Trump’s Whirlwind Diplomatic Initiatives

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

U.S. President Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and he may get it. His recent Middle East trip is his follow-up to the Abraham Accords, which he negotiated during his first term.

He has also attempted to reduce tensions in South Asia, in the wake of the recent India-Pakistan conflict. And he continues his efforts to bring an end to the Ukraine war and for a nuclear deal with Iran. He’d like to end the Gaza war as well.

In his diplomatic efforts he has been noticeably evenhanded, to the point where the leaders of some American friends have felt slighted. Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Volodymyr Zelensky are all somewhat disappointed – Trump is perhaps too impartial for their taste.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. To make deals, Trump’s specialty, you must be seen as an honest broker by both sides. Trump is not the prime minister of India or Israel, nor the president of Ukraine. He is the president of the United States, and his job, first and foremost, is to make the world a safer place for America, by putting out fires that may otherwise get out of control and involve the U.S. in further wars. After the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles, it’s the last thing Americans want.

In early May, Trump served as a go-between as he announced a cease-fire after the most expansive military conflict in decades between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed powers. But India wasn’t pleased. In announcing the cease-fire, the U.S. president made no mention of how the confrontation had started with a terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

The Indian government refused to publicly acknowledge the American role, insisting that their deal had been reached directly with Pakistan. Some right-wing politicians in Prime Minister Modi’s party even described Trump’s comments as a betrayal.

Delhi was concerned that the Indian public might perceive this as their country having halted the confrontation under outside pressure before achieving victory against a weaker adversary.

As for the Ukraine war, “Nothing is going to happen until Putin and I get together,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One May 15. And Israel, too, is perturbed, given Trump’s embrace of the new leadership in Syria.

Even before he left on his Middle East tour, with stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Trump declared a cease fire with Yemen’s rebel Houthis, who had been attacking shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthis had shot down several American drones and continued to fire at naval ships in the Red Sea, including an American aircraft carrier. But having spent more than one billion dollars of escalating operations against the Iran-backed group, the high costs led Trump to pull the plug.

“We hit them very hard and they had a great ability to withstand punishment,” Trump admitted.” Still, the Houthis agreed to stop their attacks.

In Riyadh on May 13, Trump criticized “Western intervention” in the Middle East. He mocked the neocons, hawks and so-called “nation builders,” who preached democracy and human rights through occupations and violence. They “wrecked far more nations than they built,” he declared, as they meddled “in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves” and “spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, and so many other cities.”

Trump met with the new Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh May14, a day after announcing the lifting of all U.S. sanctions on Damascus. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman al-Saud sat next to them. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined them by telephone. The meeting, the first between U.S. and Syrian leaders in 25 years, was hailed by Erdogan as “historic.”

Twenty years ago al-Sharaa was languishing in an American military prison in Baghdad, held on suspicion of terrorism on behalf of the Islamic State. Now he was shaking hands with President Trump.

This is part of al-Sharaa’s desire to upgrade Syria’s relations with Saudi Arabia and it fits into a long-term American and Saudi strategy to isolate Iran, so Trump is pushing al-Sharaa to sign the Abraham Accords. If the president’s decision to engage with the Syrian regime succeeds, the benefits to the United States and the West would be immense.

Trump also told bin Salman that “you’ll be greatly honouring me by recognizing Israel” and signing on to the Abraham Accords. “It’s my fervent hope, wish and even my dream,” he stated.

Behind all of Trump’s praise of the Gulf’s leadership for the region’s achievements, and denigration of failed Western nation-building projects, were his administration’s plans for the Middle East – including the withdrawal of American troops in northeast Syria.

We tend to think of Trump as a hard-nosed realist, a transactional deal maker. And he did announce hundreds of billions of dollars in business deals. Yet he also has an idealistic, even utopian, side to him. After all, who but Trump could ask not only the Saudi crown prince, but also Syria’s new ruler, a former jihadi whose group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was until 2016 al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, to recognize Israel?

While that request remains highly unlikely to be granted by the latter, the contours of the Middle East are rapidly changing, with Trump playing no small part. The president is turning over tables, and we don’t know where the dishes will fall.

 

The Old World Order is Gone

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

Three years into the Ukraine war and months into Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a new world order is emerging. As progressive-liberal norms are breaking down, the world is redividing into competing geopolitical power blocs.

U.S. Vice-president JD Vance shocked his audience at the Munich Security Conference last February by stating these views. The country that had laid the foundations of the postwar multilateral order was now itself calling it into question.

Whatever its limits, liberal elites in the western world contended multilateralism represented a step forward for international relations, and that in a similar fashion, the same held true for globalization in world trade.

Despite ongoing conflicts that began with the Cold War and decolonization, institutions had emerged that encouraged the nonviolent resolution of disagreements over everything from nuclear proliferation to human rights, finance, trade, culture, health and the environment.

By the 21st century, Communism had collapsed and the European Union expanded. Soon, China joined the world trading system. Many people believed this kind of internationalism was irreversible, and the interdependence of the global economy would guarantee peace and prosperity.

Even at that, however, the UN’s legitimacy and effectiveness remained severely hampered, with the composition of its Security Council reflecting the dynamics of 1945. After all, several permanent members had carried out unilateral military interventions, with the United States invading Iraq, and Russia attacking Ukraine.

The anti-global moment took time to grow. “One of the first signs of trouble was in 1999, when the World Trade Organization held its ministerial conference in Seattle. The delegates were confronted with tens of thousands of anti globalization demonstrators,” wrote Tara Zahra, a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of the 2023 study Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars.

The end of hyper-globalisation was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis. It “devastated individual livelihoods and challenged people’s faith in the stability and fairness of global capitalism.” The COVID-19 pandemic followed. It killed millions of people and disrupted global trade and migration. “The pandemic revealed the fragility of economies dependent on imports for basic supplies.”

Shortages and snarled supply chains prompted governments and companies to consider moving operations closer to home, onshoring rather than offshoring production. This helped anti-global populists gain further traction around the world.

American foreign policy has always been swinging between messianic idealism and the temptation to unilaterally withdraw. Yet never has a break within the Western alliance been put so plainly as since Trump’s 2024 re-election. Today’s world – divided by geopolitics – looks closer to the one conceived by political scientist Samuel Huntington in his famous 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

When did this great era of globalisation end? In “What Comes After Globalization?”, his May 24 essay in the socialist periodical Jacobin, the economist Branko Milanovic advances as symbolic endpoints either Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports in 2017, or Trump’s second accession to power this year.

Milanovic asserts that the losers in globalisation were the middle classes of the Western world, squeezed between, in his words, the growing wealth of their financial overlords at home, and the newly affluent workers of Asia.

Now all this is in danger of disappearing in a new world-historical context. Today’s demand from voters isn’t for the kind of globalised openness provided by free markets, lax borders and limited government, but for a sovereigntist, neo-statist revival that builds national resilience, protective social policies, and domestic security.

The emerging tariff regimes will, Milanovic predicts, usher in “a new world of nation- and region-specific trade and foreign economic policies, moving away from universalism and internationalism and into neo-mercantilism.”

So the break-up of the globalised world-system will lead to the revival of the nation-state. As Philip Cunliffe, professor of International Relations at University College London, observes in newly-published The National Interest: Politics After Globalization, the crumbling of globalization “involves deepening and broadening mass politics and democratic self-government.”

Political leaders have been accustomed to treat national interest as an embarrassment, he writes. But they will not be able to rise to the challenges that confront their countries without the legitimacy conferred by it.

Many university professors, elite journalists and corporate executives have been openly contemptuous toward both their nations’ traditions and the views of most of their fellow citizens. Globalists tend to view Western culture as unjust and destructive to the environment. This has eroded traditional values like patriotism, especially among the young and the highly educated.

Globalist elites’ attitudes on race, gender and climate have undermined their credibility with much of their national populations. Unsurprisingly, faith in globalist institutions such as the state bureaucracy, the mass media, the education establishment, as well as the corporate giants, has diminished.

Leftist thinkers deplore this outcome. Typical is Abdur Rehman Cheema, a development studies academic. “Globalization, once heralded as the pinnacle of human progress, promised a world united by shared science, development, and peace,” he observed in “The Collapse of Globalization,” published Feb. 3 in the journal Global Policy. “It was a vision of collective advancement, where borders would dissolve not just for trade and capital, but for knowledge, empathy, and mutual respect.” It seems those days may not return in the foreseeable future.

 

Vietnam’s Relations with America, Then and Now

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

You know you’re getting old when you realize that April 30, 1975, was half a century ago. That’s the day the Vietnamese Communists marched into Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), ending the long, brutal Vietnam War.

For people of my generation, as young adults it was probably our defining political moment. I entered a Canadian university as it began to gather steam, received my BA at the height of the fighting, and as a graduate student at an American university, received another degree the year American troops left South Vietnam. Two years later, the war came to an end, leaving a devastated moonscape of a nation.

Like millions of other college students, I got caught up in the anti-war movements of the time. We turned out to be right. The last time I was in Washington I paused at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which lists the names of the more than 58,000 Americans who lost their lives during the conflict. (Four are from my wife’s high school.)

As many as two million Vietnamese civilians on both sides, as well as 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong Communist fighters, were also killed. But America’s ally, the southern regime, was vanquished. Its last president had fled the previous day.

Between 1968 and 1975, a greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on this fairly small area than in all theatres in the Second World War. But the Vietnamese are a resilient, highly nationalistic people, and when it ended the two parts of the country, divided in 1956 between a determined Communist north, supported by China and the Soviet Union, and a corrupt American-supported south, were finally unified by the victorious North Vietnamese Communists.

Fast forward 50 years, and Vietnam is arguably one of the safest places in the world for American visitors. Today far more fearful of China, and no longer particularly close to a post-Soviet Russia – though President Vladimir Putin did pay a state visit in June 2024 -- relations with the United States have become relatively cordial.

In January the country’s new Communist Party general secretary, To Lam, embarked on a program to slash bureaucracy and fight corruption and graft. The country's 63 provinces and municipalities are being reduced to 34, and government ministries and agencies cut from 30 to 17. This year, 100,000 government employees are being laid off.

Today’s Vietnam remains a one-party Communist state, but its authoritarian leadership has embraced capitalism. Hanoi has embarked on an ambitious plan to build an upper-income, knowledge-and-tech-based economy by the year 2045.

Vietnam has low labour costs and a young and large workforce, with 58 per cent of the population of almost 100 million younger than 35 years old, making the country an attractive site for investment.

The economy has been growing at a steady five per cent. The World Bank last October forecast that Vietnam would show the strongest growth of the emerging economies in Southeast Asia. Economic growth is expected to reach 6.5 per cent this year, and the country is aiming for annual growth rates in excess of eight per cent and double-digit growth from 2026 onwards.

In September 2023, Washington and Hanoi upgraded their diplomatic relations, signing a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership for Peace, Cooperation and Sustainable Development. The U.S. is Vietnam’s second-biggest trading partner – China is first -- and its largest export market. 

All that has been put at risk now that Donald Trump is in the White House and has launched a global trade war. Hanoi is accused of currency manipulation and trade circumvention. A 46 per cent tariff on some Vietnamese exports has been suspended until July, but remains on the table.

The problem is this: Chinese firms, to evade the extremely large American tariff on their goods, have been using Vietnam as a go-between. Trump wants to stop this by extending the economic pushback onto Vietnam.

Vietnam is particularly vulnerable as the country holds the third-largest trade surplus with the U.S. in the world. Bilateral trade in 2024 neared US$150 billion, with Vietnam enjoying a substantial surplus of US$124 billion, more than triple the US$38 billion recorded in 2017. This sharp increase stems largely from the relocation of manufacturing from China to Vietnam, to bypass American tariffs.

With its trade surplus with the U.S. now comprising nearly a third of its GDP, Hanoi must tread carefully to safeguard its economic gains. It won’t be easy. Vietnam dispatched deputy prime minister Ho Duc Phoc in early April to Washington to plead his country’s case and offered to eliminate all tariffs on U.S. imports to placate Trump.

 But Peter Navarro, President Trump’s senior counsellor on trade and manufacturing, said that Vietnam’s offer was meaningless, because it would not address the deficit in trade where Vietnam sells $15 worth of goods to the U.S. for every dollar it buys.

He also claimed that one-third of all Vietnamese exports to the U.S. were actually Chinese products, trans-shipped through Vietnam to avoid U.S. tariffs, though detailed trade studies actually put it at between seven and 16 per cent.

So Vietnam is once again on the frontline in a new American battle, though in an entirely different way than 50 years ago. Is Vietnam again being asked to choose between America and China? It’s not one it wants to make.