World – Page 4 – thinking liberal

Joe Biden has made a strong start

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” is what I wrote when Joe Biden was elected US President last November. I had a good feeling about the man because Mr Biden looked to be somebody who confronts the world as it really is, rather than on some projection based on conviction, as more partisan politicians do. It is going better than I expected.

In that post I said that the new president needed to do three things: revive the economy, get on top of the virus, and put pressure on the Republicans. On all three counts he is doing well. He has been lucky, but he has helped to make that luck. We can now see that this is the job he has wanted to do all his political life. He was ready for it. It turns out that being a Vice President is good preparation for the Presidency, especially at the start. The last Vice President to make it to the top was George Bush Senior in 1988; he proved very effective at the job, even if he was less effective at the politics. Before that we might remember Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, also very effective operators. Mr Biden knows how the machinery of government works and was well prepared by the time inauguration came, notwithstanding the tardy cooperation of the outgoing administration.

Mr Biden has also proved an adept politician. He made a good start before he took office when the Democrats took both the Senate run-off elections in Georgia. The Republicans had been favourites. How much he can take personal credit for this is hard to say – but he clearly didn’t get in the way. That gave him control of the Senate by the narrowest possible margin. He has used it skilfully. His biggest achievement has been pushing through a massive economic stimulus bill. He now has two more ambitious efforts involving massive outlays: an infrastructure plan and welfare reforms. He has not sought to build bridges with the Republicans, in the way that Barack Obama wasted so much time doing, but the measures are likely to go down well with many Republican voters, especially the ones that switched to Trump in 2016 and 2020. I can’t see that the welfare changes stand much chance, as they look too strong for conservative Democrats in the Senate – but they should help keep up the pressure.

And the next point about Mr Biden is that he takes decisions, even tough ones, quickly. This is part of being ready for the job, but it is a strong contrast with Mr Trump and Mr Obama, and especially the former’s gaggle of squabbling advisers. A striking example of this has been the decision to withdraw the US military completely from Afghanistan by 11 September. We might well think this is wrong (The Economist argued that keeping on a small commitment would be value for money), but it happened quickly.

But is he taking America in the right direction? One criticism is that he is just rehashing failed policies from the 1970s. This is put quite eloquently by Gerard Baker in The Times. Mr Biden wants to throw a lot of public money at problems, promoting federal agencies and trade unions, in a striking reversal of the prevailing wisdom since Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980 – even if the practice never quite lived up to the rhetoric. There does seem to be something quite old and familiar about this approach. Mr Biden has been compared to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson – falsely because he doesn’t have enough Senate votes to be anything like as ambitious as this pair. His infrastructure plans recall Dwight Eisenhower. These policies just led to stagflation in the 1970s, it is said. But context is all. Big government worked well enough in the 1950s, with the rise of light manufacturing and the bureaucracy of the consumer society – all those salesman, account clerks and insurance administrators. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the economy and society suffered a number of problems. First came the Vietnam war, which the US government refused to finance through taxation, causing the postwar world financial infrastructure to buckle. Then came the malign effects of union inflexibility, which meant that consumer price rises fed through quickly into wage inflation, creating a wage-price spiral. And then came the shock of escalating oil prices in the 1970s, the first important symptom of environmental constraints on the US model of growth. Combine these with big government and you got stagflation.

That was then. Now is a very different world. The wage-price spiral has been broken by the growth of globalisation and the impact of technology. A new world financial infrastructure has emerged. Environmental constraints are being embraced rather than denied. And anyway since 2008 the developed world seems to have been suffering from deficient demand. Interest rates have been cut to rock bottom; there does not seem to be enough positive pressure in the labour market. Nominal jobless rates may look low (slowing for the pandemic), but pay at the lower end is propped up by minimum wages, job insecurity is rife, and people are dropping out of the workforce. Throwing public money at problems could be quite beneficial at such a time, even if it was harmful in the 1970s. And excess public spending is much more likely to get the money to where it is needed that tax cuts.

Still, you don’t have to be on the political right to worry that president is taking things too far. Predictions of a rise in inflation are widespread, though an awful lot of people seem to think that this will work in a similar way to the late 20th Century. One way or another interest rates are likely to rise – a sign of a better balanced economy after all – and this could have some fairly scary consequences in a financial system that seems to take low interest rates and booming asset prices as one of the fundamental rights of man. But it could take some time for any problems to emerge.

A second criticism is that Mr Biden is taking his radicalism too far. He has spoken of bringing America together and healing the partisan divides. But in many ways he is doing the opposite. Much of the Republican base – the wealthy rather than the populous part of it – was horrified by Donald Trump, whose grip on that party shows no sign of weakening. But they will be even more horrified by fear of tax rises, and will doubtless find themselves returning to the party fold. That does not matter that much in terms of votes (these are the top 1% after all, even if you have to add in larger numbers who fancy their chances of entering that elite) – but it means lots of campaign funding to promote misinformation and damaging memes. The Republicans scared a lot of people into voting for them in Congressional races last year by portraying the Democrats as being taken over by the “radical left”. It won’t be too hard to paint Mr Biden’s policies in that light.

A big challenge will come in 2022, when the mid-term elections come. Most commentators already seem to have written the Democrats’ chances off, following what happened to Mr Obama and Mr Trump at the same points in their presidencies. But that can’t be in the plans of a consummate politician like Joe Biden. He clearly feels that his policies can peel away a lot of voters from the Republicans.

And that will make American politics very interesting over the next year and a half. Mr Biden has started well, and he means to keep up the momentum.

In defence of vaccine nationalism

Not all are equal when it comes to vaccination against Covid-19. Israel speeds ahead, followed by Britain and the USA, with other European countries bumbling along in their wake. Developing countries, or most of them, are a long way behind. This has provoked some harrumphing. “None of us are safe until we are all safe”, it is said. According to this idea the vaccine should be distributed in a world programme based on individual vulnerabilities. This gets general murmurs of approval from liberal types, or at any rate those are not in government. No wonder conservatives think liberals are soft in the head.

There are deeper philosophical and ethical questions behind this, but it would be useful to start with two facts which don’t seem to get mentioned in this context. The first is that vaccine manufacture is well behind the ambitious targets set earlier in the year. The headlines may be dominated by the massive scale of orders placed by the British government and others, but delivery is another matter. According to Tim Harford in the Financial Times some 800 million doses were promised in 2020. but only 20-30 million were actually delivered. There are no surplus stocks sitting around in national inventories while the needy are unvaccinated. The second fact is that death rates in the developed world, and Britain and the USA in particular, are very high. Britain’s is the highest in the world, we are told. In the developing world death rates are much lower. Some of this may be down to weaknesses in data gathering and government denial, of course. But mostly it is because their populations are much younger, on average, and so less vulnerable. And Britain and the USA both have an obesity problem. So if you are going to start with a worldwide vaccination programme, why wouldn’t you begin with the USA and Britain anyway? Is there really a worldwide injustice here?

Looking a bit deeper there is then the question of practicality. Collective efforts are often inefficient. In Europe the EU’s joint procurement is well behind that of newly separate Britain’s. A centrally organised world programme doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s bit like the lockdown sceptics’ idea that we should protect the vulnerable and let everybody else live their lives unrestricted (or restricted only by their own fear). At fist sight you might think it looks a good idea, but it doesn’t survive any closer inspection at all.

It’s worth a thought as to why this might be. One problem is accountability. The more complicated a project, and the more people involved, the more the need for accountability slows things down. And at the world level accountability has always been a problem. There is also the question of information. The further away you are from the sharp end, the poorer the quality and the less effective decisions tend to be. Committees and collaboration have their place; they even have heir place in worldwide vaccination programmes. But not in leading the emergency effort to get as many people vaccinated as fast as possible. here allowing national governments to act independently is going to get more shots into arms more quickly.

This leads to an important philosophical and ethical issue that liberals would do well to think about more deeply. How often do we hear pleas that needs of African peasants (we often focus on the rural poor and overlook ballooning urban poverty for some reason) should be just as much concern to us as the problems of our immediate neighbours? The fact that we neglect poor people in faraway places is regarded as a moral failure. And yet when rich people, or people in rich countries, try to help poor people far away, it so often ends badly. Aid ends up helping the wrong people, or distorting market and governance structures to their detriment, or simply comes over an example of patronising post-colonialism, reinforcing ethnic stereotypes. The exercise often seems to be guilt-tripping with little wider practical utility, beyond raising the status of certain NGO types. Of course the first premise of the liberal argument is sound enough: that all people on earth are morally equal. This is not a given, but there are all manner of reasons, moral, spiritual and pragmatic, why we should believe this. But this needs to be complemented by some form of proximity principle. It is quite right to be more concerned about those closer to us than those further away. It isn’t a moral failure. We can imagine a sort of hierarchy of family and close friends, neighbours, fellow countryman and so on. Such a hierarchy invites a whole series of problems, though. Western liberals, me included, agree that race or ethnic identity should play no part in it, of course, but this isn’t universally accepted (look at what is happening in China or India). Should Britons be more concerned about Latvians than Moroccans because of some form of European or Christian identity? And a lot of aid made by rich countries to faraway places is beneficial to humankind; I give to several charities and support the UK’s generous aid budget. It’s a bit of a nightmare, which is doubtless why many liberals try to short-circuit the discussion by denying any kind of proximity principle. But that doesn’t work either.

I am no moral philosopher,so I am not going to attempt an answer to these tricky questions. I rely on intuition. To me there is nothing wrong with countries focusing on vaccinating their own citizens as a top priority, even if richer countries end up getting ahead of the queue (which won’t be entirely the case anyway; India, for example, is the world’s leader in the manufacture of vaccines and is as nationalist in its priorities as anybody). That does not mean it is right to sabotage other countries’ efforts, or to hoard unused vaccine stocks. And once the urgencies of your own country have been dealt with, it is right to devote national resources to aiding other countries where the need is greater. I often disagree with the current British government’s moral priorities, but I think they have this one roughly right.

Trump is not a proper fascist; his coup might have succeeded if he was

Throughout his presidency, I have waited for the moment when Donald Trump overstepped the mark, causing him to alienate a large part of his support base. There were moments when I thought he had reached such a point, but I was proved wrong each time. But the events last week in Washington are surely that moment. His presidency is nearly over anyway, of course, but he is surely unlikely to come back from this.

Of course an astonishing number of Americans thought that the storming of Congress was justified, but the Republican coalition is still breaking up, and it is likely to reform without Mr Trump in control. You could tell Mr Trump was in trouble when he read out his statement disowning the protesters and conceding that he would hand over to the new administration. He normally doubles down; he does not do light-footed manoeuvre.

What happened? It was very clear from even before the election that Mr Trump would try to cling to power if he lost. His plan to do so amounted to a coup, but one that maintained some vestiges of legality. He thought he could mobilise Republican Congressmen and state administrators, and sympathetic judges to annul the state election results he didn’t like, and substitute more congenial ones. For the most part they did not cooperate (the Congressmen being a shameful exception), because Mr Trump could not provide them with any serious evidence to work with, and they had too much respect for the rule of law, or at any rate understood that the risks for them personally were far too high. His last chance was on Wednesday, when Congress was due to ratify the election results. He organised a march of his supporters on the Capitol. What was Mr Trump trying to do? Here it gets murky. His hope may have been to intimidate the law-makers into overturning the election results. He may simply have wanted a spectacular demonstration of the strength of feeling on his side to sustain the betrayal narrative, from which he could build his comeback. If you want to build a conspiracy theory you can easily find enough to work on. After he lost the election Mr Trump cleared out the senior appointees of the Defence department and put in complete loyalists. The Washington National Guard was under the control of the Defence department, but it had not been mobilised for trouble, as it had been for the Black Lives Matter protests.

But it looks as if there was no clear plan. Once the protesters got into the building they did not know what to do. This was the worst possible outcome for Mr Trump. The protesters engaged in vandalism and showed general disrespect for one of the United States’s most hallowed institutions without achieving anything more than a delay to proceedings. This was fine by those of Mr Trump’s base driven by a hate for those institutions and of revolutionary intent: the white supremacists, the QAnon conspiracy theorists and the wild fringe in general. But a large part of the Republican coalition prefers to see these people as a tiresome sideshow. For many conservative Americans, having somebody dressed in a bison outfit leading the way is not a good look. Funnily enough, if the protestors had been met by a robust police and National Guard presence, it would probably have worked much better for Mr Trump – they could blame failure on the “deep state”. The plan had not been thought through and it lapsed into farce, albeit a farce in which several people were killed.

That is very revealing. Many people claim that Donald Trump is a fascist. It is perfectly true that there are many common threads between Trumpism and fascism. The cult of personality, the demand for personal loyalty amongst officials, the disrespect for the rule of law and political convention. The tactics were fascistic too: the use of elections to gain a foothold, the cooption and then subordination of establishment conservatives, and the indulgence of mob violence from supporters. But there are big differences. Fascists concentrate power in a militarised state, subordinating all other civil and private organisations. They adore administrative competence (Mussolini wanted to make the trains run on time; Hitler built autobahns). They are also driven by a clear, if fantastical, vision of where they want to take their country. Donald Trump worked to dismantle the state, not build it up. He let private corporations run riot, including ones he did not like. He has very little regard for administrative competence. He was not a warmonger either – he tried to end foreign wars, not start them. His supporters were not organised into paramilitary formations that could drive through a violent coup. Some of his supporters were heavily armed, it is true, but there was something anarchistic about them; they viewed their weapons as an extension to their personal autonomy, rather than part of being a soldier for a cause. Once you take the narcissism away from Trumpism, there really is very little left.

Which is why the coup failed and Mr Trump has been humiliated. There were no storm troopers ready to enter the Capitol and neutralise opposing Congressmen. There were no leaders on the ground with a clear idea about what they needed to do.

Very soon Donald Trump will leave office. So much of his power, and self-esteem, derived from that office that it will be difficult for him to come back, especially after this fiasco. But his popular base is still there, angry at the turn of events and convinced that it is they who are the victims of a coup. The new administration faces many difficult choices. Joe Biden wants to be a figure of healing and reconciliation. But can he simply let the forces of darkness reorganise with impunity? Republican leaders face hard choices too. Their no-prisoners resistance to the Democrats has unleashed a tiger that is consuming them. Is it time to change tactics in order to capitalise on the fears that much of the American public has of left-wing radicalism?

And all the while the pandemic runs riot. What a moment to become President. But it will not do to underestimate Joe Biden.

Joe Biden: cometh the hour, cometh the man?

I greeted the defeat of Donald Trump in the US Presidential election with relief rather than joy. It was the most important thing to be decided in these elections: but otherwise it was a poor night for the Democrats. That bodes ill for the success of the new administration. But perhaps the new President, Joe Biden, will rise to the occasion.

The first Democratic disappointment was the failure to suppress Mr Trump’s vote more than it did. In fact “suppress” is not the word: Mr Trump’s vote was huge. Victory depended on a series of narrow wins in key states: very similar in character to Mr Trump’s victory in 2016. Based on polling evidence, most people had expected something more decisive. The next disappointment was the Democrats’ failure to secure the Senate. This game isn’t over yet: it will be decided by the double run-off section in early January in Georgia, but the Republicans are favourites. But the Democrats fell short in a whole series of contests where they were expected to do well, and that was the pattern of the night. The Democrats hung on to the their majority in the House in Representatives, but went backwards. They did not make breakthroughs at state level either: important because these elections will affect redistricting for the House. Down-ticket Republicans polled more than Mr Trump.

If the Democrats couldn’t win big this year, when can they? Looked at strategically it the Republicans are winning the battle to be the natural party of government, albeit by a narrow margin. This should worry Democrats a lot. They have long been expecting a demographic dividend, as America becomes less white, and as older, conservative voters die off. Instead Republicans are managing to recruit amongst ethnic minorities. I don’t know what data on younger voters is, but I suspect it follows educational attainment. Less well-educated Americans gravitate towards the Republicans, regardless of race and age, it seems.

This bodes ill for the Democrats in 2024, and of Kamala Harris’s chances in that election if Joe Biden steps down, as expected. There will be a lot of soul-searching. Some want to go down a left-wing populist route, stoking up anger over wealthy elites rigging the system to their advantage. Such a strategy has worked in Latin America (though whether it has done poor voters there any good is another question) – but I don’t think it has traction in America, not least amongst those of Latin American heritage, for whom socialism is often a toxic brand, based on the record of Latin American socialists.

Beyond that, Mr Biden is going to find it very hard to govern. He needs the Senate to unlock major spending initiatives, or legal reforms, for example to health care, or reforms to make it easier to elect Democrats. Nothing in these election results is going to discourage the dominant no-prisoners wing of the Republican Party, represented by the senate leader Mitch McConnell, as well as Mr Trump himself. Republicans will suddenly rediscover their fiscal conservatism and stoke up worries about public debt, conveniently forgotten when Republicans such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Donald Trump have been in charge. The new administration will be undermined at every turn. And on top of likely control of the Senate, they have stacked the Supreme Court with conservatives. Mr Biden’s appeals for Americans to unite to tackle the country’s problems are entirely futile. Further, Republicans are trying to undermine his legitimacy by saying the election was “stolen”. The extreme partisan nature of US politics will continue.

So what does Joe Biden need to do? The critical things are to revive the economy, get on top of the virus, and put pressure on the Republicans. The economy is critical. Until 2020 this was looking good for Mr Trump. The acid test isn’t the level of the stock market, so beloved of the President, but whether the economy is running hot enough to push up wages and well as create a plentiful supply of less skilled jobs. Mr Trump’s success there doubtless accounts for much of the strength of his support. How much he was actually responsible for this, and how much he was building on his predecessor, we will never know. The virus, of course, is the test Mr Biden has set himself. On both counts luck looks to be on the new President’s. side. The first of the vaccines is coming good, and other promising ones are behind it. This is already having a positive effect on confidence. This means that he is not as reliant as he might of been on Congress to provide funding for the states. The second piece of luck is that the Federal Reserve takes an expansive view of its role in keeping the economy going, and should not jack up interest rates at the first sign of success.

What do I mean by putting pressure on the Republicans? His life will be a lot easier if a small handful of Republican Senators break ranks. It will also be easier if Supreme Court justices also feel a bit of political pressure to appear non-partisan. This dos not mean indulging in the culture wars (on abortion and such matters), which tend to polarise politics and rally the Republican faithful. It does mean keeping the heat up on healthcare and support for “seniors” and veterans. The Republicans aren’t having it all their own way. MrTrump is not going to disappear; surely the party’s stalwarts are going to tire of bowing and scraping to their monarch. Mr Trump is also likely to face a blizzard of lawsuits – though this is unlikely to change public opinion much.

The interesting thing is that of all senior Democrats, Joe Biden seems to understand what needs to be done best. He has it in him to empathise with the average working class Trump supporter. His campaign was very skilful. He is going to need all of that skill in the years ahead. But he knows that. Cometh the hour, cometh the man?

September: the virus strikes back

I still have not yet recovered blogging groove, as I settle down in my new home, and with family caring issues taking priority. So I am doing a consolidated look-back on the last month’s news again. If last time the central theme was the rise of Great Power politics, this time the theme is the virus.

After the Spring crisis passed, more or less, in the developed world (not so much in the US), people relaxed in the summer (or winter depending on your hemisphere). But the virus is coming back, with the world both better prepared, but less psychologically and economically resilient. The stress is showing.

The virus’s most spectacular victim was the US President. This drama is still playing out. What has emerged is interesting, though. Donald Trump has made a great show of not allowing the virus to affect him, being rarely seen in a mask. But in fact huge efforts are made to screen anybody that comes near him, with extensive use of a quick-turnaround test. But such measures only work so far, and if enough people come into proximity, the test is bound to have miss a few. A reception for his nominee for the Supreme Court appears to have been too hubristic.

Once Mr Trump was infected his behaviour stands in complete contrast to our own Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson soldiered on valiantly, did what the doctors told him, and went to a public hospital only when he had to, with treatment recognisably similar to any member of the public. Such a passive approach was not for Mr Trump. He quickly ordered the most aggressive treatment possible, and checked himself into and then out of an elite hospital. He now claims to have conquered the virus in days. We shall see. This probably reflects cultural differences between our two countries as much as personality. Many Americans, and especially the rich and powerful, struggle with the idea that they can’t take full control of their treatment, as is often the case with the UK’s NHS. Private treatment is available here, but, quite often the best expertise is tied to the public service, and Britons don’t like public and private to mix. It is one reason why nationalising health care is unpopular in the US, even if less well-off Americans have little practical control.

But what effect will this have on the US election campaign? Democrats continue to have reason for quiet confidence. A month ago they seemed a bit rattled, as Mr Trump had forced the narrative onto his own agenda: law and order. But the Democrats’ candidate, Joe Biden, is a seasoned campaigner, backed up by a solid team. He held his nerve. The riots subsided and soon the news was dominated by the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the unseemly haste to replace her before the election. Mr Biden refused the invitation to stoke up the culture war on abortion, but instead moved the narrative on to court challenges to President Obama’s health care system, which many working class Americans now depend on. This was followed by the first TV debate, dominated by Mr Trump’s hyper=aggressive behaviour. Mr Biden was not given the rope to hang himself with, and the focus became the personality of the President, which the Democrats are quite happy with. And now Mr Trump’s infection has put the virus centre stage. Mr Biden’s poll lead seems to be holding up, and perhaps even increasing. Most Americans have chosen who they will vote for, and not a few have voted already. Everything that is happening seems to reinforcing those choices, on both sides, and making each side more motivated. As in the mid-term Congressional elections in 2018, that is mainly working for the Democrats. Can they seize the Senate?

But the biggest question to me is what will happen after the election, with the country so bitterly divided. Mr Trump doesn’t seem to care. But if Mr Biden wins, he will have a big job on his hands. He does seem to be aware of this.

Here in Britain, the UK government’s reputation is floundering. There is something curious about this. After its initial fumblings, and the appalling early death rate that resulted, the country’s record bears comparison with many of its peers. The record of the US is worse, and so is that of France, since June. Also the records of England (directly under the control of the UK government) and Scotland (mainly under the control of the devolved SNP government) is pretty similar. But Mr Johnson’s Conservatives have suffered much worse damage to their reputation. Mr Johnson’s style is ill-suited to the occasion, and, worse, he has surrounded himself with weak ministers, while more competent people remain on the sidelines criticising his record. There is a lot to criticise, of course, especially with the government’s failure to understand effective process management (with vastly inappropriate and over-centralised structures), and the lack of a clear strategy, as different factions vie to be heard. But others are making the same or worse mistakes and getting away with it. Mr Johnson is failing at the sorts of things politicians are supposed to be good at, as well as the ones for which they have little expertise. Many of theConservatives that voted Mr Johnson into office last year seem surprised; but most others are not.

So far the big winner from the crisis appears to be China. Although they too fumbled the early stages, with dire consequences for the rest of the world, their brand of totalitarian government has stamped out the disease and kept the virus at bay. Meanwhile everybody else is struggling: as they ease restrictions to let life go on as it should, the virus comes back, and the exponential dynamics of infectious diseases stoke. Still, some countries seem better able to handle the challenge than others. But it is hard to generalise. Herd immunity can be bought only at a very high price, in direct and indirect deaths, and debilitating “long-covid”, and may not last long-term anyway. But containment comes at a very high price too. A vaccine seems the best hope.

The world in August 2020: the dance of the Great Powers

I haven’t posted at all in August. This is mainly because my wife and I finally completed our house move to a village in East Sussex. We have been reunited with the bulk of our possessions after nearly four months of storage, and we have been unpacking figuring out what to do with them. Then came choosing and ordering all sorts of new things to fit our new house and lifestyle; getting to know the neighbours has been constrained by social distancing, but there has been some of that too. It just hasn’t felt appropriate to take time out to do some blogging. Besides I quite like to take extended periods off for reflection. I’m sill not sure what direction to take the blog. I’ve had two main ideas. One is to try to dig a bit deeper to develop some ideas in series of essays. The second is the opposite: to fire off quick opinions on the issues of the day. Of course I can do both. I’m going to try the second idea first, by reflecting on the month that has just passed.

The pandemic gets messy

The biggest issue of the day remains the Covid-19 pandemic. In the developed world the good news is that death rates have plummeted (outside the USA). But infections remain persistent, which makes loosening restrictions much harder. The exponential nature of infectious diseases means that things can quickly get out of control. Not enough people have caught it to confer herd immunity, and it looks likely that immunity isn’t conferred for long periods after illness anyway. Meanwhile the impact on jobs and normal life has been heavy, and could get worse as measures to head off the worst, such as paying people to do nothing, run out of steam. Difficult decisions pile up on governments and members of the public, and everybody, across the world, is struggling. Apart from trying to head off another wave of nasty, slow deaths, the biggest worry seems to be the effect this is all having on children’s education, closely followed by how to rebuild economies as people realise (or not) that the we can’t go back to how things were before.

The US election: is Trump catching up?

The month started with US President Donald Trump trailing his Democratic challenger Joe Biden for November’s presidential election. It ended with all sorts of experts from both sides saying that Mr Trump is closing the gap with his relentless focus on law and order, following riots in various US cities over police racism. The betting now has the two contenders nearly even. The hard evidence for this catching up is rather thin so far, so we await polling based on the month end, after the republican convention. Doubtless both sides have their reasons for talking up the President’s chances, but I remain sceptical. Compared to four years ago, many more people have already made up their minds. Those that have plumped for Trump will be cheering him on, and remain on fire. But Trump sceptics will have seen nothing in his transparent politicking and outright lies to persuade them to change their minds. Mr Biden seems to be holding his nerve, and appears to be well-advised. Mr Trump, on the other hand, remains his own worst enemy. Still the polls don’t have to narrow by very much for the election to become quite close, such is the built-in Republican advantage. But this is no rerun of 2016.

Belarus: spheres of influence

The big idea of the moment on the political right (taking in some on the left too) is national sovereignty and the primacy of the nation-state, with a reaction against supranational structures and treaties. Alas, just as it did in the 19th Century this soon morphs into an international system based on a small number of “Great Powers”, surrounded by minor powers, satellites and colonies who are not fully independent in any practical sense. Each Great Power demands its sphere of influence, where other Great Powers must keep their noses out. This is evident in Belarus, where there is a popular uprising against a rigged election and a dictatorial regime that has been in power for too long. But Belarus is, more clearly than any other country, within Russia’s sphere of influence. The rest of the world seems to accept this, and are keeping out of it. This is bad news for the people taking part in the uprising. President Lukashenko’s support in his security forces looks strong, and the Russian government do not want the uprising to succeed. They only want to weaken Mr Lukashenko’s regime so that they are less able to resist Russian influence, which doubtless involves making the Russian oligarchy richer. Belarus’s claim to be an independent nation is probably the weakest in Europe, after all; it only won independence from Russia by accident.

China: victim culture

Another Great Power seeking to undermine the independence of others to further its interests is China. Like Russia (which feels it was shafted when its communist regime collapsed in the 1990s) and the USA (where Trump supporters are convinced that their country has been taken advantage of by all and sundry), this assertiveness is driven by a strong sense of historical victimisation. In China’s case this is based on abuse by colonial powers in the 19th Century (it did not achieve Great Power status and was treated as fair game, by the values of the time) and then subjected to a decade of attack by Japan from the 1930s, in which it was devastated. China’s sense of victimhood has more historical validity than Russia’s or Donald Trump’s. But victim mentality is hard to turn into mature, constructive engagement and long-term success. The country is demonstrating its contempt for Western liberalism by crushing dissent in Hong Kong (where nobody questions its sphere of influence). Its subordination of all to its national interest, and its willingness to bully and bend rules, including its tolerance of cyber attacks from within its borders (or worse) have raised security fears for equipment supplied by businesses based their, and any data they might get their hands on. This is causing costly commercial disengagement with the West, not helped by Mr trump’s paranoia. It has now also deeply antagonised the other Asian giant, India. It is hard to know where all this is going. Personally I’m not as convinced as most commentators by the country’s unique combination of central party control with rampant commercialism, with the former increasingly taking priority. There are distinct financial instabilities which even China’s highly competent management may be unable to control, and the rest of the world is slowly ganging up against it.

A revitalised European Union

The EU hit a low point early in the year, as the advance of Covid-19 made it look irrelevant, and Britain’s exit diminished it. But the institution advances in times of crisis, and release from the Brexit saga seems to have invigorated it, as well as fresh leadership within the Commission. Its scheme to deliver collective relief for the Covid crisis broke new ground, especially with the issue of collective debt. The usual Anglo-Saxon sneerers (like the New Statesman columnist John Gray) predict the EU’s imminent demise, but, not for the first time, the institution lives on. The flaws of the nation-state system may not be evident to these critics, but it surely is to the EU’s member states. But it is sobering for British Europhiles like me to realise that the EU’s step forward has been made much easier by the UK’s departure. shared debt would have been a very hard sell in Britain’s political climate, even if Brexit had been headed off.

Brexit endgame

But Brexit isn’t done yet. What will happen once Britain ends its transition period from leaving the European Union on 1 January 2021? Negotiations seem deadlocked, with both sides blaming the other for intransigence. They may well both be right. Britain’s light-headed government as a strong belief in cobbling things together at the last minute, and does not want to end up as appearing to be an EU satellite. It hankers after status somewhere in between being a Great Power, where it develops spheres of influence, while not being in a minor power, where it would be in somebody else’s sphere of influence. There is no sign that this has been properly thought through, and so what it is prepared to compromise on. But the EU is behaving decidedly in the manner of Great Power which doesn’t mind denting a neighbour’s sovereignty for its own convenience. But a no-deal would be very costly to both sides, so the betting is that a way will be found of saving face.

Britain’s essay-crisis government

Britain’s Conservative government’s approach to Brexit, leaving everything difficult to the last minute and trying to bodge through, is reflected in everything it does, and the results aren’t pretty. The most egregious example in August was the collapse of its attempt to replace A-level and GCSE exam results with a moderated system of teacher assessments putting the overall results in line with previous years. Instead there has been massive grade inflation, and doubtless injustice as some teachers were more generous with their assessments than others (though, of course, this may be the case with exam marking too). The government had plenty of time to prepare, and yet walked straight into the elephant trap, relying on moderation by algorithm rather than human intervention. This partly reflects the managerial approach of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who celebrates his light touch, but abhors competence and dissent amongst his ministers. But it goes deeper. Britain’s political class has for a couple of generations become political specialists, with little experience of serious organisation and management beyond election campaigns. The civil service is little better, drawing a critical distinction between “policy” and “implementation”. Civil servants take pride in specialising in the the first, and assuming that the second can be dealt with by separate implementation specialists. In the real world policy and implementation need to be in a close feedback loop which separation makes impossible. And when the government (in both political and civil service guises) asks for help from practical people, it usually asks the wrong ones: people from big business or the major consultancies that support them. Big business succeeds by making things simple and employing economies of scale; public services are in the public sector largely because the have to deal with human complexity, for which this approach is ineffective (otherwise the private sector would already be handling them). The government’s sub-standard Covid testing and tracing regime arises from the false application of big business wisdom.

Ed Davey: the new Lib Dem leader

The British Liberal Democrats chose a new leader, Ed Davey, who comfortably beat his rival, Layla Moran. I know them both quite well. The party went for the experienced Ed, who was a coalition minister. Many of Layla’s supporters had hoped to put those coalition years, with their student tuition fees and benefits cuts, behind them. But many members had joined precisely because they thought the coalition was a worthy project. On being chosen, Ed said that the party had to “wake up and smell the coffee”. A rather tired cliché, but he is right that the party needs to broaden its appeal beyond an opposition to Brexit that tipped into taking sides in a culture war. Like the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, he seems to want to make competence centre stage, as the Conservatives seek to distract the public from their failures with cultures wars. But will the party be crushed by Labour? Or will Labour seek to operate in a sort of partnership depending on relative local strength? The answer to that depends on the party’s local strengths, and relatively little on the leadership. Meanwhile there is a lot of quotidian work to be done to make the party’s national infrastructure more effective, after years of crisis management have created dysfunction . The same can be said of Labour, but, as a smaller party the job is much easier for the Lib Dems. The party’s President, Mark Pack, and Chief Executive, Mike Dixon, recent appointments both, are up for this patient work – the signs are that Ed is too.

Deadly and contagious, this virus is reshaping our society

When the pandemic started to seriously intrude into our daily lives, in March, my view was the it might accelerate some changes, but it was being overplayed by some commentators as a society-changing event. My view is changing. And it is changing because the virus is proving so hard either to beat or to live with. It just won’t go away. In this week’s statement the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, made some steps towards acknowledging this. But many people are still in denial.

It is too early to develop a clear view of how this pandemic is evolving. But I can see at least three phases. The first phase is over. This saw the initial emergence of the disease, and immediate hard lockdowns to try and contain its spread, alongside the mobilisation of the health systems. In East Asia and Europe, and in some parts of America (such as New York) this strategy has succeeded in preventing or stemming a rapid advance. Elsewhere weak health systems or perverse political leadership means that the disease is still spreading rapidly. But that aside we are now in an awkward second phase. The lockdowns are being eased, but alongside this the disease is making local breakouts. It is becoming clearer that restrictions on our daily lives cannot be relaxed fully. Even if the disease can be stamped out in some areas, it remains prevalent in neighbouring ones, and the threat of it returning ever-present.

We still don’t know enough about the virus that is causing all the trouble, how it spreads, and its effects on the human body. But some aspects are becoming clearer. The first is that it is deadly. It does not seem to affect many of the people it infects, and some people seem to think that it merely hastens the demise of people already at death’s door. And yet 20-30% of the population appears to be vulnerable in most places, and it has the capacity to double the death-rate, or more. Hospitals become overwhelmed and unable to deal with other health conditions. The second aspect is that it is highly contagious, much more so than other viruses that are deadlier to the infected (such as ebola). Just how contagious is unknown, but we do know that super spreading events occur, where dozens of people are infected by a single individual at once. Being indoors seems dangerous, as does being in proximity to people who are exhaling heavily, such as people singing, shouting or exercising. Wearing masks seems to be a significant help in reducing infection risk. What makes the virus so much of a problem is this combination of lethality and contagiousness. We are conditioned to deal with diseases that are highly contagious but not so deadly (like most flu) or deadlier but much less contagious. To these two known aspects there is an important unknown. Does catching the disease confer immunity to it? There is a widespread assumption that it does, meaning that we can expect herd immunity to arise at some point, when most people can’t catch or spread the virus. But the emerging evidence is troubling. Antibody tests show low rates of prevalence even in places where the disease has been widespread. And there are reports of people being infected multiple times. A second unknown is how quickly we can get an effective vaccine. There has been impressive progress, but plenty of reason to be cautious.

So where does that leave us? Developed societies have no choice but to try and contain the disease. This means changing behaviours to reduce the risk of catching it. This arises partly through public policy and partly through private choice. As I said in my previous post this means that many people are going to avoid social gatherings indoors, including going out to pubs and restaurants. The more prevalent the disease at any time and place, the more such measures have to be taken. The best we can hope for is containing the disease to low prevalence, allowing quite high levels if freedom, but stamping on local outbreaks as they occur. This is being done most successfully in East Asia; in Europe Germany is the main large exemplar. But even this is far from normal. The big problem is that we are going to have to live with this disease for a year at least and probably a lot longer. This has profound consequences.

The main consequence is in the world of work, and in the economy generally. There are two main aspects to this. First is that sectors that rely on close social contact and free movement are going to shrink, perhaps drastically. This includes hospitality and travel. The second is that productivity in most sectors is going to be dented as health precautions take effect. This will inevitably reduce the standard of living. Prices will rise faster than pay; taxes will probably have to rise to curb excess demand and inflation. All this is too much for most people to take on all at once. Many are still trying to negotiate with the virus. I hear owners of indoor gyms complaining about not being allowed to open, like other businesses are. And yet an indoor gym must be one of the best spreading environments conceivable, after a mass indoor choir.

So how did Mr Sunak face up to this huge challenge in his budget statement this week? Pretty well in the circumstances. The most important thing is that he is pivoting from trying to keep old jobs alive (e.g. through the furlough scheme) to creating new ones, in particular focusing efforts on younger people, whose livelihoods are most at risk. His generosity towards the hospitality sector with his VAT scheme and meal discounts may look hopeless against the tide of events – but it does demonstrate some empathy towards one of the sectors most under pressure, which could reduce the short-term trauma somewhat. His £1,000 bonus for firms that retain furloughed staff until January looks harder to justify. It is hard to believe that it will make much difference to job retention, and yet it is estimated to cost huge sums. Surely it would have been better to top up benefits for the out-of-work. His reduction of stamp duty on property purchases looks like an expensive sop to party donors – though I personally stand to benefit.

But, as most people see, this is only a start. In the pipeline are more job losses and business failures, which will bring more problems in their wake. There is also an upcoming crisis in local government finance, as central government support to meet the extra costs of the crisis is woefully inadequate, and the role local government needs to play in combatting the virus is becoming ever larger. This will be the third phase of the pandemic, as the economic crisis deepens, while the struggle to contain the virus continues. Conventional economic management tools are not going to help as much as they should be. A lot of the problem is restriction to the supply side of the economy, while demand is suppressed by fear as much as lack of funds – so boosting demand simply risks creating inflation or a currency crisis. However job creation in public services: health care, social care and education, looks like a sensible way forward. Lower productivity means more people will be needed in these sectors. A rebalancing of the economy from private to public sector will surely mean tax rises in due course, but with no shortage of liquidity in financial markets the government can probably defer some of the hard decisions.

And meanwhile the public will have to confront some hard truths. The virus shows that the free-wheeling individualism at the core of western societies has its limits. It is not sustainable to suggest that individuals can judge the health risks for themselves, since by spreading a lethal disease the consequences of their actions will mainly be felt by others. The failure of so many people in Britain and parts of America to wear masks in public shows how far we have to go. We have something to learn form the East Asians. But not China. That is another story.

What are Donald Trump’s chances in November?

Like many Britons who follow politics, I follow US politics enthusiastically. But I don’t like to comment so much on it here. I have no special connection to the US zeitgeist,and it seems to be a bit rude to comment on somebody else’s politics. But we can’t help but be affected by the US, so I feel I must comment from time to time. The big question is whether Donald Trump will be reelected as President this November.

At the start of the year Mr Trump’s position looked strong. The economy was doing well, he was delivering to his base, and all of his potential Democratic opponents had limitations and weaknesses. He easily saw off impeachment, successfully portraying it as a manifestation of partisan politics. Mr Trump’s divisive style never made him a shoo-in in this year’s election, but he was the betting favourite. But then things started to go wrong. The Democrats resolved their selection race with unexpected speed, in favour of Joe Biden, the candidate, apparently, that Mr Trump most feared. And then came the Coronavirus epidemic, which saw Mr Trump conspicuously flailing. This was followed by the Black Lives Matter explosion after the murder of George Floyd, and more presidential flailing. Mr Biden has a steady and growing poll lead both nationally and in the battleground states, a lead that is bigger and steadier than Hillary Clinton achieved at this stage in 2016. But we have over four months to go, and a lot can happen.

To win, what Mr Trump needs to do is to motivate his base, demotivate the Democrats’ base and win over independent voters. The first part of this is going well enough for him. Mr Trump’s base has two main components: his fanbase and anti-liberals. The fanbase consists of less well-educated white people, who have felt excluded by political elites for decades. Mr Trump speaks their language and expresses what they feel. They experience a sort of euphoria when Mr Trump expresses their values from the top of the political system; they are happy to disregard incompetence for the sheer joy of seeing one their own in charge. And with Mr Trump, unlike many other populists, what you see is what you get; there is no guile about him. This increases the bond of trust. The anti-liberals, on the other hand, are not admirers of Mr Trump personally, but they love him because because he is a bastion against the advance of liberal values. They are passionate about such things as stopping abortion and maintaining complete freedom over the ownership of firearms. They don’t believe in a strong Federal state, apart from having strong armed forces, so they aren’t bothered by Mr Trump’s evident incompetence. This group is diverse, but religious groups are prominent. They also include many business owners who dislike government regulation and taxes, and seek opportunities for cosy deals. For this group Mr Trump has delivered on his promises, most notably in the appointment of Supreme Court (and other) justices, but also with tax cuts for companies and the neutering of federal regulation; he has also held the line against gun law reform, in spite of a spate of mass shootings. For the anti-liberals the Democrats pose as great a threat as ever, and there is no sign that their enthusiasm for reelecting Donald Trump is fading. Doubtless Mr Trump’s partisan approach to the Covid crisis and the BLM uprising helps motivate this group too. They are on fire.

How about the Democrats’ base? Their main weakness is their candidate. He’s been around for a long time, and there is lot of grey in his record, not least around claims of sexual harassment. Before the BLM explosion there were signs that younger voters were becoming demotivated by all the questions being raised by his record. But Mr Trump clearly doesn’t get why people are so angry about the Floyd murder. To him this is just an isolated crime, and not evidence of a systemic failure. He doesn’t feel the pain of decades of being fobbed off with talk of progress. In fact his behaviour has given succour to the forces of darkness. He has thus become a channel for anger across the Democrats’ base, and has managed to fire them up.

And how about independents? This is a harder group for people on this side of the Atlantic to read. Mr Trump picked up many independents in 2016, because his campaign to undermine Mrs Clinton’s credibility was so successful, and her campaign to reassure them was so weak. Mr Trump fitted the American model of a successful and admirable businessman much better than the European one, so people there were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, while most Europeans had written him off as a nutcase. It is probably this group that is gradually coming over to Mr Biden as Mr Trump showcases his incompetence. But they are doubtless wary of the Democrats too.

So what next? The campaign hasn’t really got started yet. We know that Mr Trump will try to make it about Mr Biden and not himself, by hammering on his weaknesses. He already refers to him as “Sleepy Joe”. But this is surely not as effective as “Crooked Hillary”‘; voters are tired of hyperactive and hyper partisan politics; “sleepy” doesn’t sound so bad. But there are plenty of cracks in Mr Biden’s candidacy, so the attack could work. A further issue is whether the need to keep his base fired up moves Mr Biden into tricky policy territory. The demand to “defund” the police may not be as bad as it sounds, but it sounds like an invitation to criminals.

A big question hangs over the future course of the epidemic. Mr Trump is playing on the idea that the threat was exaggerated and lockdown measures were overdone (by Democrat governors and mayors), and he is supporting the lifting of the lockdown, even though many think this is premature. This builds on the different experiences of the epidemic across America. It has been devastating in big, crowded cities, such as New York and New Orleans, but much less so in less densely populated places. By and large Republican voters’ experience has been much less severe than that of Democrats. So if the disease retreats even as the lockdown is removed, and the economy bounces back, the Republicans will claim vindication while the pain of many cities will be forgotten as they will vote Democrat anyway. And the administration’s financial management of the crisis has been perfectly competent, largely because Mr Trump has been happy to leave that to others, and not disrupt it.

On the other hand, the disease could boomerang, hitting Republican areas hard, and disrupting the economic recovery. This is particularly likely as Autumn approaches and the weather cools: i.e. just as America approaches the vote. This could create a perfect storm for the Republicans. Mr Trump’s plan to hold mass election rallies in defiance of social distancing and mask-wearing looks especially risky.

And that points to something that I think will be the deciding issue against Mr Trump. He has become very dependent on his own judgement. When he was first elected, it was expected by many that he would surround himself with competent people, and let them do most of the work. And that seemed to be what was happening, with the recruitment of many generals to his administration, and with Steve Bannon advising on political strategy. But Mr Trump hates to be managed and he has replaced almost everybody with more compliant people who will go along with his madnesses, with the interesting exceptions of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. This has made Mr Trump much more likely to make mistakes. Mr Biden, on the other hand, while gaffe-prone, surely knows how to ask for and accept advice.

But four months is an eternity in this crazy year.

Will the Euro survive the Coronavirus crisis?

So far in this astonishing episode, the world’s financial systems have held up well. Remarkably, lessons have been learned from the Great Financial Crisis, both in the behaviour of policymakers, and in the resilience of banks. But many claim that the Euro is especially vulnerable. Are they right?

The crisis so far has not been good for the egos of the Europocrats. The response has been led almost totally by the governments of its member states. It turns out that the EU really is just a free trade area after all. When something more important than trade comes along it has nothing important to do. And when its leaders at last got together to sort out a financial response, the outcome was pathetic, and spoiled by the sort of bickering shows that there is little solidarity amongst the member states.

Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, called this out on BBC Radio 4. The most important part of the EU’s infrastructure, the Euro, has turned into an instrument of oppression. The rich northern states, notably Germany and the Netherlands, were vetoing any serious aid to the most afflicted states, such as Italy and Spain, while not allowing them to help themselves. He said that German leaders should level with their public: the Euro was really good for their economy, but to keep it going they needed to be more generous to other members. The Italians, in particular, are throughly disillusioned and could provoke an existential crisis for the zone.

There is plenty of truth in what Mr Varoufakis is saying, but nobody should bet on the dissolution of the Euro just yet. Critics of the system miss two things. Firstly, as this week’s Buttonwood column in The Economist has pointed out, the European Central Bank (ECB) has learned a lot from the previous crisis and has now become the EU’s most effective institution, and not bogged down by the bickering that undermines the more overtly political arms. It has, amongst other things, rushed to buy up debt from Italy and Spain, thus greatly assisting a strong fiscal response to the crisis. This has the effect of mutualising their debt by stealth. The ECB has learnt the art of doing just enough to keep the Euro going, while being unable to fix its deeper flaws.

The second point is more subtle. It is wrong to suggest, as Mr Varoufakis does, the Euro is in effect a plot by Germany to rob Italy. It is better understood as a conspiracy between German workers and Italian savers. The Germans get plentiful and secure jobs, because their currency is held down, allowing its industry to run a surplus. Italian savers get more buying power for their money in a currency that is stronger than their own would be, with less risk of inflation. The victims are Italian workers, whose firms struggle to make progress with such a strong currency, and German savers, who lose buying power. It is arguments between these victims that drive the acrimonious politics of the Eurozone. Politicians like to blame an outsider, so German ones like to blame lazy Italian workers for low returns by their savers, and Italian ones like to blame the Germans for screwing their businesses.

So the Euro’s losers drive the day to day politics, but as soon as it looks as if they might succeed in their goal of causing the collapse of the Euro, the winners, German workers and Italian savers, hoist it out of trouble with a twitch upon a thread. The clearest example of this is Marine Le Pen’s tilt at the French presidency. Her bid featured resentment at the Euro, and it got her into the final round against Emmanuel Macron, but it rapidly collapsed when, in one of the debates, she floated the idea that France might leave the Euro. French savers, many of them older voters sympathetic to Ms Le Pen’s anger at liberal elites, suddenly realised that there could be a cost to their protest and deserted her. Something like this effect will happen in Italian politics if anti-Euro politicians get too much traction there.

So the Euro is safe but the politics is grim. What is needed are two things: more enlightened self-interest from northern leaders, and more willingness to embrace economic reforms by southern ones. The big trading surpluses by northern countries mean that they could easily be more generous to their southern neighbours by buying their goods and services or through direct aid (though lending them money simply builds trouble for later). Each of the southern economies has economic inefficiencies that their leaders should do more to tackle. In Italy it is excessive petty regulations to protect economic vested interests. In Spain it is lack of labour market flexibility. In Greece it is a failure to collect enough tax, especially from the better off. Until they tackle these they will always be supplicants and politically vulnerable.

For all that, the Euro has some very challenging times ahead (as do the US dollar and the Chinese Yuan, for differing reasons). Italy could easily be faced with a banking crisis, at a time when the attempts to mutualise banking risk across the Eurozone are incomplete. The acrimony will continue.

And this will set the EU on a trajectory that makes it more and more resemble the Holy Roman Empire. This was a tangle of German states, led by an Emperor with little practical authority. It was much despised by Enlightenment thinkers, and finally brought to an end by Napoleon. But it was the foundation of the strong commerce and devolved administration that makes Germany (and Austria) such successful states today. This is something Anglo-Saxon observers almost never understand.

Donald Trump’s message to Iran: get nukes fast

US President Donald Trump doesn’t do quiet confidence. If he had, then he might have ended 2019 displaying it. Which makes his actions in Iran in early 2020 baffling.

As Autumn approached Mr Trump might have been worried about his reelection and his legacy. He came into office promising to show his vaunted business skills, in contrast to his inept predecessors. He was the arch deal maker, he claimed. And yet he had practically nothing to show for it. His attempts to negotiate with North Korea had run into the sand. His dramatic ripping up of the “worst deal ever” to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions had not restrained that country’s foreign adventures, and seemed to be hastening the day when it would become nuclear. There were almost no trade deals: even the replacement for NAFTA was stuck in Congress. On other issues, his attempt to negotiate a fabulous new deal for Americans on healthcare had long since collapsed. It was painfully slow to find funding for his border wall. He had aggressively slapped tariffs on Chinese trade, but he seemed unable to close any kind of deal with China, while America’s trade deficit roared ahead. His one significant achievement in his term to date was corporate tax cuts, which probably left most Americans unimpressed.

It got worse. He allowed Turkey’s President Erdogan to talk him into winding down the American presence in Syria, abandoning his Kurdish ally. Whatever strategic sense this made, it was tactically inept. It angered many of his Republican allies.

But this blew over, and things started to look up. As the race to be his Democratic opponent in 2020 started to heat up, it became clear that each of the candidates had weaknesses that he could exploit. There is nobody he can be truly scared of. The House of Representatives also cracked after revelations on Mr Trump’s attempts to pressurise Ukraine, and set impeachment proceedings in motion. This largely works in Mr Trump’s favour; ordinary voters will not be able to fully understand his wrongdoing and its implications, especially after these are buried by the barrage of nonsense supplied by him and his many allies. The whole episode will just serve to distract attention from his weak record in office. Meanwhile he managed to close a deal with the Democrats in Congress for the NAFTA replacement, and some kind of interim deal with China looks close. The wall is being built. Even in the Middle East, Iran was under increasing pressure from its own people, and those fed up with its meddling in Iraq and Lebanon. Thin pickings, perhaps, and North Korea is going from bad to worse, but enough for Mr Trump to suggest things were going his way at last. His core support was holding up. If opinion polls still seemed against him, he might reflect that they were probably good enough: all he needs to do in November is hold the states that voted for him last time; he needs no majority in the popular vote. Enough for some quiet confidence.

But then came the Iran/Iraq episode. He firstly overreacted to a militia attack on a US base in Iraq, and then, after those Iranian-backed militias made a not-all-that-serious attack on the US embassy, he launched his assassination of Qasem Soleimani and his associates. This is a dramatic escalation, to which Iran has “no choice”, in the oft-repeated phrase, to respond. The Iranian government is playing the episode for all it is worth to distract attention from its other troubles.

What makes this very striking is that it goes against the general restraint Mr Trump has shown in the Middle East. He is much criticised for this, and has shown no tactical acumen, but he is not wrong in principle. Not, at any rate, in his wish to disengage the US military involvement, and treat Russian adventurism with a shrug. We need to get beyond the post-colonialist thinking that everything that happens in the region is somehow the result of US and western government actions, while denying multiple local actors agency and responsibility themselves. Mr Trump is, though, wrong in principle to think that ripping up the Iranian nuclear deal and applying sanctions to that country will make it more amenable, rather than making the whole region a lot messier. This is the logic of the bully, who assumes their own actions are principled and everybody else simply responds to the exercise of menace.

The defence put up by Mr Trump’s supporters are really hard to fathom. Soleimani was a bad man and his removal will make peace more likely, they say. Soleimani, and his like in the Iranian regime, are indeed bad people. They use innocent human lives as pawns in their games, and have no compunction in perpetrating murder. But he was also a senior state actor, and acting against him is like declaring war on the Iranian state. Assassination is a very dubious instrument of state policy. Israel has long used it, but its conflicts with neighbours and people within its borders have just dragged on regardless. The Iranians are no worse than the Russians, but would the US attack senior Russian officials in this way?

Which brings me to the central point. The US under Mr Trump treats nuclear armed powers with respect, even such mavericks as North Korea. Mr Trump seems to think that the rational response to his behaviour is to come to the negotiating table to make serious concessions. Iranian leaders are just as likely to think that the only rational course for them is to acquire nuclear weapons as fast as they can.

As I write the Iranian response has begun with some missile strikes at US bases in Iraq. They are suggesting that this is the limit of their response, though it is hard to know whether to take that seriously. Mr Trump seems to be shrugging it off. If that is all that happens, then Mr Trump will have got off lightly, and he and his supporters will claim victory.

But earlier the Iranian regime abandoned its vestigial adherence to the nuclear deal. Their thinking may be to deliver this rather underwhelming response and then go as hard and fast as they can for nuclear weapons. In their eyes that is probably the most rational approach: if Mr Trump wants to scale down US action in the Middle East, there will be little they can do to stop Iran, if that country does not present too many easy targets for air strikes.

The US public is unlikely to understand that this is what is happening, and look on Mr Trump’s actions favourably. If so Mr Trump’s faith in his own genius will be affirmed. At some point this has to unravel. Doesn’t it?