Gangster’s paradise
The transactional world Donald Trump seeks would harm not help America
Ukraine, Gaza and China will all test his self-interested approach to diplomacy
It MAY BE a holdover from his failure as a casino mogul or a reflection of a might-is-right worldview.
Or perhaps America’s president is simply feeling lucky.
Whatever the reason, Donald Trump loves to describe geopolitics as a card game.
Russian forces, he said of the war in Ukraine recently, have “taken a lot of territory, so they have the cards”.
Soon afterwards Mr Trump suggested that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was refusing to accept the inevitable: “He has no cards.”
China, Mexico, North Korea, even TikTok, a short-video app—Mr Trump has described them all as players in a card game.
America, needless to say, always has the better hand.
Its military and economic might, he believes, should guarantee it victory in every diplomatic dispute.
It is only because of the weakness and stupidity of his predecessors that other countries have been able to exploit American consumers or shelter under America’s security umbrella free of charge.
No longer: Mr Trump promises to extract proper recompense from such freeloaders.
But even in a purely transactional world, in which America abandons principle and embraces coercion, Mr Trump may not find the game as simple or his cards as strong as he thinks.
The situation they got me facin’
Three pressing diplomatic concerns will put Trumpian foreign policy to the test in the coming months and years.
The president has repeatedly suggested that he will find it easy to resolve all three through hard-nosed negotiation.
He has already embarked on talks with Russia and Ukraine to end their war.
With the first phase of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas coming to an end, discussions about the future of Gaza and of the Middle East more broadly will soon acquire more urgency.
And looming larger than any other foreign-policy debate are relations with China, which Mr Trump has promised to reset in a manner more favourable to America.
It is a daunting in-tray.
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump famously declared that he could end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”.
Certainly, America has enormous leverage.
It can cripple Ukraine’s armed forces, not only by halting donations of munitions, but also by cutting off battlefield communications, which are provided in large part by SpaceX, an American firm led by Mr Trump’s buddy, Elon Musk.
Although European countries have talked about boosting their aid to Ukraine, they would not be able to compensate completely for an American disengagement.
America’s power over Russia is not as expansive, but it can hold out the prospect of relief from the sanctions that have hobbled Russia’s economy and gratify the desire of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, to have some say over events in Russia’s near-abroad.
America this week used its clout to bully Ukraine into a deal to share its mineral wealth with America, which Mr Trump depicts as recompense for all the military assistance America has given Ukraine.
Although Ukraine was the first to float this idea, it had offered it in exchange for American security guarantees, which were not forthcoming.
And the peremptory behaviour of American negotiators made it clear that they were not asking their Ukrainian counterparts, but telling them.
At one stage Mr Zelensky was given an hour to approve a draft of the agreement, or else.
Me be treated like a punk
Yet Mr Zelensky refused in that instance, without triggering Armageddon.
In fact, his domestic approval rating has recently risen, presumably because he has been seen to be standing up for his country.
The final version of the deal did not specify a $500bn payout for America, as originally demanded.
Ukrainian negotiators are pleased: they hope the deal gives America enough of a stake in Ukraine’s future stability and prosperity that Mr Trump will refrain from foisting any lopsided peace agreement on them.
With Russia, Mr Trump has been pure emollience, talking to Mr Putin above Mr Zelensky’s head, opposing hostile resolutions at the UN and conceding in advance the notion that Russia will retain most of the territory it has seized and that Ukraine will not join NATO—big victories for Mr Putin.
Yet Mr Putin seems in no rush to strike a deal: “I would be happy to meet with Donald…But we are in a position where it is not enough to meet to have tea, coffee, sit and talk about the future.
We need to make sure that our teams prepare.”
American officials’ retreats and concessions could, of course, be clever negotiating tactics, allowing their interlocutors to believe they have salvaged a better deal than had initially seemed possible.
But Ukrainians involved in talks with Mr Trump’s team did not feel that they were witnessing a strategic chess game as much as a frantic search for anything the boss might accept.
“I don’t think Trump or his people were thinking things too far ahead,” says one.
In particular, by siding with Russia against America’s European allies, Mr Trump has created a damaging rift within NATO and reinforced the impression that America is fast becoming an unreliable partner.
That may not concern him much, but in fact America relies on bases in Europe to oversee and supply lots of military operations in Africa and the Middle East.
It also makes copious use of intelligence from European and Asian allies.
Such mutually beneficial exchanges may be curbed if Mr Trump continues to ride roughshod over his allies’ objections, complicating other foreign-policy goals.
And even if Mr Trump does manage to end hostilities in Ukraine, there will be unforeseen consequences.
Having mobilised lots of soldiers and stoked Russia’s arms industry, Mr Putin is unlikely simply to send everyone home.
The return of traumatised soldiers from the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan caused great instability in the late 1980s, an episode Mr Putin will not have forgotten.
An alternative idea said to be circulating in the Kremlin is to dispatch troops to Africa, to act as mercenaries.
In effect, bloodshed might diminish in one part of the world while surging in another.
In the Middle East, Mr Trump’s goal is to strike a series of deals that would end the region’s various wars.
Doing so would allow Mr Trump to declare himself a great statesman.
It might also allow America to shift resources and attention to Asia: there would be less demand for aircraft-carriers in the Persian Gulf or frenetic shuttle diplomacy.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, calls this a “liquid” moment in the Middle East.
“The ability to reshape is unlimited,” he declared last year.
But even the first step—steadying the ceasefire in Gaza—is proving tricky.
Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, is trying to coax Israel and Hamas into starting negotiations on the second phase of the deal, which would bring a permanent end to the war.
Those talks were meant to begin on February 3rd but have been repeatedly delayed.
Mr Trump’s shocking suggestion of evicting Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to build resorts has served a useful purpose, impelling Arab states to draft an alternative plan for the enclave, to be presented at an Arab League summit scheduled for March 4th.
The proposal envisages a five-year rebuilding effort, led by Egyptian firms and financed by Gulf states.
Hamas would be excluded, but Gazans would not be expelled.
A peace-and-reconstruction deal in Gaza would allow Mr Trump to pursue more ambitious goals.
He wants to persuade Saudi Arabia to normalise ties with Israel, expanding the Abraham accords negotiated in his first term.
He wants to broker a new nuclear deal with Iran in exchange for sanctions relief.
He might also try again to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, after the Palestinians rebuffed his so-called “deal of the century” during his first term.
But not everyone in the Middle East shares this vision—and if they decide to test Mr Trump, he may again find that America’s leverage is more limited than he thinks.
Start with Israel.
Binyamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, has goals of his own.
Above all, he wants to stay in power and out of jail.
That means pandering to the far-right elements of his coalition, who want to resume the war in Gaza.
Beyond that, Mr Netanyahu is trying to impose a sort of Pax Hebraica on the region.
He wants the Palestinians to remain weak and divided in any post-war settlement (his allies want to go further and annex Palestinian territory).
He demands the “complete demilitarisation” of southern Syria.
He is still determined to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, ideally with American help.
Much of this runs counter to Mr Trump’s vision.
Annexation would foreclose a normalisation deal with the Saudis; so would another round of war in Gaza.
A strike on Iran would end all hope of a nuclear pact.
The president is not without leverage over Israel: around 70% of its arms imports come from America, which also sent $18bn in aid in the year after the October 7th massacre, equivalent to 10% of Israeli government spending.
To use his leverage, however, Mr Trump would have to provoke a crisis in relations with Israel, and perhaps suffer a backlash from the otherwise supine Republican Party.
Better, then, to hunt for a deal that Mr Netanyahu can accept.
In Gaza, that means neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority (PA) can run the enclave.
But Hamas wants to retain de facto control, even if it might be willing to cede responsibility for day-to-day governance.
Arab states insist they can cobble together a committee of Palestinian technocrats to oversee reconstruction.
They are vague on how those technocrats might disarm a militia.
Hamas can also sabotage any attempt to reach a broader peace agreement with Israel, as it has done for decades.
It will be equally difficult to satisfy Mr Netanyahu when it comes to Iran.
For now, the Islamic Republic seems eager to cut a deal with America.
Its regional power is at a low ebb after Israel battered Hamas and Hizbullah, two of its proxies.
It feels vulnerable at home: two rounds of ballistic-missile strikes on Israel last year did little damage, whereas Israel’s retaliatory strikes knocked out Iran’s most sophisticated air defences.
Its economy is a mess.
Still, a willingness to talk does not mean Iran is willing to make enormous concessions.
Some of Mr Trump’s advisers want an ambitious deal that limits not only Iran’s nuclear programme but also its ballistic missiles and its support for proxy militias.
As an opening position, that is sensible.
But Iran is unlikely to accede.
The president will have to decide whether to settle for a narrower deal, hardly better than the one he (at Mr Netanyahu’s urging) abrogated in 2018, or to keep escalating the pressure and hope Iran caves.
On February 24th America’s Treasury department announced sanctions on more than 30 brokers, tankers and firms involved in smuggling Iranian oil to China.
To really squeeze Iran, America will need to go much further: imposing secondary sanctions on Chinese ports, for example, or threatening penalties for the United Arab Emirates, home to lots of dodgy middlemen.
This will mean antagonising countries in Asia and the Gulf, again complicating other foreign-policy goals.
It might also drive Iran to lash out at its neighbours—as it did in 2019, when Iranian drones and missiles temporarily knocked out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production.
All this makes the Saudis nervous.
They want a formal defence treaty with America in return for normalisation with Israel.
Ironically, they would be negotiating one at a moment when Mr Trump is devaluing American security guarantees.
Moreover, there is a real contradiction in Mr Trump’s goals.
If he wants to show that he is serious about protecting the Gulf, he must cement rather than curtail America’s military commitments in the Middle East.
If he does not, then a combination of sanctions relief for Iran and hollow security guarantees for Saudi Arabia could actually make the region more volatile.
An illustration depicting a high-stakes card game featuring world leaders, including Trump, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and key EU politicians. / Illustration: Javi AznarezThe Middle East is full of surprises.
Post-Assad Syria could slip back into chaos.
The death of Iran’s ageing leader, Ali Khamenei, could set off a power struggle.
It is hard to find a stable equilibrium amid so many failed or failing states.
There is also no shortage of hardened poker players who may be willing to call Mr Trump’s bluff.
Israel or Hamas (or both) could spoil plans for Gaza, leaving the enclave in a twilight world between war and peace.
Iran’s regime could defy his demands for a better deal, gambling that it could survive whatever military strikes or sanctions he might order in retaliation.
The Saudis could stick to their principles and reject a one-sided normalisation deal.
Even if Middle East peace eludes him, Mr Trump may seek a deal with China.
There are signs that he is angling for one.
He invited Mr Xi, whom he considers “an amazing guy”, to his inauguration and has mused on social media about all the problems the two of them will solve together.
At the same time, Mr Trump is as usual seeking to demonstrate the strength of his cards.
The tariffs that he imposed in his first term and that Joe Biden, his successor, expanded, remain in place.
Since returning to the White House, he has imposed an additional 10% across-the-board tariff on Chinese goods, proposed hefty docking fees for Chinese-made or -owned vessels, and signalled a tightening of rules on inbound and outbound investment to China.
More tariffs are probably on their way after a review of trade policy due by April 1st.
But there are limits to how far Mr Trump can squeeze China economically.
Tariffs raise prices in America and invite retaliation.
China, America’s third-biggest export market, has not only imposed reciprocal tariffs on American goods, but also restricted the export of various strategic minerals to America and initiated an antitrust investigation of Google.
China does not seem especially worried.
Mr Xi did not show up to Mr Trump’s inauguration.
Nor did China honour the trade agreement it struck with Mr Trump in 2020, albeit partly owing to covid-19.
China’s dependence on exports to America, although still substantial, has shrunk markedly in recent years (see chart).
In general, although America’s big trade deficits mean that it is likely to suffer less from a trade war than its main trading partners, it suffers all the same.
And China has plenty of ways beyond tariffs to strike back at America, both economic and geopolitical.
Better watch how you talkin’
One option is to further menace Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory but which America helps to protect through arms sales, diplomatic support and its military presence in the western Pacific.
Mr Trump appears conflicted over Taiwan which, he thinks, “stole” America’s chip industry.
Mr Trump told an interviewer in October, “They want protection.
They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know?
The mob makes you pay money, right?”
Mr Trump’s equivocation over both Ukraine and Taiwan alarms America’s other allies, who naturally wonder how reliable a friend it will be.
If their doubts become severe enough, countries like Japan and South Korea might seek to develop their own nuclear deterrent, with unpredictable consequences.
And even if things do not go that far, America’s perceived faithlessness strengthens China’s hand, as countries in the region seek to hedge their bets.
Mr Trump’s card game, in short, has many complexities he does not acknowledge.
The incentives of his adversaries are far from straightforward.
Mr Xi’s overarching goal is the survival of the Communist Party.
Economic growth is one means to that end, but not too sacrosanct to be tempered for reasons of security.
Likewise, no inducement can convince Gazans to leave Gaza voluntarily, or Ukraine to stop fighting to preserve its independence.
The players are also not fixed, with decisions in one dispute having ramifications for another.
Thus if Mr Trump decides to impose tariffs on computer chips to strengthen domestic production, he weakens Taiwan, which produces some 90% of the world’s most advanced microprocessors.
That, in turn, adds to his difficulties with China.
By the same token, the rehabilitation of Mr Putin is also likely to benefit China.
Perhaps most important, the game has infinite rounds.
Mr Trump’s bullying and bluster can be effective in the short run.
But it is a wasting asset.
As he alienates ever more friends, America’s clout will diminish.
As friends and foes alike call his bluff, his credibility will decline.
Treating international relations as a card game does America more harm than good.
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