Meanwhile, Hartwich praises those conservatives who, like him, have attacked Trump. (Think George Will and Bill Kristol.) But he unsparingly criticises Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson and others, who have decided Trump’s virtues far outweigh his vices. And let me be clear, this first Hartwich article is highly moralised. There is a clear side of the angels – namely those like him who see Trump as basically evil – and then those (and I paraphrase liberally) whose moral standards have fallen to such a low point that they allow themselves to support a man like this. Indeed, I do not think anyone can read this first Hartwich article and pithily summarise it in any other way. Of course whenever one writes in such a manner he opens himself up to the charge of having succumbed to puffed-up, sanctimonious self-righteousness.
The second article from May of this year turns from the US domestic scene to the international one. Using Thomas Hobbes’s famous view of the awfulness of the state of nature, Hartwich here casts the US as the main villain in undermining the liberal rules-based order that has served the West so well since the end of the Second World War. Unsurprisingly for anyone who happened to read his earlier March jeremiad or sermon (as the tone does shift back and forth between these two), Hartwich again makes Trump the villain of this piece. For at least the last year or so, goes Oliver’s claim, the US President has not just been a symptom of this decline but its cause. This opens the door to more Hartwich criticisms of US foreign policy under Trump.
I write here because I beg to differ with the entire substance of these Hartwichian claims, as well as with a good few of the jots and tittles details. Hence, consider this article to be my response to the two-part Hartwich anti-Trump diatribe. Of course this may not surprise readers who noticed my reply to Roger Partridge’s anti-Trump pieces in these pages last year (and for what it’s worth, the Partridge comparisons there of Trump to Mussolini and Hitler still look totally ridiculous to me). But I preface this reply, as I did that one to Partridge, by noting that I have known and very much liked Oliver Hartwich for many years now going back to when I lived and worked in New Zealand myself. I think his writings on economics are excellent. But on the topic of Trump, well, I am afraid that my view is that Oliver is seriously wrong-headed. Put it this way. If Oliver is not displaying a near-Hollywood level of Trump Derangement Syndrome, then what that would look like I have no idea.
With that preamble out of the way, let me note how Hartwich’s first article approaches the issue of President Trump’s alleged breaches of the rule of law, his alleged weaponising of the Justice Department and all the rest of Oliver’s alleged Trump failings. The approach is to ignore everything that was done by earlier Democrat administrations to Trump and the Republicans, even when those earlier actions look to me – and to many others – to be far worse than even what Hartwich alleges of Trump. (Please note readers that I am not conceding the force of any of Oliver’s Trump allegations, as I will detail below. I merely point out here that these alleged Trump failings seem pretty piddling and inconsequential compared to what we know was done to Trump.) Put bluntly, there is not a single word anywhere by Hartwich, not even a perfunctory, passing nod, about any of the following. For instance, nowhere does Oliver mention:
The second article from May of this year turns from the US domestic scene to the international one. Using Thomas Hobbes’s famous view of the awfulness of the state of nature, Hartwich here casts the US as the main villain in undermining the liberal rules-based order that has served the West so well since the end of the Second World War. Unsurprisingly for anyone who happened to read his earlier March jeremiad or sermon (as the tone does shift back and forth between these two), Hartwich again makes Trump the villain of this piece. For at least the last year or so, goes Oliver’s claim, the US President has not just been a symptom of this decline but its cause. This opens the door to more Hartwich criticisms of US foreign policy under Trump.
I write here because I beg to differ with the entire substance of these Hartwichian claims, as well as with a good few of the jots and tittles details. Hence, consider this article to be my response to the two-part Hartwich anti-Trump diatribe. Of course this may not surprise readers who noticed my reply to Roger Partridge’s anti-Trump pieces in these pages last year (and for what it’s worth, the Partridge comparisons there of Trump to Mussolini and Hitler still look totally ridiculous to me). But I preface this reply, as I did that one to Partridge, by noting that I have known and very much liked Oliver Hartwich for many years now going back to when I lived and worked in New Zealand myself. I think his writings on economics are excellent. But on the topic of Trump, well, I am afraid that my view is that Oliver is seriously wrong-headed. Put it this way. If Oliver is not displaying a near-Hollywood level of Trump Derangement Syndrome, then what that would look like I have no idea.
With that preamble out of the way, let me note how Hartwich’s first article approaches the issue of President Trump’s alleged breaches of the rule of law, his alleged weaponising of the Justice Department and all the rest of Oliver’s alleged Trump failings. The approach is to ignore everything that was done by earlier Democrat administrations to Trump and the Republicans, even when those earlier actions look to me – and to many others – to be far worse than even what Hartwich alleges of Trump. (Please note readers that I am not conceding the force of any of Oliver’s Trump allegations, as I will detail below. I merely point out here that these alleged Trump failings seem pretty piddling and inconsequential compared to what we know was done to Trump.) Put bluntly, there is not a single word anywhere by Hartwich, not even a perfunctory, passing nod, about any of the following. For instance, nowhere does Oliver mention:
- That under Obama and Biden (both Democrats) the FBI spied on Trump’s Presidential campaign, put surveillance on some of Trump’s advisors, lied to a FISA court, and fabricated a Russian collusion story to help justify a special counsel that would be used for a Trump impeachment by the House Democrats;
- That the Biden administration organised dozens of ex-intelligence higher-ups to announce publicly before the 2020 election that the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign – and did so when they all knew, all of them and most relevantly Biden and his senior people – that that was false and that the laptop was real, and we now know that later polling showed the laptop story could easily have shifted the 2020 election outcome if voters had known it was true;
- That as Senator Ted Cruz has just recently made public, Biden’s FBI wiretapped Trump’s now Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’s phone on a privileged call to her lawyers without the consent or knowledge of either of those parties and then tried to hide this by marking the file ‘prohibited’;
- That the Biden administration, with the help of a few Democrat State Attorneys-General, brought four ridiculously weak indictments against Trump (and if Oliver wants to argue that any of the four were remotely in keeping with normal legal standards or that anything similar had ever been done to a past President then he can just name the debate time and place and I will be there) that threatened to put him jail for hundreds of years – and did this while he was the official opposition candidate in the upcoming Presidential election;
- Not only that, with the clear support of the Biden administration the New York AG – a woman who ran for the post with the explicit promise to ‘get Trump’ – tried to bankrupt him with a civil suit so risible it was eventually tossed on appeal in the New York state courts. But not before Trump lost at first instance and was fined half a billion dollars. Remember the basic facts? Trump gives a value for Mar-a-Lago. The lending bank sends out assessors and is completely happy with the valuation. Trump borrows the money and then pays it back early and ahead of time. A rabidly anti-Trump judge and Letitia James (the above New York AG) build an incoherent case that involved changing all known protocols to posit wrongdoing though all the banks were happy with the loan (and wanted to lend to him again, in fact). This scheme of theirs also involved the AG and judge valuing Mar-a-Logo at between $18 and $27 million in order to allege some never-before-heard-of and after-the-fact type of fraud against the bank by Trump. Forbes, by the way, later valued Mar-a-Lago at $650 million;
Now perhaps Oliver Hartwich has mentioned all these breaches of the norms of democratic government by Democrats and Democrat administrations somewhere. And perhaps he has described all these wrongs done to Trump with an equivalent level of moral outrage to that he displayed in these pages when criticising Trump in his first article. Perhaps. But if he has, I have certainly not come across it.
At this point let us stop and ask a question. Because what happened to Trump came first – the Russian collusion hoax, the attempts to bankrupt, imprison and take him off the ballot, the legacy media-aided raids on Mar-a-Lago, the list goes on for some time. And all of these precursors look to me as though they could broadly be characterised as weaponising the Biden Department of Justice and the intelligence services. Or as systematically violating the rule of law. Or as undermining the institutional integrity of the courts, law enforcement and the civil service. You know? All the morally pregnant substantive charges Hartwich hurled at Trump in his first article. It’s just that they all happened to Trump first. Hence here’s the question. What is the proper way to respond to grievous wrongs done to oneself? How does one (or ought one to) respond when the other side has tried to imprison and bankrupt you, has spied on your campaign, has lied to the FISA courts, has triggered bogus impeachments that eat up political time and political capital, has knowingly covered up the Hunter laptop truth, has behaved far worse than Richard Nixon did? Do you take it all on the chin and pretend it did not happen? Or do you set out to find and prosecute the people who did this to you?
Now there is a respectable argument that turning the other cheek might be best. Let me be clear that I do not agree with that view. I think that even a passing knowledge of game theory makes it plain that bad conduct demands some sort of reciprocity or it will happen again down the road. Still, the more Christian approach is certainly a respectable view. Maybe that is Oliver’s view. But we do not know, and cannot know, if that is his view because (as I have said) Hartwich writes as though all of the Trump 2 administration’s actions that he dislikes happened in a vacuum – out of the blue and for no reason at all, except for Trump’s deficient moral character. Yet with all due respect to my long-time New Zealand friend Oliver, what he has done is to paint a seriously distorted picture of what caused what and who did what to whom. The facts are plain. Obama and Biden were the first bad actors. Trump was a responder. That, of course, only goes so far in terms of justifying anything. A few Quaker-types might even try to argue that it goes no way at all towards justifying otherwise unjustifiable actions, that two wrongs never make a right. To use a grandiose Second World War analogy – references to Second World War baddies being something many Trump-haters seem unable to resist – this is the school of thought that believes that Churchill and FDR were wrong in bombing Dresden. Well, as I said, this Quaker-type view is respectable. But I believe it is wrong.
That is point one of my substantive reply to Hartwich. You can only judge Trump’s domestic actions in his second administration in the light of what was done to him beforehand by the Obama and Biden administrations.
Let me now move to a second point. Here I want readers to focus simply on the specific allegations that Hartwich made in his first article (as opposed to the high-falutin’ moralised denunciations). I counted seven. I will take them in a reverse order of importance (at least as I see it), from trifling to serious.
So one trifling complaint by Oliver is that some conservative commentators (such as George Will and Bill Kristol and Johah Goldberg) lost most or all of their influence and audience by opposing Trump. So? Readers and listeners have no obligation to agree with these people. Or with Hartwich. Is Oliver saying they somehow deserve an audience? Bill Kristol strikes me as (how does one put this?) having lost all perspective and judgement when it comes to Trump. Put it no higher than this. Some of these people Hartwich mentions made it clear they would support Kamala Harris over Trump. For me, anyone who thinks she was the better choice is in a different political galaxy to me. And, it would seem, to almost all Right-of-centre American voters, all the over 77 million Americans who voted for Trump and saw him win the popular vote for the first time by a Republican in decades. Just recall some of Trump’s substantive achievements since then, only a year-and-a-half into his second term. Trump has closed the border completely and seen well over two million illegal aliens leave the US (some deported and some voluntarily). That, alone, would win my vote. Come in illegally and you have to go. No exceptions. No amnesties. This, by the way, is the key issue driving the insurgent parties’ successes in Germany and in big chunks of Europe. And here in Australia. And for Nigel Farage in Britain. Whether Hartwich agrees with the voters who think this way or not is beside the point. Trump campaigned on the immigration issue and then he set about doing what he promised on that issue – where myriad other conservative politicians said one thing to win and then did another time after time after time – just as with every issue on which he campaigned. Some would say doing what you promised fits in pretty well with an expanded, abstract and fluffy notion of the rule of law (which, by the way, is the understanding of the rule of law which Hartwich himself plainly utilises, for good or ill).
Continuing on with his successes, Trump has reduced the federal civil service back to below 1966 levels, down some 11.5% or 350,000 jobs gone. He has withdrawn from the Net Zero Paris Accords and the whole climate alarmism worldview to “drill, baby, drill” (yea, says I); from the UN Human Rights Council (yea, says I); from the WHO (yea says anyone like me who understands the role it played in the Covid lockdown thuggery); and from other conventions and treaties worth leaving.
Next, because of Trump’s willingness to use the National Guard the murder rate in the US is now below where it was 125 years ago, remembering that US murder victims are highly disproportionately black and are highly disproportionately murdered by other blacks. The deficit is much lower than under Biden. The first-year respective inflation rates favour Trump 2 big time over Biden. Trump has fought back hard against the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion divas in the bureaucracy, civil service and universities – with some wins and some rearguard actions by the DEI divas, yes, but compare this to New Zealand and Australian and British conservatives when in office. Trump has taken on activist judges and fought to turn off the tap going to NGOs and the bureaucracies and the Left-leaning public broadcaster, the money often being spent in ways no one can detail or account for. Trump knows what a woman is (because yes, he has some expertise on that front, I admit it) and so has tackled head-on the transgender lobby. On every one of these issues Trump signalled what he would do before the election and then he did it, or tried to. If Oliver or Billy Kristol or Jonah Goldberg don’t like these actions, too bad. They can vote for Kamala again in 2028.
Another trifling complaint Hartwich makes is that Trump “denigrates allies and courts adversaries”. So? This is a purely form-over-substance complaint. It only gains traction in the finer salons of the inner-city elites. My long-expressed view is that the Left has captured so many and much of the cultural and educational institutions in the West, and of the legacy media and bureaucracy, that it takes a pugilist with the thickest of skins to be willing to fight back. Yes, Trump can be boorish and crass and self-regarding. But we buy people wholesale not retail. The kind of person who can get up after three assassination attempts, after the Left has tried to imprison and bankrupt him, after myriad people who should know better have described him as a latter day Hitler (which indirectly licenses violence against the man, does it not?), well, that kind of guy may well not be someone everyone would want to have to a refined dinner party – though Trump is reportedly pretty good company and funny. Personally, given the state of the West today, I could not care less about this second Oliver grievance.
The third least important grievance Hartwich makes is about James Comey being fired as director of the FBI in 2017. Well, there is pretty good evidence Comey was in up to his neck in the Russia collusion scam and in the FBI’s lying to the FISA court. Want to know how many top people Obama fired when he came in? I don’t see how this is a serious complaint. Oliver says the firing took place “in the midst of an investigation into [Trump’s] campaign”. Ya, a bogus investigation premised on the Hillary paid-for Steele dossier underlying the Russian collusion scam that crippled the first two years of Trump’s first term. Breaches of the rule of law and undermining institutional integrity should be made of sterner stuff, a lot sterner. I would also have fired Comey.
The fourth Oliverian complaint as we move up in seriousness is that Hartwich claims Trump has weaponised the Department of Justice. The legacy media back when Obama and Biden went after Trump used to intone ‘no one is above the law’. When Trump’s Department of Justice sets out to investigate what was done to him (so, note, we are talking about reciprocity and responding to a first wrong), the legacy media instead talks of ‘weaponising the DoJ’. Put it no stronger than this. I wholly dispute and reject Hartwich’s characterisation here that what is happening can be fairly described as ‘weaponisation’. Nope. It’s looking at past illegal conduct, some of it having been aimed at derailing the Trump 1 administration and some at Trump when he was the official candidate of the opposition.
That leaves three grievances. Oliver does not like the legal investigation into Jerome Powell. Frankly, I don’t like it much myself. The costs over-runs are shocking. But the real problem here is that Trump thinks both a) that Powell needs to loosen monetary policy and b) that Powell did take that loosey-goosey monetary policy approach under Biden but that he is now playing politics and making life difficult under Trump. Well, I think that the latter of those Trump views is pretty defensible on the evidence. I am agnostic on the former. I just think Trump would do better politically letting this one go. But again, how does this undermine the rule of law? Powell wanted to stay. He stayed. The massive costs over-runs look really bad. But no one was denying Powell his day in court – you know, the way Trump had to go to court to defend four distinct and bogus indictments. No one is invoking never-before-heard-of charges, as happened to Trump more than once. For me, this was and is a Trump political error. Still, it did not come close to justifying the conclusions of the first Hartwich article. No voter will ever find a candidate whose views and actions perfectly align with that voter’s. Well, no one who is not a bit in need of a life.
The second last Oliver gravamen is about tariffs. Now early on in his article Hartwich concedes that “nobody disputes that tariffs [as in imposing them in a big way] … [are] a legitimate position to hold”. That is correct. And again, it was a key and repeated campaign pledge by Trump that he would impose them. So how in the world does it matter in the least that Hartwich thinks “tariffs contradict decades of conservative economic argument”? By that I mean, how does Trump’s position on tariffs make him a breaker of accepted democratic norms or of the rule of law (in some puffed-up, moralised sense)? I get that economists working for many Right-of-centre think tanks do not like them. In democratic terms the answer to that by many voters is ‘So what? We don’t care what the Hartwiches of the world think or want. Our candidate won almost three million more votes than the other candidate and he is now doing precisely what he said he would do.’
And that leaves really the only specifically articulated grievance or allegation that Oliver lists that amounts to anything. I think Hartwich is wrong here too. But this one is widely believed by most Left-wing Americans and deserves a response. This is Hartwich’s assertion that “[Trump] attempted to overturn an election he lost, culminating in violence at the Capitol”. Let me divide this into three parts. Did Trump incite violence at the Capitol? No, he clearly did not or the Biden administration would most certainly have prosecuted him for that rather than resort to four bogus Hail Mary indictments. So what did Trump do? Well, he refused to concede the election. That is any candidate’s right, is it not? Hilary Clinton made multiple speeches after losing in 2016 in which she said that the 2016 election had been stolen from her by Trump and the Russians. Does the problem Oliver raises lie with this sort of claim that ‘the election was stolen from me’? Because if so I can point to all sorts of Democrats, just in the last two decades, who made that allegation. And everything Trump did after the results came in amounted to invoking – or trying to invoke – legal processes to challenge the results. Doing that may be distasteful and unwise. It may have bad long-term consequences for one’s country. It may hurt one’s own party (though as Trump came back to win in 2024 we can discount that one). All those are possible. But what Trump did after the 2020 results simply cannot accurately be described as “attempting to overturn an election he lost” if “overturn” is being used in some non-legal or ‘overthrow the established order’ sense. It was not stirring up a rebellion or an insurrection. Again, had it been either of those in remotely legal terms then the Biden administration – the one later trying to take Trump off the ballot, bankrupt him, imprison him on laughably weak charges brought in places like Washington DC where 95% of voters (and hence jurors) vote Democrat – would have charged him accordingly. And would have done so in Washington DC where a conviction would have been near certain. Right?
Then add the fact that Trump’s legal challenges to the 2020 result never made it to any court anywhere on their merits. There was never an evidentiary hearing with discovery, witnesses and cross-examination. The courts rejected all the cases on procedural grounds – no standing, timing issues, etcetera. Of course that is just what unelected judges should do and should be expected to do (conceding, as I do, that in many US state level courts judges are elected). But given what is coming out of Georgia right now it would be a brave person who could say there were not serious questions about the 2020 Presidential election in that state what with the mass absentee ballots, the weak to non-existent signature verification requirements, the last-minute rule changes. Add to that the way the decisive swing states used Covid to allow (or in some cases the top state judges ordered the elected branches in states to allow) unsolicited mail-in ballots, third party ballot harvesting and weak-to-invisible ballot verifications (a combination no other democracy on earth countenances). And do not forget all those middle of the night ballot dumps. I went on record at the time of the 2020 elections saying that all we knew for sure was that the Biden win was statistically incredibly unusual – all the usually indicative bellwether counties went to Trump but Biden nevertheless won; Trump in 2020 got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support for an incumbent ever, but lost (recalling that Obama in 2012 went down by 3.5 million votes); Ohio and Iowa delivered Trump huge wins, these two states always in the past having swung the same way as the key mid-west swing states Biden won; Biden’s nationwide black vote fell below 90%, a normally losing level for Democrats; the big disparity in the black voter turnout in the needed swing state big cities versus all other US cities – put differently, Biden’s black vote spiked (it really spiked) only in the exact locations he needed to win; the fact Biden won way, way more votes than Obama ever won; the fact Biden won a record low of only 17% of all counties; the late night ballot drops that delivered over 90% of the votes to Biden; and the fact that Biden in 2020 had, not uniquely but almost, no down-ballot coattails – in 2020 the Republicans held the Senate and gained a large number of House seats, including every single one of the 27 toss-up House contests. Given the voting rules that were used, this was the loosest, most potentially open to abuse American election ever. So we do know that Biden’s win was in the face of all sorts of statistical indicators that in past elections had signalled correctly who would win – but did not do so this time. To repeat myself, the voting rules had been loosened under the rubric of Covid safety to an extent never seen in any other democracy. All of this gave any sceptical person plenty of reason to have doubts. You can believe that (as I do) but also believe (as I do) that the game was up for Trump. He was never likely to win in his quest to have the results gainsaid. There was no chance. Zero. That was obvious straightaway. But it is also true that Trump was free to try every legal avenue open to him to contest them. Nothing Trump did after the 2020 election results came out was outside the aegis of trying to use the legal measures available to try to win. And as I have said, Democrats do that all the time. Are they repeatedly “attempting to overturn an election they have lost”?
To sum up, then, this first article by Oliver does not provide anything like the grounds needed to support the high-flown rhetoric he uses to condemn Trump as a rule of law breacher, a destroyer of institutions, etcetera. Meantime, the whole first article is written without even a cursory nod in the direction of what had been done to Trump beforehand – which, to repeat myself, looked then and today looks even more so to be far worse than Watergate.
That takes me to the second Hartwich article, the one on foreign affairs and Oliver’s allegation that Trump is the main villain in undermining the liberal rules-based order that he tells us has served the West so well. Again, my view is that Hartwich simply cannot cash out his highly moralised claims. Sure, he may not agree with some or all of Trump’s actions. But that does not make Trump the destroyer of the post-Second World War liberal order. Others, I am afraid, have to put their hands up for that.
Let me recount Hartwich’s grievances against Trump – specifics, not the generalised abstract sense of dislike he brings to the table – when it comes to international affairs. Well, Oliver says that the “US-Israeli strikes on Iran, launched without explicit congressional authorisation on contested legal grounds, took Trump’s [undermining of the liberal world order] logic further”. Really? Because Bill Clinton had no congressional authorisation nor any UN Security Council approval to bomb Serbia. Did that undermine the world order? George W. Bush lacked both when he went into the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan, an action that was one of the key drivers in getting Trump to enter politics, such was Trump’s dislike of putting US troops on the ground in wars they cannot win. Barack Obama did not have congressional authorisation to attack Libya and the legal grounds for doing so were every bit as contested. At the time of writing, 13 US troops have died fighting in Iran so far. And this has bought a decade or two of grace, at least, in terms of Iran building nuclear weapons. What did Obama and Bush Jr. achieve? Absent a pre-existing loathing of Trump and it is not possible to claim that Trump’s attack on Iran is a world order destroyer where Obama’s and Bush Jr.’s and Clinton’s were not.
Then there is NATO. To be fair, Oliver concedes that European governments “spent decades relying on American security while letting their own military capabilities wither”. And that Europe “treated NATO’s 2% spending target as a wish”. True. But also understated. For 80 odd years the Europeans have spent an average of about 1.5% on defence. The US has averaged over that time at least 3.5%. That is over eight decades. Want to know what 80 years of 2% of American GDP can buy you in terms of health, education, welfare, pick your favourite big ticket spending priority? Want to know why the European welfare state is so bloated and (to me) ridiculously generous? And while it is true, as Hartwich notes, that “Europe is responding belatedly” and upping defence spending we can also think that a big reason for that – one that Oliver does not list – is that Trump has threatened them with an end to NATO if they do not up their spending. Remember, Clinton asked the rest of the NATO countries to up their defence spending to hit the promised 2%. So did Bush Jr. So did Obama. None of them had any real effect. Moreover, Trump campaigned before the 2024 elections to do something about this. I will be blunt. American voters have had enough. If it were not Trump it would be someone else who made clear that Americans would not spend if the Europeans themselves would not. And be clear, even with Trump’s brutal bluntness, it is not as though the Europeans (and Canada for that matter) are hurrying to spend more. As I write, only Britain has hit the legally binding 2% of GDP spending on defence – and as almost all defence writers will say, this has been done with big dollops of creative accounting, including opting to count military pensions in the total. Want to know who was killing NATO? It was not the Americans in my view. It was freeloading Europeans who had had it too good for too long.
As an aside here, I might remind readers that I spent 11 wonderful years living in New Zealand. Oliver is a transplant to New Zealand. For all the great stuff one of the things I really hated about New Zealand is that it totally and completely freeloaded on defence – mostly on Australia’s goodwill if we are being forthright. But when I got to New Zealand in 1993 I soon learned that since 1987 the Kiwis had refused to let US naval vessels enter its waters if they were nuclear powered or nuclear armed. Remember, for solid military reasons the US refuses to reveal the nuclear status of its ships. So New Zealand spends virtually nothing on defence. And it also actively makes more difficult the single greatest engine of commercial and other freedom in the world, the US navy (having taken that mantle from Britain’s Royal Navy, which had had the job for centuries). When Kiwis preach about contributing to the liberal world order, I confess that I feel they should at least make a passing mention of their own virtue-signalling free-riding. Otherwise, you can get something that somehow combines sanctimonious self-righteousness with a deep disdain for America and the US navy, the people who are spending money and risking their lives to protect that liberal order.
Hartwich also does not like Trump’s position on Ukraine. (For one rebuttal, see the above paragraph.) Again, no one will agree with everything his or her preferred political candidate stands for. But Trump made plain to voters his position on Ukraine before the election. In some ways this is chickens coming home to roost for the European NATO countries whose militaries are in a risible state of affairs. Americans ask why some poor worker in Iowa should be paying to defend Europe when Europeans with far more generous welfare benefits will not. More to the point, why should Americans defend countries not in NATO, as Ukraine is not. Does the liberal world order require the US to defend all countries attacked anywhere on earth? Or only European non-NATO countries? And as strange as it seems to me to see Europeans, who for decades wanted to spend nothing on defence, suddenly become pro-war zealots, the fact is that Russia has the second biggest nuclear arsenal in the world. That matters. After the Second World War the Americans and Brits let Russia take eastern Europe. Because without starting WWIII there was nothing they could do about it. So I would say that Hartwich’s critique as regards Ukraine lacks a certain nuance. He may be right. Or maybe not. But the characterisation of Trump as destroying NATO is just wrong I think. Indeed, by making Europeans now start taking defence seriously, you could make a case that in the long-term Trump is saving NATO. What cannot go on forever, won’t. Or put it this way. Hartwich asks, “Why do American voters tolerate the dismantling of an order that has served them well?” The obvious answer is that it no longer is serving them well and they know it. What worked 60 years ago (for example, the Refugees Convention), may not work well today. Heck, democracies repeal statutes all the time. Nothing about treaties make them any better at being useful over time than statutes.
Let me finish with the World Trade Organisation and trade more generally. In his second article Hartwich again laments Trump’s tariffs. Again, this is what a clear majority of US voters wanted. And for context, as regards US-EU trade, Hartwich might have mentioned that for decades the EU has used tariffs against the US more aggressively than vice versa. For instance, for decades the tariffs on cars coming into Europe was 10% but into the US only 2.5%. The EU also indulges in all sorts of non-tariff barriers. Anti-dumping provisions. Supposed concerns with genetically modified beef. Limits on chickens and US tech. All in all the EU ran a $220 billion trade surplus. Maybe the Europeans are more productive and more innovative than the Americans. Or maybe not. I understand comparative advantage. I get the benefits of trade. But when someone runs on a promise to bring in tariffs and he wins, then that is what he should do. Later voters can decide if it works. We have become cynical about democratic politics because so many of our elected politicians, especially on the Right, promise a set of things when campaigning and then refuse to do them once elected – because they supposedly breach international law (which in my view barely has a democratic bone in its entire corpus), or because the unelected judges and bureaucracies and NGOs object and oppose them. For me, it is a good thing that a politician does what he promised the electorate he would do. The alternative is a sort of holier-than-thou elitism (think, perhaps, of a supranational body that rhymes with ‘MeToo’) whose decision-makers are largely unaccountable to the voters. If you want to sum up the last few decades that is as good a précis as any. And Trump is an effect of that, not a cause.
To conclude, I think Oliver is unfortunate enough to be suffering from a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The current US President is not perfect. None of us is. But the apocalyptic ways in which he is perceived by his Cassandra-like critics is, frankly, laughable. If those views of mine, according to Oliver, put me in the same camp as Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson (rather than with George Will and Bill Kristol), I would take that deal any day of the week.
Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.This article was sourced HERE
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