What Trump Gets Right That Even Liberals Can Agree

Aristotle believed that man is a political animal. He was wrong. Foremost and utmost, man is a partisan political animal. The difference is gargantuan. As such, logic and reason are seldom enough to change one’s mind. And nowhere it is more true than in contemporary American politics.

Across the country critics of Trump discard any possibility that he may get something right, be it the economy or foreign policy. Quite the contrary, he is wrong by default, simply by the virtue of being Trump. The same is true whenever a rival political incumbent is in power.

Such far-fetched reductionist narratives appear exceedingly common in the era of political polarization. Nothing, however, can be further from the truth.

Divisive, transactional, and not without a sin, Trump is neither naïve nor a rookie in high politics. After all, it is his second stint in the White House following a triumphant win.

His persona, modus operandi, and visceral instincts do take the world by surprise occasionally. But that does not mean there is no raison d’être behind his actions. In fact, I would pinpoint at least three policy decisions that make complete sense to me as a nonpartisan outsider. Let’s call it a commonsense guide to Donald Trump.

Take Russia, for example. In democratic West there is an almost unanimous consensus on disengagement with Moscow as a collective punishment for assaulting Ukraine. Total isolation of Putin et al is the paragon of behavior among the allies.  Well, that strategy of maximum pressure has produced next to nothing in the last three and a half years.

Russian soldiers doggedly chip away more and more of the Ukrainian territory.  Germany’s economy, which is the largest in Europe and third after the US and China, went through two consecutive recessions. Meanwhile, global trade with the sanction-laden Kremlin continues, despite hiccups.

Any hopes of imminent Russian defeat – military or economic – are crushed. Being ten times smaller than EU in GDP ($2,2 trillion against $20 trillion), the country outproduces the block in armaments. Not to mention, that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is the largest in the world.

Politics is the art of possible and Zelensky’s resolve to liberate every inch of Ukrainian soil under occupation is just a dream.

In this circumstance, Trump is absolutely right to be speaking with Putin. The only downside, supported by history, is that negotiations may disadvantage Ukraine and benefit Moscow.

Hmm, I am not so sure. The future is notoriously hard to predict. South Korea, for example, unspeakably prospered after partition of the peninsula in 1953. So, Russia’s victory may turn Pyrrhic.

Moving on.

As a US Edmund S. Muskie and UK Chevening Scholar, even I acquiesce that some elements of American and, broadly speaking, Western soft power are woefully outdated. State-sponsored news agencies airing abroad particularly come to mind.  Conceived during the height of the Cold War, Voice of America and brethren fail the litmus test in information-abundant age.

First, most of the world is already nominally democratic, to varying degrees.  Second, the media landscape has been digitally disrupted by new entrants.

Let’s crunch some numbers.

On average, 11 million people listen to each episode of Joe Rogan. Meanwhile, US-funded Radio Free Europe has a maximum weekly audience of 50 million. That means anywhere between 3.6 and 11 million people consume one hour of content of the former (11 million / 1-3 hours per episode) versus 298K of the latter (50 million / 168 hours per week). And that’s just one podcaster in the attention economy.

Furthermore, fears that the void left after the US exit will be filled by Russian and Chinese propaganda are overblown. The world is full of varied media organizations and Facebook nowadays counts as a legitimate news source for over half of America. So, informational vacuum hardly exists. Most importantly, now more than ever support of democracy abroad begins and ends at home. Hence, taxpayers’ money is better spent elsewhere.

Lastly, nothing unites Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump more than their deep-seated mistrust of globalization.

Both fault international trade with corroding America’s industry. Both draw a line from China’s WTO ascension to the withering of US factories. Both lambast offshoring of blue-collar American jobs.

There’s a kernel of truth to their grievance.

Conceptually, globalization was envisaged as a planetary assembly line, whereby one country would extract natural resources, another design a product, and a third manufacture. Such division of labor was initially complementary, delivering massive improvements in quality, efficiency, scale, and price.

On top of that, the American worker was spared the most onerous chores as it is better to wear Nikes than make them.

Yet, the push to run the world like a Ford factory – with every nation being a cog in a wheel – is problematic.

Gains from globalization are skewed. Just a handful of economic activities up the edges of global value chains generate the bulk of returns. The rest, including labor-intensive manufacturing, induce immiserizing growth. This asymmetric distribution of wins is dubbed the “smiling curve”.

Predictably, no country wants to languish forever on the lowest rungs of wealth creation. Moving up the “food chain” and staying atop is paramount. This is where competition supersedes complementarity, which evangelists of globalization miss.