quickly as it did Bashar al Assad.

But Trump’s wilful destruction of amity between key Western nations lessens the pressure on the Chinese Communist Party on numerous fronts.

I don’t blame the Foreign Office for reacting to all this with sang froid – aka embarrassed paralysis.

Decades of under-investment in defence, an incoherent policy towards China and the self-inflicted wound of Brexit leave us with very little space for independent action. We are marooned between an unpredictable and eroded democracy in the USA, and a Europe that has yet to cohere as a global power. We have no option but to be nice to Trump – and the prize is to keep his brain focused on support for Ukraine, and to prevent an American withdrawal from key military and diplomatic joint ventures.

But once the actions follow the words, the UK will be forced to react. We’re a nuclear power; we have a stated priority of a security treaty with the EU; we have, in the Commonwealth, a powerful global soft power alliance. We should be confident enough to draw red lines publicly – because men like Trump only respect clear bargaining positions.

For me, now, everything from the Heathrow runway controversy, to defence spending, to AI regulation, development aid and trade policy has to be framed around the possibility that Trump’s America implodes, leaving Europe and China to plug the gaps in the global system. In its scenario planning, the UK government needs to leave nothing off the table.