The America First policy of Donald Trump will “shrink the ambition” of the United States rather than grow it, former minister for foreign affairs Simon Coveney has said.
Speaking in Boston College, Mr Coveney warned that the international reputation of the US is being damaged, especially in the European Union, where “the US is no longer seen as a reliable partner”.
He highlighted “the change in direction, the coarsity of language” in political debate, as well as “the way in which difference is seen as weakness, the way in which immigration is seen as a problem rather than an asset.
“It’s undermining the power of the United States internationally in a way that I don’t think is appreciated here,” he declared, warning that everything cannot be seen through the prism of deficits or surpluses.
Teacher who claims she has been wrongly named as ‘GAA catfish’ gets interim injunction to restrain disciplinary process
Web Summit case: Paddy Cosgrave’s use of complaint against Daire Hickey ‘reprehensible’, court hears
‘I had a breakdown’: Dublin office worker accused of passing trade secrets to rival firm has destroyed phone, court hears
Donald Trump and Elon Musk won’t be able to go on ignoring the damage to the bottom line
“It’s just missing the point, in my view. Is anybody seriously saying to me that a company like Apple would be more powerful if they had never left the borders of the United States today in the world?” he asked at a conference titled Peace, Prosperity and Future Relations: Ireland and the US.
“Or that a company like Johnson & Johnson would be more powerful and more profitable if they had never left the US in terms of employment and innovation?” he added.
The conference was organised in an alliance between Boston College’s Institute of Irish Studies, led by Professor Mary Murphy, the University of Galway and Queen’s University Belfast.
The US has been the standard-bearer for democracy, globalisation, rules-based trade and innovation over the last 50 years, “exporting that idea as well as its companies around the world”, said Mr Coveney.
In return, the US has shaped how the global economy is regulated, the standards and rules that apply, continued Mr Coveney, who stepped down from Irish politics at the end of the last Dáil.
An America First policy that declares it is “actually a bad thing” for US firms to be successful abroad and “that they should be back in the US employing Americans, to my mind, actually shrinks the ambition rather than grows it”.
Nearly 800 Irish firms employ 200,000 people in the US, he noted. “We are the most globalised economy in the EU, by far. We see it as a really good thing when an Irish company comes to the US and employs hundreds of people and pays taxes here.”
He said the expansion of Irish firms in the US is indirectly strengthening the influence of the Irish economy globally due to the impact on corporate decisions around the world.
Despite the challenges, Mr Coveney said he believed that Ireland “can weather the storm”, though it must “double down on our investment in relationships, and across the US, not just in Washington, but across US states”.
“We need to try to keep that in place while being true to our value system,” he said, “This shouldn’t just be about what President Trump wants to hear. It’s got to be a more substantive discussion than that.”
