Donald Trump’s choice of running mate has won a ringing endorsement – not only from the Republican Convention but also from Putin’s propagandists.
“Reasonable people could come to power in the States,” commented Alexander Dugin, the ideologue of Russian Nazism. Translated from the Russian Nazi, ‘reasonable’ means ‘willing to deliver the Ukraine to Putin’.
But fair enough, J.D. Vance is indeed an intelligent and capable man. And he is misguided the way only an intelligent and capable man can be.
Vance’s intelligence was honed by his career as venture capitalist, just as Trump’s was by his lifetime in property development. It’s understandable that both men have to see the world at least partly through the prism of their experience.
Alas, that prism tends to distort the real picture. That’s why Trump seems to think that any foreign threat can be nullified by ‘making a deal’, a phrase I think should be banned from political discourse.
Property developers think deals; political leaders think alliances, blocs, partnerships, treaties, power relationships. Property developers make deals on the basis of short-term profit. Once the project has been completed and all the cheques have cleared, the deal is done – on to the next one. Political leaders, by contrast, must think on a loftier timeline: decades, possibly even centuries.
Property developers and their clients engage in a bit of give and take to strike a mutually beneficial deal defined in monetary terms. The only moral requirement is to stay a hair’s breadth inside the law. Political leadership relates to that activity the way philosophy and morality relate to double-entry accounting.
Everything that can be said about property development also goes for venture capitalism. This isn’t to say that men trained in such professions can’t rise to statesmanship and strategic thought. They can, but such an ascent requires a qualitative upward shift, making which is never easy, and it becomes harder with age.
Vance is young enough to make it, but the starting point should be a realisation that so far his thinking on foreign policy has been at best shallow. He doesn’t seem to understand the tectonic shifts in world order currently under way.
Vance doesn’t see Putin’s Russia as “an existential threat to Europe”. Speaking about the biggest European war since 1945, he said: “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” And in any case, Trump will “bring this thing to a rapid close so America can focus on the real issue, which is China. That’s the biggest threat to our country and we are completely distracted from it.”
Trump doubtless shares this point of view, yet even he doesn’t pronounce on “this thing” so forthrightly. Moreover, when Trump suggested he’d stop the war in 24 hours, he didn’t go into much detail. Cutting aid to the Ukraine is what he probably had in mind, but Vance has already acted in that spirit in the Senate, by manfully trying to block the aid package for the Ukraine.
He couched that effort in pragmatic-sounding but in fact spurious terms: “We lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war. By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence.”
‘Defensive strategy’ and ‘negotiations’ are in this context synonymous with surrender. As to America’s inability to make enough weapons, that claim is simply false. The US was able to act as ‘the arsenal of democracy’ (also of Stalin’s totalitarianism, it has to be said) under the much greater demands of a world war. That enabled her to emerge as a great power and undisputed leader of the free world.
In this case, America wouldn’t even have to manufacture all the arsenal that could win the war for the Ukraine. Much of it already sits in warehouses ready to be decommissioned and replaced with the next generation of weapons. Yet what has become obsolete for the US army could be life’s blood for the Ukraine.
For example, the USAF is now flying 5th generation fighter planes, which will be replaced with 6th generation by 2030. However, a few hundred 4th generation F-16s could throw a security blanket over Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Such planes wouldn’t have to be manufactured: they are already parked in hangars, and there’s some life left in them yet.
In common with his boss, Vance is suspicious of America’s Atlanticism. He sees NATO as “a tax on America”, which no doubt plays well in the swing states. Yet this is sheer demagoguery because the ‘tax’ comes with a hefty refund.
This isn’t to argue that Europe shouldn’t spend more on defence – its approach to such matters has been criminally irresponsible for decades. If Trump only threatens to withdraw from NATO to make Europe loosen its purse strings, I hope this works. Yet it’s hard to overestimate the economic benefits America derives from being the dominant Western power.
Without going into too much detail, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement established the dollar as the world’s reference currency, which was consistent with America’s newly acquired global status. Should America relinquish that status, just think what would happen if her staggering $35 trillion debt were denominated in some other currency, such as the yuan. The ensuing catastrophe is hard to imagine.
Also in common with Trump, Vance feels that America’s vital interests lie in the Pacific, not the Atlantic. Yet he is wrong to discount the “existential threat” of Russia while emphasising that presented by China. Both threats exist, and in fact they are one and the same.
The two evil powers work in concert to destroy the post-1945 world order, as underwritten and enforced by NATO. China is the senior partner in that relationship, the feudal to Russia’s vassal. Xi is using Putin the way the Golden Horde used Russian princes who did much of its fighting, mostly against other Russian princes.
China herself stays on the side lines, openly encouraging and secretly supplying Russia’s war effort, while buying up Russian hydrocarbons at dumping prices. Meanwhile, China’s own designs on Taiwan have never gone beyond hysterical threats, and it’s far from clear that Xi is planning an invasion.
His vassal Putin, on the other hand, is already attacking Western interests on the battlefield. Hence Vance’s belief that America needs to keep her weapons for a potential war with China is misguided. And if he doesn’t realise that the Ukraine is defending our vital interests, he hasn’t delved into this issue as deeply as it requires.
In any case, his main problem with China has to do with matters economic rather than martial. According to him, too much production is outsourced to China, which makes American workers suffer. His – and Trump’s – solution is to impose stiff tariffs on Chinese imports, stiffer than the 10 per cent Trump put into effect during his first term. In fact, Trump is threatening to slap protectionist tariffs on all imports, not just Chinese ones.
This is bad economics, which has been known since at least the 18th century. Thus Adam Smith: “To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry… must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation. If the produce of domestic can be brought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful.”
Protectionism “must generally be hurtful” because it raises the price of goods produced by uncompetitive domestic industries, thereby diverting funds from the competitive ones – and hurting consumers in the process. Limiting or even eliminating trade with hostile powers is a different proposition, but that’s achieved with sanctions and boycotts, not tariffs. All such measures spring from political necessity, not economics.
I recall seeing bumper stickers in America, saying: “Buy a foreign car, put 10 Americans out of work”. One would expect the once and future leaders of the free world to think of the economy on a higher level than the owner of a pickup truck with deer antlers attached to its roof.
At my advanced age, I know better than to take politicians at their word. It’s possible that Trump and Vance won’t act on their statements, coming up instead with a sage policy designed to contain and roll back evil powers. But something tells me they are likely to practise what they preach, which would be bad news for all of us.
We have no statesmen, we have egotists looking to garner votes. Our foreign policy should not be, cannot be, based on casual remarks made by one man. It has to be based on an understanding of history and current and future global affairs. Hence the creation of the Foreign Office (originally staffed by the aristocracy, as mentioned in these pages yesterday) and the State Department (staffed now by big-government, one-world ideologues). The Republican Party should have a well-defined foreign policy and a stance on the Russian aggression. All candidates should have open access to that policy and be able to cite the reasons behind it.
The day before Trump announced his running mate I gave it about three seconds of thought and came up with Dr. Carol Swain. She checks the diversity boxes, but more important, checks the intelligence box (all too often left blank by today’s candidates) – which is what I suppose disqualified her.
There seems to be an ill-disguised boorishness or anger in the way right-wing American media figures, and politicians, express their opposition to aide the Ukraine, which faintly suggests a popular maxim, not wholly applicable perhaps to them and possibly a variant of La Rochefoucault’s, that we hate those towards whom we must be unjust.
As well as providing Ukraine with weapons we could have tried from day one producing most gas and oil to bankrupt Putin.
Sadly his useful idiots stopped that.