Darroch, Kim. Collateral Damage: Britain, America, and Europe in the Age of Trump. PublicAffairs, 2020.
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
10 Theresa May Meets Donald Trump
It had been the first dip in the Trump rollercoaster ride, and we guessed that many more would follow. Or, as poet Robert Browning put it, ‘Never glad confident morning again.’
13 Foreign Policy and Trade
Watching discussions unfold, I was both intimidated by the show of power on the other side of the table, especially from Holbrooke, and dazzled by it. I knew instantly that while I was proud to serve as a British diplomat, there would never be a moment when I would be able to say, as Holbrooke had, ‘we are going to sort this out, with or without you’. This was a superpower in action. It was an internationalist America looking outwards, showing leadership, addressing the world’s wrongs, taking on the bad guys, making the world a better place. And it worked.
14 Domestic Policy: Obamacare, Tax Reform and Immigration
The administrators accordingly put together an incentive scheme: they offered a bounty for every dead cobra produced before designated city officials.
What was happening, of course, was that cobra corpses had become valuable. So enterprising individuals had started breeding programmes. Those with a steady supply of dead cobras enjoyed a stable source of income: nowadays they might be called entrepreneurs. Moreover, it was much more convenient to kill the cobras being bred in captivity than to hunt down those living in the wild. So while more dead snakes were being produced for bounties, there was, after a while, also a rise in the number of cobras loose in the streets. Faced with this combination of rising costs and reduced effectiveness, the administrators understandably abandoned the bounty programme. The cobra breeders, stuck with nests of newly worthless cobras, simply released them into the city. The net result: more cobras on the streets than ever.
‘In foreign affairs, the President can do what he wants unless Congress says no. In domestic policy, the President can’t do anything unless Congress says yes.’
whether he really believed that the wall would be built, with Mexico paying for it. ‘Of course not,’ he replied. ‘It isn’t a policy, it’s an image which sends a message that we will be tough on immigration. It’s worth a thousand words.
16 Resignation, Part Two
quote from Macbeth which summed up the moment and the need to move on: ‘Things without all remedy should be without regard; what’s done is done’.
17 The Great Unravelling: Brexit, Trump and the Eclipse of Establishment Politics
three I’s: immigration, inequality and identity.
In the first two years after their countries joined the EU, close to two million central Europeans came to work in the UK.
Ten years later, in the aftermath of the Leave victory, it became clear how much, outside London and the South-East, the newcomers had been resented. In the endless post-vote vox pops, the same themes kept emerging. It was taking two weeks, not two days, to get a doctor’s appointment. You couldn’t get your child into the local nursery, because it was ‘full of Eastern Europeans’.
Two other factors amplified the immigration debate in the minds of British voters. The first was the European migrant crisis of 2015.
May 2016, in the midst of the referendum campaign, the Office of National Statistics announced the second highest figure ever–333,000–for net migration into the UK.
If immigration is a big part of the narrative behind both Brexit and the rise of Trump in America, then inequality sits alongside it.
Since the year 2000, the US has lost 20 per cent of its factory jobs. In 1960, one in four American workers was employed in manufacturing; today it is fewer than one in ten. And many of the jobs that have replaced those in manufacturing are poorly paid: one-quarter of American workers are earning less than $ 10 an hour, which means in most cases they have no health insurance or pension plan.
The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated inequality, and must have raised the levels of anger and resentment among those already ‘left behind’ by several notches.
The ‘Silent Generation’, those born between 1928 and 1945, and the ‘Baby Boomers’, those born between 1946 and 1964, are both significantly less wealthy now than they were in 2007. And annual income for the poorest households, the lowest 10 per cent,
After immigration and economic inequality, identity politics was, in my view, the third part of the trilogy.
an aspect of identity–ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation–shared by a group which feels that its concerns are not adequately recognised.
Alexander Hamilton and in 1787 wrote one of them himself, Federalist No. 10 (now regarded as one of the most influential documents in American history). His particular concern was factionalism–‘ a number of citizens united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, adverse to the rights of other citizens or the permanent and aggregate interests of the community’–
Trump understood grievances, because he was himself a tightly wound ball of deeply held grievances.
18 What Happened Next
Milosevic having been a classic user of the tools of populism, and
The notorious British gangster Reggie Kray made a famous death bed confession about killing another gangster, Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, by stabbing him repeatedly in the face, chest and stomach. When asked why he’d done it, he said, ‘I didn’t like the man.… he was loud and aggressive.… he was a vexation to the spirit.’.
wrote to the famous Scottish economist and philosopher, Adam Smith, and said, ‘If we go on at this rate the nation must be ruined.’ Smith replied: ‘Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.’