Loyalty and Potential Exposure

Figure 1

I was wondering today why Trump is said to put so high a value on loyalty while appearing not to reciprocate.

Loyalty, after all is not transactional - you are loyal to someone whatever they do. But Trump is nothing if not transactional in all his dealings, something many commentators, even the dolts on Fox, have noted.

It dawned on me today that loyalty may not be the right term (any more than "trust" is an appropriate term for Denzel Washington's crew in training day - great film, J Brandon White).

What Trump may mean is simply not giving up where the bodies are buried. And it is highly transactional; keep quiet and in return you are included in the inner circle; defect and you become an enemy, a target.

And the corollary is that the greater the expected (negative) value of legal jeopardy, the greater the need for this variant of loyalty (see Fig 1)

Pompeo and circumstance

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was very careful in his testimony to Congress today. When asked if the North Koreans had made a commitments to  denuclearize (which oddly includes chemical and biological weapons), he said only that "North Korea understands the US position". Spin it all you want but that's not a commitment.

And when asked about what Trump had committed to in Helsinki, he repeatedly stated only that the official US position had not changed. That wasn't the question asked, and sheds no light on what commitments Trump may, in a momentary lapse in judgement, have made to Vladimir Putin.

Negotiating with adversaries

Several people have made the point that talking to our adversaries is important. John Bolton noted that FDR met with Stalin (although that was at the end of the WWII); Nixon went to China; Reagan talked privately to Gorbachev (the Walk in the Woods). That's fine in principle, but it's not what many people are concerned about.

While there are always risks associated with this more unscripted approach, two things are have been tacitly assumed; first that the President's only agenda is advancing America's interests, and that he is sufficiently well informed and competent to do so. In Trump's case neither condition is met.

Many serious and well informed commentators including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and even Dan Coats, Trumps own DNI, have explicitly or implicitly lamented Trump's comments and questioned the wisdom of his approach. Many are wondering whether he is putting personal interests above country.

What serious people are concerned about is not whether such Presidential diplomatic initiatives are a good idea as a means of changing the trajectory of bilateral relations, but whether Trump can be trusted to pull it off. The evidence so far suggests their concerns are well founded.

Process, Transparency, Autonomy and Accountability

Trump has been roundly criticized for his handling of the Helsinki Summit. He met Putin without going though the process that normally accompanies such a high-level diplomatic meeting - the prior talks between lower level officials to clarify an agenda, to negotiate and establish goals that both sides could reasonably expect to announce with satisfaction to their citizens. That didn't happen, at least on the US side (one assumes it probably did in the Kremlin).  Now the summit has concluded, many in the our government don't know what went on, and what was agreed to. Keeping secrets from his own top level officials, people Trump appointed is remarkable for its lack of transparency.  How might Trump's choice to take this highly unconventional approach be explained?

The answer, I think is autonomy and accountability (or rather lack thereof). By not setting out goals in advance, Trump feels he could frame any outcome, whatever it might be, as a negotiating triumph. That gives him enormous negotiating freedom and autonomy. Engaging in a formal process in which others help set the agenda reduces his his negotiating autonomy. Not being clear about what he wants to accomplish and not being transparent about what is said means he can't be held accountable. No one can point to goals not achieved, since neither the goals not the outcomes are stated.

This approach, maximizing autonomy and minimizing accountability, might have suited a one-person business, whether that was his real estate dealing or his reality TV show, but is poorly suited to international relations. A failure in either of Trumps two prior careers, such as a badly negotiated sale or a drop in ratings, would have been disappointing for him personally, but would not have had mattered much for anyone outside his family.  In negotiating with Russia, failure affects everyone in the US and to some degree has implications for every person on the planet. That's why his outlandish behavior is worrisome.     

Branding - the dark side

Once a brand becomes well known, manufacturers can and often do raise prices. The brand equity represents the additional margin that can be added to the competitive market or oligopolistic commodity price ("CMOCP"). The danger, however, is that when the brand loses its luster, the company must either reduce prices back to the CMOCP or lose sales. But in reducing prices, it reveals to its installed base and to potential future customers what the brand equity premium was. Those who paid it may feel cheated, and that might tarnish the brand for potential future buyers.   

The party of Trump

With Mark Sanford's defeat yesterday, one thing is becoming clear; for Republicans to win their primaries, they cannot criticise Donald Trump. While being critical of a sitting president has always been a difficult position for any elected official of the same party, the problem has never been this severe.

How did we get here? We got here because GOP partisanship overwhelmed values and standards. Appeasing the bully not only emboldened him, it also made obsequious subservience normal. Once critical mass was reached (which it evidently has been), resistance from individual Republicans is useless. The wall, the one that insulates Republicans from accountability for deceit, has been well and truly built.

   

Europe's Dilemma

I cannot begin to imagine what Europe's political leaders make of Trump. Normally political systems filter out the fools, those just in it for a a lark or self promotion. But America's system failed to do so in part because of Citizen's United, but also because none of the framers of the constitution probably could have imagined a wealthy reality TV star running for public office. This was an almost unimaginable confluence of circumstances.

Now the leaders of the world's leading democracies, who have been groomed and moulded by systems that reward, if not the exclusion of all else then to a large degree, serious policy engagement, must find a way of interacting with someone the like of whom they have probably never had to engage with in any serious fashion, someone who has no patience for, or understanding of, policy.

The two questions I imagine they much be asking themselves are these: how can Trump be contained in the short term from doing too much damage to the world order; and is this just a temporary aberration that will be gone in 30 months, or does it reflect a real underlying change in the USA's electorate's orientation to world affairs?

To the second I suspect only time will tell...