Freddy Gray

Barack Obama tried to be the first Pacific President. He attempted to pivot America's grand strategy eastwards in order to adapt to a changing world. He failed, by and large. After his meeting with Kim Jong-un today, Donald Trump has shown that he is moving further east. In fact, Trump could be turning into the first truly Global President. No doubt that sentence sounds ridiculous. Trump is an ‘American First’ nationalist who believes in tariffs and borders; he stands for everything we’ve been told globalisation isn’t. But there is a difference between globalisation as a supranational faith in the free-market; and globalisation as a process that is actually happening.

Did anybody really think President Donald J Trump wasn’t going to pull out of the Iran deal? He’s said all along he would and this Commander-in-Chief’s number one public image rule is that, unlike most politicians, he honours his word. Trump’s other big rule is that anything Obama has done he’ll undo. And Obama’s biggest achievement, according to his admirers and former staffers, was the Iran deal, which – in theory anyway -- stopped Tehran from acquiring nukes while strengthening democratic forces within the troubled Muslim state. The pride with which Team Obama held up the deal was precisely why Team Trump wanted to destroy.

From 2009 to 2010 Sven Hughes worked for SCL group, the parent company of the controversial — now deceased —  Cambridge Analytica. SCL/Cambridge Analytica and its CEO Alexander Nix have been in the news a lot lately, chiefly because of their role in the Trump campaign. The fall of Cambridge Analytica was prompted by a Channel 4 documentary in which Nix boasted about running ‘counter ops’ — sting operations and so on — against political opponents. The firm shut down on Wednesday.

You could call it the John Bolton effect. The President’s new National Security Adviser has only been in the job a few days, and already Donald Trump is threatening war with Russia on Twitter: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/984022625440747520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw SMART! One can almost imagine Bolton’s moustache brushing Trump’s ear on that one. Trump didn’t talk about Russia like that before. But Trump’s new found bellicosity is also down to what could be called Obama syndrome. On foreign policy, you see, President Trump and his predecessor in the Oval Office are far more alike than either man would admit. They have both found themselves struggling over the problem of China’s rise, only then to get distracted in the Middle East.

Nobody likes the sound of trade war, and rightly so. China’s new retaliatory tariffs moves against US products feel like the beginning of something bad: an escalating tit-for-tat trade conflict between the world’s richest countries which could choke the global economy. But there are good reasons to think that, far from being another silly move by a hothead president, Trump’s right about trade with China and that, as he has with North Korea, he is grasping a dangerous nettle that other presidents dared not touch. It may be scary, but it needs to be done. And it’s not just necessary for America, but perhaps the rest of the world as well. China is deeply protectionist, and is rapidly becoming the most powerful country on earth.

Another massive America news blizzard yesterday: Trump lawyer quits, tariffs tariffs tariffs, stock-market slide, former alleged mistresses of the President speaking out, McMaster out (finally), Bolton in (finally). And then, as a night cap, the Senate approves a whooping $1.3 trillion spending plan to prevent a government shutdown. The Bolton news has, so far, been the most headline grabbing, even though people in the know — and readers of Spectator USA — have known it was about to happen for weeks now. Trump has rather sweetly let it be known that he has hired Bolton on the condition he didn’t start any wars: ‘now now John, don’t go nuking’ but people who cherish world peace are right to be alarmed.

Boris Titov is running to be president of Russia, but he’s eager to talk himself out of the job. ‘I am not a good politician,’ he says, over breakfast at the Lanesborough hotel in Knightsbridge, London. ‘To be a president means you need to be wise, a big politician like Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew. Russia needs a tough politician in the presidential chair and I am not that man.’ Titov knows that on Sunday, Vladimir Putin, the toughest politician of our age, will be re-elected as Russia’s Supreme Commander-in-Chief. ‘Everybody understands that,’ he says. ‘We are not stupid. I have common sense.’ Which prompts the question: why run?