The Wars Fighting Back.

Trade wars are mostly made up of fightbacks. It is what everyone knows and so it is a surprise that President Trump is querying the decision of the motorbike manufacturer, Harley Davidson, to move some production abroad. It is only fair that the EU should effect retaliatory tariffs in response to the ones imposed by the US government on steel and aluminum products from Europe and elsewhere and in trade wars, it is usual to counter where it hurts most. It is unfortunate that Harley Davidson should be a victim of the reprisals but this is the age of globalization and outsourcing and it is inevitable it should switch to plants outside the US where lower wages and general costs will help to offset some of the slide in turnover expected from prices of its bikes going up in the EU, an important market. This is a common economic move that is vital in order to survive: at least in the long run. Trump cannot complain. He fired the first shot.
A sensible move as opposed to Trump's rationale of 'safeguarding national security', a bye-slang for old, turgid protectionism. How much of the steel and aluminum consumption in the US goes into national security? Are US metal plants at par with Chinese variants in efficiency? Isn' t it more profitable to concentrate energy on reforming labour and wages? Someone said Trump has to fulfil his promises to American workers, a sizable component of his political base. Such political promises often turn out to be rash. Too bad economics does not often work well with promises.
And on another front, the president's peremptory annulment of the Iran deal is having a bit of boomerang now. Ramping up sanctions would ultimately lead to cuts in Iranian oil production and that was going to push up oil prices, resulting in higher energy costs in the US. Unless production is increased quickly elsewhere to bridge supply gaps. Oil prices inching towards $80pb is a mayhem the delicate economy can gladly do without and so worrying is the scenario that the president had to resort to some fake tweeting: announcing that Saudi Arabia has promised to ramp up production. News that turned out to be false.

The Act of the Deal.

The act involved in the deal is far more complex than the art involved in the deal. The later encapsulates a lot of rhetoric, fine, dandy language; the former a lot of sweat, high doses of difficult reality. For the North Korean leader, any sign of success in his imminent summit with President Donald Trump of the United States will do. In fact, holding the summit at all is a victorious step for him: he faces a mass of countrymen whose sense of expectations is disorganized, scattered, muted and bland at best. Unless he is genuinely interested in denuclearization, reconciliation with his southern kinsmen and economic reforms even if they are only Chinese-style market tweaking. Then he would certainly need more than showboating and publicity. And a bad haircut.
For Trump, home expectations are more coherent and, in fact, could approach a sort of inquisition. He might think that his sanctions are working and that Kim Jong-un is already feeling the heat and is under intense pressure to cut a deal. That might be true but the real person under pressure to cut a deal is Trump himself. His critics and enemies, which are legion, are quick to point out that ever since he came to power, his most visible inclination is to dismantle, or attempt to dismantle, those deals he met in place, cut by his predecessors, and the list is lengthening day by day: Iran, Obamacare, Paris climate and a host of trade agreements. And he has done pretty little to fill the huge, gaping void left by the abrogations. His attempt to install his own healthcare has lacked a bit of coherence and has been swiftly dealt resounding blows everywhere. Trump often refers to himself as a builder but many are wont to argue he has rather behaved like a bulldozer, a wrecking party, a demolition crew. And if his argument is that he needs to pull down in order to construct, it is safe to counter that folks have seen much of the demolition, perhaps too much, and little, perhaps too little, of any form of building or rebuilding.
If he listens to his enemies or critics at all, even Americans that elected him, then he will strive as best as he can to cut a deal with Kim. He has achieved pretty puny domestic agreements, let alone foreign ones, and he will try to throw some pepper into his doubters' eyes. Besides, he has been touted as a master of  one-to-one, man-to-man negotiations and he will want to gratify his boys in this regard. Trump is heading to Singapore with his sights set on a trophy he can hold aloft to his enemies and in the process, cut himself some slack.
Which could bring in the twin dangers of urge and haste: a surge of adrenaline that could engender some sloppiness and throw whatever he has to agree with Kim into unintended webs of complexity. It is US-North Korea summit but thickly enmeshed in the web of negotiations are other countries. For a start, Japan, not in any way buoyed by the recent G-7 summit in Canada, may feel its own security concerns are being poorly handled. From South Korea to Philippines, there is the widespread suspicion that Trump does not think much of ditching allies, leaving them flat and dry and frying in the high desert. The summit may therefore turn out to be far more complex than he has envisaged and if he has negotiating powers, now is the time to deploy them. It is a golden opportunity.

President Trump

Kim Jong-un

Trump Promised Fireworks: He Hasn't Even Struck A Match.

The President was always going to err on the side of impulse. His tongue and tweets were too quick for caution. As the news of the alleged chemical attacks in by Syrian government forces in Douma, Eastern Ghoutta, broke out, Trump raced out of the blocks instantly, promising retaliation in form of big, bright bombs that were coming in numbers. Of course the flow of adrenalin had ebbed a couple of days later and subsequent tweets on the issue weren't as enthusiastic. Trump should have then proceeded with his tour of Latin America, that itinerary would have certainly yielded more returns than throwing 105 missiles into facilities no one, except Syrian regime officials, can really say with certainty still contain a single phial of chlorine or other chemical agents. If you're going to attack a place, why announce it so loudly? Why shout your intentions from the rooftops? The Russians and Syrians are no fools. The facilities attacked would certainly contain underground passages with designed exigencies to ferry materials through them very quickly. As it is, a president in the habit of shooting off the cuff must have given them sufficient time and warning to do so. It gave the Russians sufficient time to move their big warships out of their base in the Syrian port of Tartaus and there is nothing to suggest evacuation of smaller chemical containers will pose greater difficulty. Hence this brings us back in time, to President Clinton lobbing criise missiles into terrorist training camps in Eastern Afghanistan. As it turned out to be, the camps were empty and the outcome was that al-Qaeda got bin Laden got emboldened and encouraged to the extent of launching the devastating 9/11 attacks on the US. The missiles launched by Allies into Syria are more likely, as Assad had threatened, to emboldened the Russians and Iranians and Syrians into launching attacks on Idlib, the last major rebel-held enclave in Syria. The place had been a dumping ground for defeated rebels in the country and if it should fall, as it certainly will, then we may as well witness the dumping of defeated enemies into the sea. If the rebels are going to fight to death, having nowhere else to run, will their wives and children show the same determination?
The pyrotechnics weren't even spectacular. Israel does a better job of it with far fewer missiles. Better, quieter and more constant jobs. More efficient jobs. Of course the Russians are making huge propaganda capital out of the announcement that 65 of the missiles were shot down by Syrian air defences that were based on batteries manufactured in the old Soviet Union, 30 years ago. This has been corroborated by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization that has been fairly accurate in its reporting and even if can still take this with a pinch of salt, the attacks are not the perfect strikes Trump claims they are. The body language of Gen. McKenzie says it all during his Pentagon briefing. It was apparent he wasn't comfortable with his assurances the missiles achieved all their goals. The whole attack is turning into the most expensive pyrotechnics ever organized. Sadly, we see even a better spectacle at the Sydney harbour, during New Year celebrations.

The Sackman Wields the Axe Again.

The White House is full of revolving doors and President Donald Trump is the chief sackman. It is becoming increasingly difficult keeping pace with the number of subordinates that have resigned or have been fired from his administration. The other day it was Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State and it is the third National Security Adviser that we have on seat now. The latest is the US Veterans Affairs Secretary, David Shulkin and Shulkin did not hesitate to fire a parting salvo at his former boss,8 lamenting it should not be this hard to serve one's country. The Rasputin Coefficient measures the level of correlation between the values, beliefs and attitudes of a leader and the values, beliefs and attitudes of his subordinates. A positive correlation, good or bad, sees a high degree of match between the two sets while a negative correlation indicates a high level of dissonance. Hence Kissinger's diplomatic shuttles was an accurate reflection of Nixon's foreign policy mindset while Joe Biden would serve Obama like a faithful steed. When things become 'toxic, chaotic, disrespectful and subversive', as Shulkin has alleged, there is always a high incidence of leaders and aides working at cross purposes. Measuring the Trump administration Rasputin Coefficient was always going to be problematic. It is not all that a static index in the first place, dealing with human emotions, thoughts and passions, qualities that are always on the change and oh, how erratic is our president! This moment, he is threatening to wipe North Korea off the face of earth, the next he is eager to sit down with Kim Jong-un and have a little handshake across the table, if not across the Pacific. When your leader is unstable, voluble, projects the most coherent of his policies in tweets and is always shooting off the cuff, then it is always difficult determining where your minds meet. What made you buddies today might be your undoing tomorrow simply because your boss's thoughts had moved on. What gives you a positive Rasputin Correlation today might give you a negative one the very next moment. Mike Pompeo is the new diplomatic favorite, a hawkish necessity but nothing stops Trump from suddenly becoming dovish and Pompeo would be toast.
It is a win-win situation for Shulkin. We could see him as being fired because he is a stable, rational man who correlates poorly with the 'toxic, chaotic' Trump and if the reason given for his sack is true, an illegal acceptance of Wimbledon tickets, we can always excuse him of having the bad, positive correlation with his boss in the first place. As Trump's thoughts and opinions change, so will his relationship with his subordinates change and we will see the sackman wielding the axe again.

Putin: Russia's Strange Love for Tyrants.

One of the most recurring charades and characters in international politics has just played itself out; for the umpteenth time. The revolving wheel of tomfoolery has come full cycle again with the arrow pointing to Vladimir Putin as the president of Russia for the next six years. For as long as one could remember now, if he was powerful president, the hapless Roy Medvedev  would be puppet prime minister and in a most macabre exchange you could find anywhere, in another round of selections we call elections out of pure courtesy, Medvedev would switch to puppet president and Putin would be powerful prime minister. Dictatorship could be very outlandish at times and nowhere is it more bizarre than in present Russia.
A very predictable oddity. Opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, the only candidate who could have given him a good contest was barred from the polls on trumped up charges by a kangaroo court, leaving the field for a curious posse of contestants that included a reality TV star, Russia's pathetic version of President Trump, and that most pathetic of all comedians, the old, rable-rousing Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Only one outcome could be reasonably expected: a landslide that was going to bury Russia's and Putin's credibility. If only credibility still mattered. Instead of the brute, bare-faced power that now commands respect.
So Putin has another six years, at least, to gloat over his annexation of Crimea and continue with the bullying of near and far neighbors which include Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states and independent states that formerly made up the Soviet Union. He has already dismembered Georgia and could at will send crude, unrefined exterminators to murder or poison opposition activists and enemies abroad. Putin's authoritarian excesses stretch far and wide.
Whenever he mentions his grandfather was chef to that most heinous of all dictators, Josef Stalin, you could feel undercurrents of pride in his voice. It shows those that he admired. He seems to tell us that nothing has really changed in the Kremlin and that he would be too happy to carry on the tradition of repression and serfdom and Tsarist conquests. That is Putin is a continuation of bad news to neighbors far and near.
But of certain good news to Russians themselves, the folks that tolerate him, adore him and prop him up. Strange folks who seem to thrive very well under tyrants. Check out the list: Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Vladimir Putin. Someone once said there is no Russia without her tyrants. It is difficult arguing with that postulation in the light of present events. Russians will rather take the poetry and folklore that their tyrants give them than raise a whimper under these conditions of brazen assault on democracy.
Could you blame them? Even those enamored of democracy, if not congratulating him, are accepting whatever is coming out of the sham elections with numbed resignation. They could do better. Russia is a member of the UN Security Council, a veto-wielding nation and the least that is expected of the international community is insistence on greater transparency in the selection of who leads such an important place. Gary Kasparov, the great chess champion, has said it all, admonishing democracies now warming up to Putin over the elections that their behavior is a salient commentary on their own democracies. You cannot dine with the devil and not get something stuck in your teeth.
It could start from the US but nobody is expecting much from Donald Trump. His most coherent foreign policies are on his tongue and it is often that that piece of equipment gets stuck to his cheeks, He would get something into his tweets but it would be so ambiguous that the murky investigations into alleged Russian meddling in his election would seem clearer in comparison. Right now, Putin has no opposition, both at home and abroad.

Rex Tillerson: Serving God and Mammnon.

The oil industry where Rex Tillerson made his mark was a fairly certain arena. The newly-drilled oil-well is guaranteed to produce; new technology was going to make shale oil commercially available and the shady atmosphere enveloping Nigerian oil was always going to get cruder and darker. Only instability in the prices of oil was going to be of much challenge but that too wasn't exactly rocket science and for a man who had risen to the top echelons of his calling, he could be counted on safely to handle that. In short, the world he was familiar with was stable, rational, fairly predictable: always within his grasp. It was a place of gentlemen and handshakes.
So, it must have been a shock to him when he decided to switch jobs and throw himself into politics. Politics is a calling rough enough and American politics is a particularly toxic variant. It wasn't an arena for gentlemen, handshakes being very, very rare and fists in ample display and use and nobody was going to pull punches. And the most combative of the pugilists was the man he was going to serve as Secretary of State, President Donald Trump, a boxer who was going to play very unfairly, not hesitating a moment to punch below the belt. And the most volatile part of American politics would certainly be found in the State Department, in foreign policy. There he would have to deal with players even worse than his master. A place as stable as earthquake-engendered tsunami. An arena where the appalling Rohingya crisis could break out at any time, where Russian hackers and exterminators were going to cause trouble at any time. An arena filled with irrational souls as Mugabe, Kim Jong-un. A theater savaged by unpredictability such as the North Korean rascal making a volte-face and proposing talks with the US all of a sudden. Moments defined by not only not knowing when the next nuclear test will take place but also not knowing whether the missile was flying towards Hawaii, or flying over Japanese mainland or was going to end up shortly in the Pacific Ocean. Torrid moments of terrorists freshly abducting schoolgirls in Nigeria. Intolerable situations in which Turkey, a NATO ally would attack  Syrian Kurds, America's staunchest allies in the Middle East, and both the president and his top diplomat would be tongue tied. Tillerson was stepping into an insane world he was never prepared for, both by training and temperament.
A world that was perfect fit for his master, by temperament. Tillerson was supposed to be America's face to the outside world but it was an America that that gone Trump, a guy who was as brash and unpredictable and unrestrained as his worst adversaries in the diplomatic boxing ring. A chap whose remarks are often off cuff and whose most coherent foreign policies could be found only on his lips and tweets. It was eerily difficult imagining Tillerson as Trump's Secretary of   State. The Rasputin Coefficient was horribly non-correlative. Tillerson, in Trump administration, was practically serving God and Mammon at the same time.
Hence he would think the Iranian deal to be reasonable while Trump would savage it as nonsense. He would lay into Russia over the Salisbury spy poisoning while his president would be uncharacteristically taciturn and quiet all of a sudden. You would think that if the president was going to accept talks with North Korea, he would consult his secretary first. A dove, so to say, wasn't going to serve a hawk. Tillerson was more studied, careful, restrained than he was a pacifist but he wasn't going to do well in a regime stuffed with hardliners and of which head was a sheriff likely to shoot first before asking questions later.
Trump admitted he didn't agree with Tillerson on most issues. Sacking him behind his back was his most poignant testament to that disagreement.