US election: What does a Donald Trump presidency mean for the world?

• Paul McGeough

   

Washington: A statement, a video and a phone call to congratulate the next US president – never let it be said Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu wasn't paying attention as Russia's Vladimir Putin pressed Donald Trump's ego buttons in the course of the US presidential election campaign.

The world's got it now – Trump has a need to be "liked". This, he believes, is key to doing deals. And given his realtor's view that all deals are transactional, the best we can glean is that guiding America's next president will be the "Emetchizit" doctrine of foreign affairs – as in, the Australian strine pronunciation of "how much is it" going to cost the US?

The art of the deal would be about the bottom line, not the alliances that made it happen.

Trump is not ideologically hidebound – maybe that's good; maybe it's bad. On issues like global trade, security, migration and what Americans call "entitlement programs", Trump campaigned as much against his own party and its policies as those of the vanquished Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

• Republicans might control the House of Representatives and the senate, but to the point that Trump is their president-elect, they are likely to find that arguments based on GOP orthodoxy will be relatively meaningless in his White House.

For a man with such a loose grasp of policy detail, it's surprising to find that Trump has been in the business of global policy for some time. About 28 years ago, as his purported hero Ronald Reagan was packing to leave the Oval Office after eight years, Trump felt a need to take out full-page newspaper ads to have a slash at the outgoing president.

"For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the US," the ads read. Trump was demanding that the US pull out of the Middle East, which he bravely deemed to be "of only marginal significance to the US for its oil supplies." He asked: "Why are these nations not paying the US for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests."

Almost three decades on, it's as if Trump is in a minority of one. Not since the start of the Cold War has there been such a chasm between what professional policy experts on both sides of the aisle urge and recommend, and what a president thinks needs to be done.

Neither has there been a president who is so willfully ignorant on the issues. Through a hellish 16 months of campaigning, Trump got away with revealing very little of what he really thinks about foreign policy. We know he likes Putin; thinks the Iran nuclear deal is "terrible", doesn't like ISIS; is not sure about NATO; thinks the Chinese are thieves; wants to wall off all of Mexico; and he wants to make America great again.

It was as though he wouldn't, or couldn't, elaborate on his slogans and his policy bullet points. But because of the way the world turns and time passes, already we can discern the contours of crises that surely will test him and the mettle of the men and women around him.

In addressing the "what happens next" question about President-elect Trump, it might be best to keep this simple. Think of it as a 4x4 report – four sets of four facts on the policy challenges for the incoming president and commander-in-chief.

Four wars to keep him busy

1. The campaign against IS in Iraq
2. The campaign against IS in Syria
3. The war against the Taliban in Afghanistan – now in its 15th year
4. The air campaign against IS in Libya

Four imminent crises to test him

1. A trade war with ? After all Trump said on the hustings, he can't just do nothing about China, which he variously accused of "killing us", "stealing" or "raping our country". His beef is that China manipulates its currency to hurt US exporters and that it steals American technology. An option is to take a case against Beijing to the World Trade Organisation, but that's one of those global institutions that irritate Trump. His preferred course of action is to whack China with tariffs of as much as 45 per cent, for which China would be sure to retaliate, engulfing the world in an horrendous trade war. An army of experts is saying: "Donald, don't do it." The respected Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that a trade war with China, which would increase the cost of Chinese products in the US and make it more difficult for US exports, would cause another recession, in which as many as 4 million American jobs would be eliminated.

2. Let Putin have his way in Europe? Another issue on which Trump has talked himself into a corner. Trump is so desperate to be "liked" by the Russian leader that Putin is sure to put him to the test at the first opportunity – like in the coming months, when US and European economic sanctions on Moscow, for its messing in Ukraine, have to be renewed or abandoned. Alternately, Putin might test Trump's indifference to NATO, and Washington's obligation under the treaty to protect other members, by sending troops into NATO member and former Soviet republic, Estonia – as he did in Ukraine. Another option for Putin would be to seek a deal in which Washington would get off his case in Europe, in return for Russia taking full responsibility for the war on ISIS in Syria – the ISIS element of which Trump embraced while campaigning. Trump will reveal some of his thinking by proceeding with, or blocking an Obama plan for 4500 troops and hundreds of military machines to be deployed to Eastern Europe by February 2017.

3. "Dismantle" the Iran nuclear deal? Again, an issue on which Trump's over-the-top rhetoric obliges Trump to do something. It's not a formal treaty, so he could walk away from it. But his co-signatories – Russia, Germany, France, Britain and the European Union – probably would not walk with him. Trump might re-impose US economic sanctions on Tehran, but this week's $US4.8 billion gas deal between France and Iran is indicative of the kind of business that others would prefer with Iran.

4. Make Mexico pay for the border wall? Priced as high as $US25 billion, it's an enormous undertaking and the Mexican attitude is best expressed by former president Vincente Fox – "I'm not going to pay for that f---ing wall". Trump's various proposals for how he would make Mexico pay for America's wall would cause an economic and diplomatic crisis. They include commandeering the combined $US25 billion a year that Mexicans in the US send as small remittances to their families; onerous fees for a range of visas; banning Mexican businessmen and government officials from entering the US; putting tariffs on Mexican goods; and cutting foreign aid to Mexico.

Four US election takeaways for Russia, China and any other pushy, oppressive regime

1. We got lucky: They don't have to deal with Clinton, an experienced candidate with a record of standing up to bullies; instead they have Trump, who will be quite at home with the Russian oligarch class and in the case of China, as observed by Foreign Policy magazine's Asia editor James Palmer, "he's exactly the kind of businessman who is most easily taken in by China – credulous, focused on the externalities of wealth, and massively susceptible to flattery".

2. Authoritarianism beats democracy: All of Trump's instincts are authoritarian – the Chinese must love his approval for their brutal suppression of the peaceful Tiananmen protests in 1989. And any electoral system that throws up a winner like Trump surely is a joke; much better to stick with a system that imposes leaders; and if the US has any complaints, tell it to clean up its own house.

3. Human rights be damned: The world just got smaller, uglier and meaner; lonelier too for innocents who are denied their rights. Trump's disregard for human, civil and women's rights in the US; and his cosiness with white supremacists; all mean that he's unlikely to be fussed by human rights violations, as much by US allies as by its enemies.

4. Keep cracking down on the media: Even if Trump fails in his declared intention to strangle the First Amendment and to change libel laws to make it more difficult for the media to report on his business misconduct and his mistreatment of women, they'll love that he wants to; and they'll take his attacks on the media as a green light to press ahead with press suppression.

President-elect Donald Trump celebrates his victory. Photo: Getty Images

Four examples of Trump contradicting Trump

But it all depends on what day of the week it is. Trump's intentions are opaque, because his capacity to mangle language makes it difficult to understand what he's saying; and he often contradicts himself. So we are left with:

1. The usefulness of NATO: One day it's "obsolete", but the next it might be useful to fight terrorism; if American allies don't pay for Washington's contribution to their defence, he'll withdraw; but later, this is just a bargaining position – he didn't really mean what he said. At another time, he claims he doesn't mind if Japan and South Korea go nuclear – and later denies that he even said so.

2. Fighting terrorism: He wanted to commandeer Iraq's oil to cover the cost of its military effort and losses since the 2003 US-led invasion; he was going to "bomb the shit" out of IS; he would waterboard terrorist suspects; and he'd happily kill their relatives to make them talk. All these are war crimes and he insisted that the generals would do as he told them – but later he said he'd not order the military to act outside the law. He always had a "secret" plan to destroy IS, and then he didn't – he'd be asking the generals, who he claimed knew less about IS than he did, to devise a plan to take out the terror group. Will the likely recapture of the Iraqi city of Mosul, now under assault by Iraqi forces with help from US and Turkish forces, be the point at which he seizes Iraq's oil reserves and production facilities?

3. Homeland security: First he wanted a total ban on all Muslims entering the US and to have special police patrols in the communities in which Muslim Americans live; then the whole Muslim thing was dropped – instead, he was calling for "extreme vetting" for people from certain part of the world.

4. Undocumented aliens: First he just talked about the wall on the Mexican border – and then he had the idea that Mexico would be made to pay for it; then that the US would pay for it, and he'd find other ways to extract the funds from Mexico [see above]; at first all of the estimated 12 million "illegals" in the country would be deported – "in a very humane way"; but then it was going to be just "gang members and drug peddlers", and he'd make a decision on what to do about the millions remaining "at a later date". With 65 million people displaced worldwide, Georgetown University research professor Elizabeth Ferris writes: "The ugly anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US has fed into a toxic global narrative that refugees and migrants are to be kept out – why should Pakistan and Kenya continue to host millions of refugees if much wealthier countries are closing their doors to refugees and political candidates blame foreigners for all manner of problems?"

Just by winning the election, Trump has added to global instability and uncertainty.

Foreign policy is an area in which presidential power is least constrained by the legislative and judicial branches of government and the mere suggestion that Trump's transactional view of relationships might supplant traditional alliances that were deemed to be of mutual benefit is cause for alarm – do Vietnam, Myanmar and the Philippines seek greater stability by going deeper with Beijing? Do Taiwan, South Korea and Japan continue to have faith in the US nuclear umbrella, or do they embark on their own nuclear programs? And won't China just love that?

Describing the combined effect of Trump's election at a time of GOP control of the house and senate as a body-blow to all that flows from the traditional post-Cold War order of pro-Western alliances, Brookings Institution expert Ted Piccone makes this point: "How ironic that, as the world gets smaller and the demand for cross-border solutions grows, the most powerful country in the world has decided to build walls and run for the hills ... Say goodbye to Pax Americana. Say hello to Chinese and Russian imperialism, spheres of influence, renewal of radical fundamentalism, higher risks of climate catastrophe; and a return to the worst instincts of human and state behaviour."

Aware that Trump will take the side of the other guy, of Bernie Sanders when he was challenging Clinton, of Putin when he was belting Obama, Putin adopted the same strategy in congratulating Trump on winning the election – all the relationship problems between Washington and Moscow were Obama's fault.

"We understand and are aware that it will be a difficult path in the light of the degradation in which, unfortunately, the relationship between Russia and the US are at the moment – it is not our fault that Russia-US relations are as you see them," Putin said.

 And Germany's Angela Merkel seemingly made co-operation with the incoming Trump administration conditional on decency and compassion – "[We] are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views – I offer the next president of the US close co-operation on the basis of these values."

Far from reassuring, but nonetheless an accurate assessment of the lie of the land in terms of foreign policy as we approach the Trump era, is this from conservative security analyst Max Boot: "Is this the dark night of fascism descending on America? Maybe. Is this the triumph of white supremacists? Could be. Is this the end of NATO and the triumph of Vladimir Putin? Quite possibly …

"I admit that I'm deeply worried that these cataclysmic scenarios could actually come to pass. This could be Apocalypse Now. But I have to admit [too] … I have no idea what Trump will actually do. Nobody does … if there is any optimism to be gleaned on this day after, it lies in the very fact that Trump has been so utterly incoherent on just about every policy issue."

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/world/us-election/us-election-what-does-a-donald-trump-presidency-mean-for-the-world-20161110-gsn0zd.html