Leaders like Putin and Rocketman of North Korea have long been the square pegs in a round hole.
They don’t fit into the system. They don’t play by our rules.
They behave in ways we don’t understand to maintain power.
Unlike Singapore, which is also not really a democracy, Russia and North Korea are poor. Putin and Kim are incapable of organising productive economies and require some unorthodox and unsavoury measures to keep themselves at the top. Their behaviour often hurts their own people as much as anyone else.
So when Donald Trump, the democratically elected leader of the wealthiest nation on earth, behaves in such an unfamiliar way with such drastic consequences for the little club we’ve created, it can be easy to write him off as crazy. A lunatic.
And this week many have. Why would you risk recession and political capital? Why would you weaken the position of your friends and allies? Why hurt us? Why slash our jobs?
The answer is not particularly crazy or unpredictable when put into context. The Great American Dream has been in decline for decades.
The proportion of Americans in the middle class in 1971 was 61%. In 2023, it was 51%.
Trump swept Rustbelt states last November, picking up Reagan democrats, for a reason; the promise of a radical re-ordering of the deck chairs to turn life around.
It was no surprise to see auto worker union representatives donning hard hats at the White House Rose garden this week as Trump announced the tariffs that upended global order.
We all know, historically, protectionism has not worked.
To us, and no doubt to many Americans, it looks nonsensical. But to those whose living standards have been in decline for decades and whose streets are lined with fentanyl zombies; it looks like hope.
In their eyes, since Nafta was signed and globalisation embraced, there’s been a long procession of Washington elites who’ve continued selling them down the river, from Clinton to Bush to nearly-Clinton.
In theory (and this, as mentioned, is far from evidenced) the trade war will shift America’s tax burden from workers to foreign-based companies. In theory, the revenue will enable tax cuts for individuals and businesses.
In his Rose Garden address, Trump made another reason for this bedlam quite clear. He’s preparing America for what he sees as inevitable war with China. Several times he mentioned the threat of war and the need for self-sufficiency on everything from medicines to food production.
Standing in front of American soldiers on a most unwelcome trip to Greenland last week, Vice-President JD Vance said this:
“I’ve got all these brave Americans standing in front of me.
“We want to send, if God forbid we have to send, Americans to war, we want them to have the best weapons in the world that are manufactured in America and not in China.
“The way you do that is to first rebuild the American manufacturing sector”.
To Washington, the tariffs are as much about security as they are economics.
For the first time in American history, the Government spent more money last year servicing debt than it did on defence.
That means the start of what historian Niall Ferguson dubbed Ferguson’s Law; the tipping point after which the debt burden pulls apart the “geopolitical grip of a great power”.
The same thing happened in France before the revolution, to the Spanish, the Ottoman Empire and the British.
The beginning of a slow but inevitable slide from the top.
It’s tempting to view Trump’s trade war as the unpredictable actions of a crazy man, akin to those you might see from maniacal dictators like Putin and Kim.
But, in context, they make perfect sense to those who voted him into power and are therefore the opposite of dictatorial, rather a simple expression of democracy.
The real question is whether history will judge this week as the final death throes of a superpower or a rebirth to greatness.
None of this is cause for celebration to the rest of us, obviously.
It’s terrible for New Zealand and most importantly for many of our close trading partners in Asia.
This week we learnt the real cost of America First and it may well just be the beginning.
