Trump 0, Europe 1 - Paul Krugman
Ignorance and contempt lose a round
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
As I wrote yesterday, Donald Trump and his team clearly went to Davos determined to demean and insult their hosts. It was, one might say, a novel approach to diplomacy: "You're pathetic, your societies and economies are falling apart, now give us Greenland."
And it worked about as well as you'd expect. Trump may have imagined that the Europeans would cower in the face of his wrath. Instead, they humiliated him. He dropped his latest tariff threats in return for a "framework" that gave the United States essentially nothing it didn't already have — and left behind a Europe that is finally united in resistance to his bullying.
The Trump team went to Europe in a state of malign ignorance, exemplified by Trump saying during his Davos harangue that "without us, you'd all be speaking German." Most Swiss speak … German.
Trumpian contempt for Europe rests on two beliefs we already knew were false, and a third belief the Europeans proved false this week.
First, Trump and company are wedded to the belief that nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants have destroyed European society, that Europe's cities are hellscapes of rampant crime and social disorder — the trans-Atlantic version of what they believe about New York. In reality, while Europe has had some problems assimilating immigrants, the continent remains incredibly safe by U.S. standards:
Second, MAGA types are sure that Europe is an economic disaster area.
I wrote about this last month, arguing that while Europe lags in information technology, this does not mean that the European economy is failing to deliver what matters: higher living standards for its people. I've been doing some work comparing the growth of real wages there and here; here's a preliminary estimate:
Source: Eurostat, European Central Bank, and BLS
European workers took a bigger hit than American workers from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which cut off much of the continent's supply of natural gas. But real wages have recovered, and over the longer term European workers have seen their incomes grow at more or less the same rate as their US counterparts.
Europe has problems, as we all do. But when MAGA types declare that a prosperous continent that in many ways delivers a better life for its citizens than we do is a social and economic hellscape, that says more about them than it does about Europe.
Finally, Trump and company believed that Europe is weak, that European leaders would never stand up to U.S. bullying. And Europe's initial response to Trump's trade war — an attempt to appease and flatter him, hoping that it would all go away — surely reinforced Trumpian contempt.
But even Eurocrats have their limits. Operation Arctic Endurance, the deployment of European military forces to Greenland, might equally well have been called Operation Rising Gorge. There was rational calculation behind that deployment, but it was also a way for European leaders to say that enough is enough, that they're done with trying to make nice.
And when Trump threatened to put tariffs on the exports of nations that have sent troops to Greenland, Europe didn't cower in submission — it got ready to strike back at U.S. businesses.
Trump then confirmed the old adage that bullies are also cowards. Brave Sir Donald ran away, ran away, ran away.
This isn't over. There is no reason to believe that Trump has learned a lesson. Learning is not something he does. He's still the bully he was as a child, and he's already lashing out in other ways, suing JPMorgan for closing his bank accounts after Jan. 6 and threatening to sue The New York Times over an unfavorable poll.
But Europe has learned a lesson. Appeasing a bully doesn't work, especially when, as anyone watching Trump's Davos rant could see, that bully is experiencing rapid cognitive decline. But standing up to him does work.
The question now is whether and when enough influential people here at home will learn the same lesson.
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Bonus:
Courageous Carney vs. Demented Donald
Canada’s leader is a sane adult. America’s leader isn’t.
by Paul Krugman
On Tuesday Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister, gave a remarkable speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In effect he announced, calmly and lucidly, that Canada is filing for divorce from the Pax Americana:
And he urged other nations — implicitly, although he didn’t say it in so many words, the nations of Europe in particular — to join Canada in a new alliance of democracies no longer willing to take orders from an abusive hegemon:
It was a brave stand to take. Canada sits right next to the United States, whose economy is a dozen times larger. Moreover, as the map at the top of this post shows, Canada’s population lies almost entirely within a narrow band on top of the U.S. Back when I was writing a lot about economic geography, I used to joke that Canada was closer to the United States than it was to itself. Nature wants Canada and the United States to be closely intertwined. And for this reason Canada is arguably more exposed to the consequences of Trumpian wrath than any other nation.
But democracies can no longer maintain close ties with the U.S. The day after Carney spoke, Donald Trump showed why.
I listened to Trump’s Davos speech with fear: How much damage will this demented, vindictive individual do to America and the world? I also felt a deep sense of shame: What is wrong with my country, that we put someone like this in a position of unprecedented power?
As the whole world watched, the president of the United States (God help us) repeatedly referred to Greenland, which he is willing to blow up NATO to acquire, as Iceland . Don’t dismiss this as trivial: if any previous president had been that befuddled, the whole press corps would have been howling about senility and demanding that he step down.
And of course Trump’s press secretary insisted that he didn’t say what we all saw and heard him say.
Trump also repeatedly displayed his trademark willful ignorance, for example when talking about renewable energy. While berating Europe for using wind energy, he admitted that China also has big wind farms — someone must have showed him pictures — but declared that
In reality, China accounts for almost 40 percent of total world generation of electricity from wind power, substantially more than Europe.
Beyond confusion and ignorance, Trump delivered menace:
The horrifying details of Trump’s rant aside, what strikes me about the Trump administration’s performance at Davos — not just Trump himself but his minions — was the utter lack of purpose. The whole Trump team seems to have gone to Europe with no goal other than to belittle and insult their hosts.
On Tuesday evening Howard Lutnick, the Commerce secretary, spoke to a private dinner at Davos — at which he belittled European economies and their lack of competitiveness. He was reportedly booed , and Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, walked out.
On Wednesday morning Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, dismissed reports that one major Danish pension fund has decided to divest itself of U.S. bonds by declaring that “Denmark’s investment in U.S. Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant.”
And Trump devoted much of his speech to portraying Europe as a hellhole, its economy destroyed by renewable energy and its society destroyed by immigration.
Never mind whether any of this is true. (It isn’t.) What was the point of saying such things? Do Trump and his Mini-Mes imagine that they can convince European leaders that they, their economies, and their societies are all pathetic losers?
To say what should be obvious but apparently isn’t, we don’t need top government officials playing at being shock-jock podcasters, getting clicks by being outrageous. God knows, MAGA has plenty of those already. Official speeches aren’t supposed to be rants that provide red meat to your political base. They’re supposed to influence people who aren’t your supporters, in ways that serve the national interest.
This doesn’t mean that official speeches must be mealy-mouthed and boring. Mark Carney’s speech definitely wasn’t. But Carney had a clear purpose: To rally other nations into solidarity against U.S. economic blackmail.
Trump, on the other hand, just wanted to swagger, whine, and mostly hear himself talk. And all he accomplished was to turn suspicions that he’s gone off the deep end into certainty.
We’re already seeing some consequences of Trump’s ranting:
There will be much more of this. American power and influence have always rested, much more than many people realize, on the perception of American trustworthiness. We didn’t always do the right thing, but we honored our agreements and were the least greedy imperial power in history.
That’s all over. At Davos, Mark Carney called for giving up hope that the Pax Americana can be restored, and Donald Trump proved him right.
TACO Donald....