Trump takes a break from world affairs to tee-up his Scottish golf courses
I witnessed Trump's unconventional attitude first hand, right at the start of his political career, when I met him on the campaign trail in 2015 as the Republicans searched for a candidate who could win back the presidency after Barack Obama's two terms in office.Trump strode off the debate stage in a glitzy Las Vegas hotel and into a room packed with cameras.Jostling for position, I asked the man with the long red tie a couple of questions and, after boasting about his status as frontrunner in the race, he told me he had a message for the UK.This will make news, I thought. Maybe something about immigration, Trump's signature campaign topic?It was not. Instead Trump wanted BBC viewers to know that he had some fine golf courses on Scotland's shores which they should visit.The answer struck me as remarkable for a man aspiring to become the so-called leader of the free world.
Of course Trump does have a genuine link to Scotland.His Gaelic-speaking mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in 1912 on the island of Lewis in Scotland's Outer Hebrides and left during the Great Depression for New York where she married property developer Fred Trump.Their son's return to Scotland for four days this summer comes ahead of an official state visit in September when the president and First Lady Melania Trump will be hosted by King Charles at Windsor Castle in Berkshire.Trump is not scheduled to see the King on this visit but it is not entirely private either, as he will meet Scotland's First Minister John Swinney as well as the prime minister.Business leaders, including Scotch whisky producers, are urging Starmer and Swinney to use their meetings with Trump to lobby for a reduction in US taxes on imports, known as tariffs.
A huge security operation, which has been under way for weeks, has been scaled up in recent days.Giant transport aircraft carrying military hardware, including the president's helicopters, known when he is on board by the call sign Marine One, have been spotted at Aberdeen and Prestwick airports.Roads and lanes in Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire have been secured and closed. Airspace restrictions have been issued. Police reinforcements have been heading north across the England-Scotland border.Visits to Scotland by sitting US presidents are rare. Queen Elizabeth hosted Dwight D Eisenhower at Balmoral in Aberdeenshire in 1957; George W Bush travelled to Gleneagles in Perthshire for a G8 summit in 2005; and Joe Biden attended a climate conference in Glasgow in 2021.The only other serving president to visit this century is Trump himself in 2018 when he was met by protesters including one flying a paraglider low over Turnberry, breaching the air exclusion zone around the resort.
Even by the standards of Donald Trump the years since have been wild.When he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a mob of Trump supporters responded to their leader's false claims of electoral fraud by mounting a violent assault on the US Capitol. Four years later Trump staged a stunning political comeback and since returning to the White House he has survived at least one assassination attempt while a man has been charged with another. Amid this turmoil, security surrounding Trump is supposedly tighter than ever.The US Secret Service, much criticised for failures which nearly cost the president his life, remains primarily responsible for his safety but concerns have been raised about the impact of his visit on Police Scotland's officers and budget, with one former senior officer estimating the policing cost at more than £5m.Adding to the pressure which the police are under to secure his resorts, large anti-Trump demonstrations are expected to be held in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.Police Scotland insists it has the resources it needs to deal with the visit.
While polls suggest Trump is deeply unpopular in the UK, he may actually find some sympathy in Aberdeen, a city which he and many others call "the oil capital of Europe".He has stirred the heated debate about the nature and pace of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, telling BBC News last week that Aberdeen, which has prospered for decades from North Sea drilling, "should get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil." The environmental campaign group Uplift says Trump's claim that the North Sea can still provide the UK with a secure energy supply "runs counter to reality."Trump's pro-oil message echoes the rhetoric of Reform UK, the right-wing party led by Trump fan Nigel Farage which made progress in a recent Scottish by-election and hopes to go one step further by winning seats for the first time in next year's Scottish parliamentary election.The Scottish Parliament, known as Holyrood after its location at the foot of Edinburgh's Royal Mile, runs much of Scotland's domestic affairs, such as health, education and some taxation and benefits, while the UK parliament in London retains control of defence, foreign affairs and wider economic policy.
Trump's support for the oil industry is well known but his hatred of wind turbines appears to run even deeper. In 2012 he told me that building a wind farm off the coast of his golf course at Menie would be a "terrible error" that would "destroy Scotland."The encounter was a strange experience.At first, Trump's aides told us he was so affronted by the difficult questions he had been asked by Rona Dougall of STV News earlier that morning that he had changed his mind about speaking to the BBC.We waited anyway in the rain, for hours. Eventually the man himself emerged. After some verbal sparring he offered us burgers from a barbecue before backing down and agreeing to be interviewed.Later, asked by a committee of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh to provide evidence to back up his claim that Scottish tourism would be ruined by wind turbines, Trump famously replied: "I am the evidence." The wind farm was built anyway and is now clearly visible from the course.
It is not the only battle Trump has fought against a backdrop of shifting sand dunes and whispering grasses at Menie where he has repeatedly clashed with local residents, politicians and environmentalists for a variety of reasons. His other course at Turnberry is not controversial itself but it is the stage for a tussle with the golfing authorities because Trump appears to be infuriated by the refusal of the game's governing body, the R&A, to stage the prestigious Open Championship there, citing logistical challenges.Turnberry is home to three golf courses, said to be the most expensive to play in the UK, and the Open has been held there four times but never since Trump purchased it in 2014. It is another striking example of how, a decade after mounting what was essentially a hostile takeover of the US Republican Party, the man who has been both the 45th and 47th president of the US has still not entirely swapped business for politics.He is the most powerful man in the Western world and yet Donald Trump is still irked at being snubbed, still hankering for status, still angry about a golfing deal he has, so far at least, failed to close.
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Scotsman
6 minutes ago
- Scotsman
Polarising Donald Trump's North Sea comments tapped into growing frustration
It's time to listen to the point made by US president Donald Trump and turn his soundbite on the North Sea into a smart, sober policy, writes Ryan Crighton. Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Donald Trump's shoot-from-the-hip diplomacy was on full display in Aberdeen this week as he waded into the UK's energy debate, calling for lower taxes on North Sea oil and gas operators. The president's remarks – delivered both in person and online to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer – will have raised eyebrows in Westminster. However, in the north-east of Scotland, where redundancies are mounting, his comments tapped into a growing sense of frustration. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad US President Donald Trump on the first tee during the official opening of the New Course, the second championship course at Trump International Golf Links, on the Menie Estate in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire | PA He may be a polarising messenger, but his advocacy for the repeal of the Energy Profits Levy (EPL) aligns with what the data, the workers and the businesses on the ground have been saying for over two years – that the windfall tax is killing off a vital British industry and a crucial national asset. According to data from Offshore Energies UK, 10,000 jobs have already been lost since the levy's introduction by the Conservative government in 2022. Harbour Energy, the UK's largest oil and gas producer, has since laid off 600 people in Aberdeen alone. These aren't abstract statistics — they are highly skilled individuals, families, and communities being sacrificed on the altar of fiscal short-termism. The failure of the north east green freeport bid is a major blow for a regional economy transitioning away from fossil fuels. Picture: Andy Buchanan/Getty Worse still, the economic wreckage isn't even delivering the returns that were promised. Independent analysis from Stifel shows EPL revenues have consistently come in at the low end of government forecasts. Why? Because the supposed "windfall" they are taxing does not exist. Oil prices are down 50 per cent since the peak of the Ukraine crisis. Gas prices have collapsed by 80 per cent. The result is a textbook case of policy failure. Tax hikes intended to boost revenues have instead triggered a collapse in investment, with over £20 billion of planned capital spending now cancelled or paused. Exploration activity has ground to a halt. Fields are being decommissioned prematurely. The UK is forfeiting not just jobs and tax income, but its energy security. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This shouldn't just be of concern to those living and working in Aberdeen - this should alarm everyone, because the UK still needs oil and gas. Even in the most ambitious net-zero scenario, the country will require between 13 and 15 billion barrels of oil equivalent by 2050. Right now, we're on track to produce less than four. And that energy shortfall isn't going to be filled by wind turbines and hydrogen pipelines overnight. The reality is that we are swapping cleaner, domestically produced energy for dirtier, imported alternatives. According to the North Sea Transition Authority, gas extracted in the UK has less than a quarter of the carbon footprint of imported LNG. Yet we are allowing that domestic capacity to decline while increasing our reliance on higher-emission imports from the US and Qatar. It is environmental hypocrisy at its worst. All the while, the UK government continues to claim we are 'maximising value' from our domestic resources. But how? By driving capital offshore? By gutting the supply chain that is also needed to deliver renewables, carbon capture, and green hydrogen? By forcing energy companies to pay tax rates that, in some cases, exceed 100 per cent? Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ryan Crighton, policy director at Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce and a senior partner at True North Advisors. | True North Advisors In 2024, Harbour Energy reported a pre-tax profit of £950 million. However, after accounting for an effective tax rate of 108 per cent, the company posted no net profit for the year. This level of taxation is without parallel in the UK economy. It's not just unfair - it's economically suicidal. The UK's approach also compares poorly to our North Sea neighbours in Norway. While their headline tax rate is similar, the Norwegian government supports exploration and shares risk through its fiscal regime. That's why Norway continues to attract investment and why its energy sector is thriving. We, by contrast, have taken the opposite path – penalising production, scaring off capital, and hoping for different results. What's even more galling is that the levy is being used to fund Great British Energy – the new public clean energy company set-up by the Labour Party. According to Stifel, EPL revenues are set to collapse from £5.5bn to under £1bn by 2029. You cannot fund the future of energy by strangling the very sector that underpins it. So yes, President Trump is right to shine a spotlight on this issue. But the solution isn't a populist soundbite or a quick political win. It is a long-overdue dose of energy pragmatism. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad That means abolishing the EPL – now – and restoring a stable, competitive tax regime that can unlock investment, extend production and retain the critical skills base we will need for the next generation of energy infrastructure. It also means rejecting the false binary between fossil fuels and renewables. The future is not oil or wind. It is oil and wind. And hydrogen. And carbon capture. We need all of it. Everything, everywhere, all at once. The UK cannot build a low-carbon future while dismantling the industrial engine required to deliver it. A managed transition must be just that – managed. And that means recognising the continuing role of oil and gas, treating our energy sector with the strategic seriousness it deserves, and stopping the ideological war against the basin that still powers Britain. So, let's take Trump's call and translate it into smart, sober policy. Not because he said it, but because the facts demand it. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The North Sea doesn't need special treatment, but it does deserve fair treatment. The alternative isn't a greener future – it's a weaker Britain.
The Herald Scotland
19 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
Nobel Peace Prize winner? Trump faces serious challenges on conflicts
Serving both Republican and Democratic administrations, including under the presidencies of George W Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross for decades was one of those tasked with navigating the most dangerous of diplomatic waters. It was interesting then to hear him opine last week on current US President Donald Trump's diplomatic negotiating style. 'There is a difference between producing cease-fires and pauses and ending wars,' noted Ross, speaking to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). 'The former stops fighting, the latter deals with the causes of the conflict and forges agreements that resolve the differences - or at least gets both sides to adjust their thinking and produces a modus vivendi.' Ross's comments came in a week that saw Trump issue a deadline of '10 or 12 days' to Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a cease fire over Ukraine. This weekend that agreement seems further away than ever after Trump said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to 'be positioned in the appropriate regions' in response to 'highly provocative' comments by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. (Image: Jehad Alshrafi) Ross's remarks also came in a week when Washington's allies, France, the UK and Canada, broke with Trump to force a diplomatic shift on Gaza. For despite the US leader's boastful promises on bringing calm to the region as with his claim to be able to bring peace to Russia's war with Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to office, all of Trump's peace-making promises to date have been colliding with a more complicated reality on the ground. In short, Trump's supposed prowess on the peace-making front is not all it's cracked up to be, a point wryly made by Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker magazine a few days ago. 'Wars, it turns out, do not end magically because Trump clicks his heels and demands that they do so,' wrote Glasser in a recent column. 'Wars we end' AS even the most cursory of glances across the global geo-political landscape will quickly confirm, the prevailing reality is a far cry from when Trump in his January 20, 2025, inaugural address proclaimed that 'we will measure our success…by the wars we end.' And 'my proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.' Despite the obvious shortcomings to date in this regard though, America's peacemaker-in-chief - in characteristic mode - has continued to claim great success, a point he was keen to emphasise during his recent trip to Scotland. 'We have many ceasefires going on. If I weren't around, you would have six major wars going on. India would be fighting with Pakistan,' Trump insisted in one of his speeches. As Trump sees it, should that much coveted Nobel Peace Prize come his way then he is only too deserving of it. 'If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,' Trump said in October. Trump's ever loyal mouthpiece, White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, never misses an opportunity to remind the world that it's 'well past time' that the president received the prize. Just these past days Leavitt at a press briefing listed the peace deals the Trump administration has supposedly brokered since taking office. Thailand and Cambodia were the most recent of Trump's peacemaker bona fides. Read more Tears and trauma: David Pratt in Ukraine DAVID PRATT ON THE WORLD: Whatever happens in Brazil's resentful and rancorous election, the result will have major repercussions for us all David Pratt in Ukraine: It's hard to comprehend this level of destruction David Pratt: Kremlin's protestations have a hollow ring as atrocities mount up 'The two countries were engaged in a deadly conflict that had displaced more than 300,000 people until President Trump stepped in to put an end to it,' Leavitt insisted. Other conflicts cited by Leavitt included, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) India and Pakistan and Serbia and Kosovo, that were all claimed to have been 'resolved' on Trump's watch. One curious outcome in at least two instances, however, was that in the cases of both Pakistan and Cambodia no sooner were hostilities ceased than their leaders announced that they would nominate Trump for the Peace Prize. Interestingly too in Thailand and Cambodia's case, Trump set a 19% levy on imports from both countries, lower than the 36% they originally faced, after earlier this month he threatened to block trade deals with them unless they ended their deadly border clash. Which brings us to another significant factor that many say undermines Trump's claims to be a peacemaker and mediator and instead casts him as global agitator – trade wars and tariffs. Economy plunge LAST week Trump plunged the global economy into a new round of mercantile competition after hitting dozens of US trading partners with tariffs while formalising recent deals with others, including the UK and EU. While such competition is nothing new in itself, as a Financial Times (FT) editorial on Friday pointed out, in Trump's case they are often flagrantly politically motivated. On the one hand Trump portrays the tariffs he has ordered on US trading partners as a simple rebalancing of global trading that is skewed against America. But as the FT points out, 'what is striking, however, is how some of the harshest new measures reflect blatantly political aims - shaped by presidential whim.' The newspaper cites the example of Canada, which has angered Trump with its own plans to recognise a Palestinian state making it 'very hard' says Trump to reach a trade deal. The FT also highlights India, already hit by a high tariff rate but which Washington has threatened with an additional penalty while rebuking Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government for 'buying Russian oil and weapons'. Trump's stance says the FT also appears to reflect his dislike of India's membership of the Brics' bloc of emerging heavyweight markets and developing nations. During a summit of the 11 emerging economies last month, he threatened an additional 10 % tariff on any countries aligning themselves with the Brics' 'anti-American policies'. More than 100 days on from Trump's 'Liberation Day' set of initial tariffs, many say a new global trading order is taking shape, one that The Economist magazine recently referred to as 'a system of imperial preference.' This, argue some analysts, only adds incendiary economic fuel to an already destabilised world raising the risk that such trade wars might become shooting wars. Allison Carnegie is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and specialises in global governance and international institutions. Writing recently in the widely respected Foreign Affairs magazine, she said that Trump's trade wars are hardly without precedent and that while 'Trump may think his tariff regime will make the United States richer, safer, and stronger… history suggests it will do just the opposite.' 'In the near term, countries can benefit from wielding trade as a cudgel. But in the long term, trade wars leave almost everyone worse off,' Carnegie notes. 'When countries frequently use economic leverage to secure concessions from vulnerable partners, investment and economic growth go down. Political instability, meanwhile, goes up. States that chafe at economic coercion sometimes turn to their militaries in order to fight back. Countries that once cooperated because of commercial ties turn into competitors. Even close allies drift apart,' Carnegie noted. Few doubt the inherent difficulty in ending protracted conflicts like those in the Middle East and now in Ukraine. Both broke out during the previous administration enabling Trump to dub them 'Biden's wars'. 'Biden will drive us into World War III, and we're closer to World War III than anybody can imagine,' said the same Trump that on Friday moved US nuclear submarines in response to a social media post by Medvedev. On his presidential campaign trail, Trump often railed against Biden and such 'endless wars' and 'forever wars' and mused that he could resolve them. 'He has made comments on all of them that this could be done quickly or easily and that there are solutions to these problems," says Aaron David Miller, a State Department diplomat in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations - now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'And yet, he has not been successful in even identifying what I would consider to be a potentially effective strategy for managing or let alone resolving them. And therein lies the challenge,' Miller told broadcaster ABC News in recent interview. (Image: AP) 'Biden's wars' SIX months after Trump's inaugural address proclaiming that his presidency would bring 'a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable,' and denouncing 'Biden's wars', the data tells a very different story. For in that six months, Trump has already launched nearly as many airstrikes on foreign nations as Biden did within four years. A huge part of this of course was 'Operation Midnight Hammer' when Trump decided that he would order use of 30,000-pound weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an independent international data collection monitoring group, since Trump returned to the White House, the US has carried out at least 529 bombings in more than 240 locations in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. His predecessor's administration launched 555 over its entire four years. 'Trump's preference for engagement begs the question: Does this contradict his promise to end America's wars - or are the foreign strikes how he wishes to keep that promise?' ACLED president Clionadh Raleigh said in a statement cited by the Independent last month. 'The recent airstrikes on Iran's nuclear sites have been framed as a major turning point in US foreign policy. But if you take a step back, they don't stand out - they fit,' Raleigh added. Right now when not riling other nations through his own tariffs and trade wars, ending the fighting in Ukraine and Gaza by far poses Trump's biggest diplomatic challenge. In both cases he has his work cut out, not least say some in that he has appointed the same man, his friend Steve Witkoff, as the US envoy for all three sets of peace talks, involving Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Hamas and Israel-Iran. As the New York Times columnist Max Boot, recently observed this 'would test the powers of even a veteran diplomat' … and 'the task is all the more onerous given that Witkoff is a real estate developer with no background in diplomacy.' Meanwhile as Gaza bleeds and starves, Trump diplomatically muddles through as was poignantly described recently by another American columnist, Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker. 'In a summer of horror for Gaza, it's hard to recall the unfulfilled promises of last winter, when Trump bragged, in near world-historical terms, of the 'EPIC' ceasefire that he and his team had helped broker,' wrote Glasser recently. 'Now, as Trump stands by and does close to nothing at all, what can we do but wish that he had, for once, been right?' Negotiating style MANY critics maintain that a huge part of the problem with Trump's negotiating style is that it fluctuates depending on the current state of his personal relationships with other world leaders. As his second term progresses Trump's priorities would seem to become more apparent by the day startling observers and US allies alike. Already there have been calls for US intervention in Panama, Canada and as recently as May, Trump announced that he didn't rule out employing military force to seize Greenland. He has also proposed a $1 trillion US military budget for 2026 - a 13.4 % increase - and again took action to withdraw US support from the UN. Critics continue to accuse him of shaping American foreign policy determined primarily by a desire to pursue his own vendettas toward those that rebuff him and in doing so use whatever means, economic or otherwise at his disposal. As Dennis Ross, rightly pointed out recently, there is indeed 'a difference between producing ceasefires and pauses and ending wars,'. To achieve the latter, patience and lengthy negotiations are a prerequisite, and that, as we all know by now, has never been part of the Trump playbook.
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Donald Trump – peacemaker-in-chief or a global agitator?
Serving both Republican and Democratic administrations, including under the presidencies of George W Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross for decades was one of those tasked with navigating the most dangerous of diplomatic waters. It was interesting then to hear him opine last week on current US president Donald Trump's diplomatic negotiating style. 'There is a difference between producing ceasefires and pauses and ending wars,' noted Ross, speaking to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). 'The former stops fighting, the latter deals with the causes of the conflict and forges agreements that resolve the differences – or at least gets both sides to adjust their thinking and produces a modus vivendi.' READ MORE: John Swinney brands Gaza as 'genocide' for first time as Fringe show disrupted Ross's comments came in a week that saw Trump issue a deadline of '10 or 12 days' to Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire over Ukraine. This weekend, that agreement seems further away than ever after Trump said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to 'be positioned in the appropriate regions' in response to 'highly provocative' comments by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Ross's remarks also came in a week when Washington's allies, France, the UK and Canada, broke with Trump to force a diplomatic shift on Gaza. For despite the US leader's boastful promises on bringing calm to the region – as with his claim to be able to bring peace to Russia's war with Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to office – all of Trump's peace-making promises to date have been colliding with a more complicated reality on the ground. Ukraine In short, Trump's supposed prowess on the peace-making front is not all it's cracked up to be, a point wryly made by Susan B Glasser of the New Yorker magazine a few days ago. 'Wars, it turns out, do not end magically because Trump clicks his heels and demands that they do so,' wrote Glasser in a recent column. As even the most cursory of glances across the global geo-political landscape will quickly confirm, the prevailing reality is a far cry from when Trump, in his January 20, 2025 inaugural address, proclaimed that 'we will measure our success … by the wars we end'. And 'my proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.' Despite the obvious shortcomings to date in this regard, though, America's peacemaker-in-chief – in characteristic mode – has continued to claim great success, a point he was keen to emphasise during his recent trip to Scotland. 'We have many ceasefires going on. If I weren't around, you would have six major wars going on. India would be fighting with Pakistan,' Trump insisted in one of his speeches. As Trump sees it, should that much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize come his way, then he is only too deserving of it. 'If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,' Trump said in October. Trump's ever-loyal mouthpiece, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, never misses an opportunity to remind the world that it's 'well past time' that the president received the prize. Just these past days, Leavitt, at a press briefing, listed the peace deals that the Trump administration has supposedly brokered since taking office. Thailand and Cambodia were the most recent of Trump's peacemaker bona fides. 'The two countries were engaged in a deadly conflict that had displaced more than 300,000 people until President Trump stepped in to put an end to it,' Leavitt insisted. Other conflicts cited by Leavitt included Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), India and Pakistan, and Serbia and Kosovo – all claimed to have been 'resolved' on Trump's watch. One curious outcome in at least two instances, however, was that in the cases of both Pakistan and Cambodia, no sooner were hostilities ceased than their leaders announced that they would nominate Trump for the Peace Prize. Interestingly, too, in Thailand and Cambodia's case, Trump set a 19% levy on imports from both countries, lower than the 36% they originally faced, after earlier this month he threatened to block trade deals with them unless they ended their deadly border clash. Which brings us to another significant factor that many say undermines Trump's claims to be a peacemaker and mediator and instead casts him as a global agitator – trade wars and tariffs. Last week, Trump plunged the global economy into a new round of mercantile competition after hitting dozens of US trading partners with tariffs while formalising recent deals with others, including the UK and EU. While such competition is nothing new in itself, as a Financial Times (FT) editorial on Friday pointed out, in Trump's case, they are often flagrantly politically motivated. On the one hand, Trump portrays the tariffs he has ordered on US trading partners as a simple rebalancing of global trading that is skewed against America. But as the FT points out, 'what is striking, however, is how some of the harshest new measures reflect blatantly political aims – shaped by presidential whim'. The newspaper cites the example of Canada, which has angered Trump with its own plans to recognise a Palestinian state, making it 'very hard', says Trump, to reach a trade deal. The FT also highlights India, already hit by a high tariff rate but which Washington has threatened with an additional penalty while rebuking prime minister Narendra Modi's government for 'buying Russian oil and weapons'. Trump's stance, says the FT, also appears to reflect his dislike of India's membership of the Brics bloc of emerging heavyweight markets and developing nations. During a summit of the 11 emerging economies last month, he threatened an additional 10% tariff on any countries aligning themselves with the Brics's 'anti-American policies'. More than 100 days on from Trump's 'Liberation Day' set of initial tariffs, many say a new global trading order is taking shape, one that The Economist magazine recently referred to as 'a system of imperial preference'. This, argue some analysts, only adds incendiary economic fuel to an already destabilised world, raising the risk that such trade wars might become shooting wars. Allison Carnegie is professor of political science at Columbia University and specialises in global governance and international institutions. Writing recently in the widely respected Foreign Affairs magazine, she said that Trump's trade wars are hardly without precedent and that while 'Trump may think his tariff regime will make the United States richer, safer, and stronger … history suggests it will do just the opposite'. 'In the near term, countries can benefit from wielding trade as a cudgel. But in the long term, trade wars leave almost everyone worse off,' Carnegie notes. 'When countries frequently use economic leverage to secure concessions from vulnerable partners, investment and economic growth go down. Political instability, meanwhile, goes up. States that chafe at economic coercion sometimes turn to their militaries in order to fight back. Countries that once co-operated because of commercial ties turn into competitors. Even close allies drift apart,' Carnegie noted. Few doubt the inherent difficulty in ending protracted conflicts like those in the Middle East and now in Ukraine. Both broke out during the previous administration, enabling Trump to dub them 'Biden's wars'. 'Biden will drive us into World War III, and we're closer to World War III than anybody can imagine,' said the same Trump who on Friday moved US nuclear submarines in response to a social media post by Medvedev. On his presidential campaign trail, Trump often railed against Biden and such 'endless wars' and 'forever wars' and mused that he could resolve them. 'He has made comments on all of them that this could be done quickly or easily and that there are solutions to these problems,' says Aaron David Miller, a State Department diplomat in the Clinton and George W Bush administrations – now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'And yet, he has not been successful in even identifying what I would consider to be a potentially effective strategy for managing, let alone resolving them. And therein lies the challenge,' Miller told broadcaster ABC News in a recent interview. Six months after Trump's inaugural address proclaiming that his presidency would bring 'a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable', and denouncing 'Biden's wars', the data tells a very different story. For in those six months, Trump has already launched nearly as many airstrikes on foreign nations as Biden did within four years. A huge part of this, of course, was 'Operation Midnight Hammer', when Trump decided that he would order the use of 30,000-pound weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an independent international data collection monitoring group, since Trump returned to the White House, the US has carried out at least 529 bombings in more than 240 locations in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. His predecessor's administration launched 555 over its entire four years. 'Trump's preference for engagement begs the question: Does this contradict his promise to end America's wars – or are the foreign strikes how he wishes to keep that promise?' ACLED president Clionadh Raleigh said in a statement cited by The Independent last month. 'The recent airstrikes on Iran's nuclear sites have been framed as a major turning point in US foreign policy. But if you take a step back, they don't stand out – they fit,' Raleigh added. Right now, when not riling other nations through his own tariffs and trade wars, ending the fighting in Ukraine and Gaza by far poses Trump's biggest diplomatic challenge. In both cases, he has his work cut out, not least, say some, in that he has appointed the same man, his friend Steve Witkoff, as the US envoy for all three sets of peace talks, involving Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Hamas and Israel-Iran. As Max Boot recently observed in The Washington Post, this 'would test the powers of even a veteran diplomat' … and 'the task is all the more onerous given that Witkoff is a real-estate developer with no background in diplomacy'. Meanwhile, as Gaza bleeds and starves, Trump diplomatically muddles through, as was poignantly described recently by Glasser of The New Yorker. 'In a summer of horror for Gaza, it's hard to recall the unfulfilled promises of last winter, when Trump bragged, in near world-historical terms, of the 'EPIC' ceasefire that he and his team had helped broker,' wrote Glasser recently. 'Now, as Trump stands by and does close to nothing at all, what can we do but wish that he had, for once, been right?' Many critics maintain that a huge part of the problem with Trump's negotiating style is that it fluctuates depending on the current state of his personal relationships with other world leaders. As his second term progresses, Trump's priorities would seem to become more apparent by the day, startling observers and US allies alike. Already there have been calls for US intervention in Panama, Canada and as recently as May, Trump announced that he didn't rule out employing military force to seize Greenland. He has also proposed a $1 trillion US military budget for 2026 – a 13.4 % increase – and again took action to withdraw US support from the UN. Critics continue to accuse him of shaping American foreign policy determined primarily by a desire to pursue his own vendettas toward those that rebuff him and in doing so use whatever means – economic or otherwise – at his disposal. As Ross rightly pointed out, there is indeed 'a difference between producing ceasefires and pauses and ending wars'. To achieve the latter, patience and lengthy negotiations are a prerequisite, and that, as we all know by now, has never been part of the Trump playbook.
