As usual Janan Ganesh has a lively and insightful conversation with himself -its like a fast moving current in a river of ideas, speculations, and just plain political chatter – some call this free imginative variation, that somehow touches reality , if that seems coherent? The Reader is in ‘Ganesh World’!
Headline: The deceptively negotiable Donald Trump
Sub-headline: The tariff row is further indication that he is quick to quarrel but also quick to settle
The markets were fools on Saturday, and shrewd judges of character on Monday. When Donald Trump announced tariffs against America’s neighbours last weekend, investors who had talked since November of a misunderstood, deceptively pragmatic US president were exposed as naive. For 48 hours. Then he more or less vindicated them. The tariffs have been put off in return for Canadian and Mexican assurances about cross-border drug traffic and other Trump bugbears. Investment banks can postpone the sheepish client calls until March.
The world would be silly to relax, of course. Trump has the potential to shatter the trading system in the coming years, even if he does so in fits and starts. But if nothing else, the past few days have been an education in the art of dealing with him.
Editor: Trump is nothing more than a petulent child who loves to shock and dimay, he is a changeling. Ganesh provides a kind of ‘oppreative diagnosis’?
Because Trump is so quick to quarrel, people tend to miss that he is also quick to settle. He almost never drives as hard a bargain as his belligerent manner seems to promise. In 2020, China bought some peace with a vague and hard-to-enforce pledge to cut the two countries’ trade imbalance. (“The biggest deal anybody has ever seen,” he called it, with telling emphasis on external perception.) Likewise, he didn’t abandon Nafta so much as pass off a revised version of it as a personal coup. Being an egoist, not a fanatic, what he cares about is his reputation as a maker of deals. To keep it going, he needs a regular flow of them. And so their content becomes secondary. We can mock, but the lesson here for countries faced with Trump is an encouraging one: give him something that he can call victory. The concession needn’t be huge, and he will in fact co-operate in talking up its significance.
Editor: A portion of Ganesh’s commentary rings true: I’ve placed those sentences in italics. Some time’s, even Ganesh, manages in his commetaries, to brush by someting of value: An Egoist recogconises his brethren?
Editor: A selection of Ganesh aperues: At this he excelles, wedded to evocative Name Dropping!
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The concession needn’t be huge, and he will in fact co-operate in talking up its significance.
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Trump is open to what Henry Kissinger called “linkage”.
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…the smallness of their concessions (Justin Trudeau is appointing a fentanyl “czar”) or the fact that economics and drug policy are mixed up like this in the first place.
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In that sense, he might be easier to defang than Joe Biden, who didn’t think Nato was a club of free-riders or the EU a conspiracy against Silicon Valley.
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Instead, I suspect, he would just rather have the slow-burn pleasure of someone submitting to him over years than the one-time high of destroying them. There is something of Caesar in his belief that the ultimate emasculation of an enemy is to spare them.
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(For where is the sense of conquest with them?) If so, David Lammy and Peter Mandelson, far from being awkward choices as Britain’s foreign secretary and ambassador to Washington, make perverse sense.
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If being a Trump stalwart from the beginning were a guarantee of anything, Nigel Farage’s place in the Maga court wouldn’t be so uncertain.
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The outlandish ugliness of his statements make this hard to see. When a US president wants to “take over” Gaza and develop it into a Levantine Cote d’Azur, throwing him a bone — on trade, on anything — seems pointless.
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For anyone who recognises that trade and internationalism have raised the lot of humankind, there isn’t good news to be had about the next four years, only least-bad ways of operating in the storm.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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