Trump's second coming will change the world

What on earth is all this going to do to us? Four more years of this? It really feels like too much already, and we are only a few months in.

Trump’s second presidency is so different from his first one. The first was wild of course, but it was constrained in many ways by the Congress or the courts. As well as that, some of the people around him would say - not to him, of course - that the first presidency lacked really clear objectives.

This time, the intended outcomes are obvious. President Trump wants to throw out free trade and move towards protectionism. He also wants to dismantle the security and political infrastructure the world - and especially Europe - has relied on since 1945.

We have a much clearer sense of how this President Trump sees the future than in 2016, but the approach to getting there is anything but clear and certainly not in any sense predictable. Trump’s presidency seems so out of control, so wild, that we can only guess what is coming tomorrow. Some say this is deliberate, a tactic. Whether that is true or not, whether the future he imagines will come to pass, we know that the attempts to get there will change the world. Notwithstanding all the day-to-day chaos, we have to try and understand how that might unfold, the better to figure out how to respond.

Now every schoolkid knows Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It means that in nature any force that is exerted meets a similar response, but in an opposite direction. You push your arms and legs in the water, the water pushes back on you, and that moves you forward - that is the science of swimming. Now the laws of physics don’t change. They happen all the time and in every place on the planet in the same way.

Politics isn’t always like that. But it is true that any political force in one direction is invariably met by a reaction. And the clash of those two political forces moves you to a different place from where you started. That process is constant, but it has been turbo-charged these past few months. With no sign of the pace slowing, it is going to create four years of tumult, most especially between the big political power blocs in the world: the US, China, and the EU foremost amongst them.

We in Ireland – as globalised as we are – are going to get caught up in all of that. How is all that going to continue to change our politics and ultimately us? There are so many ways that you would need a lot of articles. But we can easily spot three key things.

First, if the Americans will no longer definitely defend Europe, Europe will have to defend Europe, and then we in Ireland will have to decide what that means for us. For many decades, we haven’t needed to think too much about the realities of defending ourselves in the world. We may want – as a large majority in opinion polls suggests – to believe that this is still the case, but that won’t change the new reality. Led by Germany and France – and yes, the UK – Europeans are going to build bigger armies to protect Europe.

Over the coming years, we are going to be asked again and again what part we are going to play in that. All the ways we currently have to say no won’t sound so great, given how prosperous we have become within the security and economic umbrella we have sheltered behind for free up to now. On the other hand, attempting to do anything about it - even incredibly modest changes like removing the ‘Triple Lock’ - will produce huge divisions at home. Much of the political left here will protest furiously against those changes, which are coming about - ironically - because the very thing they most criticise, US support for NATO, is now being undermined by Trump.

The changes that Trump brings and the reactions to those changes won’t just be confined to security matters. As we all know, Trump wants to restrict free trade and embrace protectionism. Everyone right now is focused on what that all means in terms of tariffs, but it goes wider than that, extending to the sourcing of the key raw materials that are crucial to modern forms of production. Restrictions on their sale between countries are set to become an increasingly significant element in the trade wars that Trump's second presidency has unleashed.

Those raw materials - all sorts of vital metals and minerals - are used in various industries across all of Europe. We in Ireland draw on the free flow of those raw materials enormously: firms across the west of Ireland rely on their supply and use every day.

Some of those metals and minerals are physically located in Europe. Many of them though we import into Europe, either as raw material or already in some device or product. Smartphones contain up to 50 different types of metals for example.

Now, in a Trump-shaped world, if you cannot rely on other countries to trade these raw materials with you, ensuring your own definite supply of them is going to become an increasing and serious problem. For if you are no longer able to simply buy such things, states will conclude that they must be able to control them. That is one of the dynamics behind the ‘raw materials’ deal that President Trump is so keen to force on Ukraine. The ultimate logic of such a world is that countries and power blocs will try and take these resources if they cannot freely trade them.

That is not pretty but it is the logic of where everyone may end up when free trade comes under attack and pushes more and more states towards a policy of protectionism and of your own country first. It is a very dangerous element to introduce into the world and has been the cause of many wars throughout history. The EU - and thus Ireland - has always tried to promote the idea of freely trading rather than dominating such materials: it is going to become harder to hold to that in this new world. And as our economy is affected by all these things, so will our public finances and then the choices about which particular social issues we try and address will become harder, and much more conflicted.

And while we hope for relief from the economic impacts of all this at some stage, the years ahead have the potential to impact us in a third way that can’t be undone, and not just because of the substance of the Trump administration’s policies. The style is just as dangerous and is having a corrosive effect on politics everywhere. The anger and the divisiveness are spreading rapidly.

That will dial the temperature up everywhere and institute even more division within as well as between different countries. Where that leads us no one can tell, but you don’t need to be a prophet to imagine that it will be nowhere good.