To understand United States president Donald Trump’s negotiating style, you have to think in terms of “New York real-estate tactics”, Patrick Foulis, the foreign editor of the Economist, told a discussion panel at Davos this week.
“When you’re a company that’s overburdened and strained, you do one of two things, you escalate or in US real-estate terminology you kill the dogs, you get rid of the weak obligations you have,” he said.
That’s the sort of binary thinking, Foulis believes, Trump will bring to US policy.
The “shooting the dogs” line was once used by the founder of Manhattan real-estate company the Corcoran Group, Barbara Corcoran, who revealed that when she ran the company she routinely fired 25 per cent of its sales staff every year.
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When it comes to Trump, does “escalating” mean tariffs, the president’s favoured tool in trade negotiations? Does “shooting the dogs” mean discarding US obligations to Ukraine?
To date, the US has spent $183 billion on the Ukraine war. It’s hard to see Trump continuing that level of support given the disquiet Republicans had with Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy.
In his address on Tuesday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that an official under the Biden administration had explained that America’s priorities were the Pacific, the Middle East “and then Europe third”.
“Will president Trump even notice Europe? Will he see Nato as necessary, and will he respect international institutions,” Zelenskiy asked.
[ Ireland risks being caught in the middle of Trump’s tax warOpens in new window ]
Trump’s second term begins against an extraordinarily complex geopolitical backdrop. And much of the debate at this year’s Davos centred on what his return to power means for US foreign policy, for US trade and for the two conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
“The world is colossally more dangerous than when he was first in office,” Foulis said, noting that “American deterrence has collapsed around the world” and other countries are “simply not as intimidated by the superpower”.
“I see the Trumpian agenda essentially as a more comprehensive and forceful expression of American power on a much more limited geographic scope,” Foulis said.
The more forceful expression of power includes things such as renouncing international borders (think of Trump’s comments in recent days regarding Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal) and the use of technology platforms to influence public opinion in other democracies (think of Elon Musk’s recent interventions in UK and German politics).
“So a much more forceful use of American power but at the same time retracting the geographic remit of America away from the idea of controlling the whole world to a much more selective evaluation of its interests,” he said.
In the same discussion, Sam Jacobs, the editor-in-chief of Time, said there were a number of “points of tensions” within the Trump agenda, not least the fact that he “ran on a pro-growth agenda” but with anti-growth policies.
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