With Donald Trump as America’s 45th president, 2017
will mark the beginning
of a
new and darker global order, warns Zanny Minton Beddoes
LEADERS
For liberals 2016 has been a grim year. A wave of
populist anger has swept through the West, leading Britons to vote for a
divorce from the European Union and Americans to elect as their 45th president
a property magnate with no previous government experience who ran the most
divisive and ugly campaign in modern American history.
Within a few short
months voters on both sides of the Atlantic delivered a powerful repudiation of
their political establishment; shifted the fault lines of Western politics from
left v right to open v closed; and voiced a collective roar of disapproval of
globalisation, now shorthand for a rigged system that benefits only a
self-serving elite. These are body blows to the liberal world order. Just how
serious they are will become clear in 2017.
Most important will be what kind of president Donald
Trump turns out to be. Take his words before and during the campaign at face
value and the outlook is bleak. Mr Trump is a long-standing economic
nationalist, a man who believes free trade has destroyed America’s economy, who
has cast doubt on America’s commitments to its allies, and called for building
a wall with Mexico and for restrictions on Muslim immigrants.
Although it seems unlikely that President Trump will
try to enact all of this illiberal agenda, some of it will survive (see box on
next page). His voters seemed to give Candidate Trump a lot of leeway, less
interested in policy detail than the broad thrust of his message. The best
outcome once he is in office would be for him to focus on his economic plans
minus the protectionism. Big tax cuts coupled with a surge of spending from infrastructure
to defence would bust America’s budget in the long term. But in the short run
they would inject adrenalin into the economy. This might, just, be enough to
keep the protectionism minimal, perhaps limited to a few token anti-dumping
tariffs. The result would be a recipe similar to that of Ronald Reagan, a man
whom much of the world viewed with alarm when he stormed to victory in 1980.
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