Gavan Reilly: How do you deal with the Dealmaker who can’t deal?

Honestly. Where to start? By the time this paper gets into your hands, the row might all be defused and the world will have forgotten the Greenland crisis by the end of the week. Or, alternatively, we’ll spend the next few weeks repeating the news cycle of last summer: frantic negotiations to patch together some kind of transatlantic accord to avoid (a) a trade war and (b) an actual war.

Make no bones about it: the latter would be devastating for us. A collapse in trade norms means Europe would levy tariffs of about €94 billion a year on U.S. goods and services – tariffs which would eventually be paid by European consumers. What’s moreover four million Europeans work for American companies, and American exports support about five million European jobs. Ireland, a small export-led economy, is overrepresented in both.

Trump’s whole calling card is being ‘the dealmaker’ and yet – on a Saturday morning in Florida, notably detached from the advisors who midwifed the last deal into existence – he has flippantly torn up the last deal America achieved.

It’s especially silly when you realise how great a deal that was: Trump’s White House negotiated a situation where there would be 15% tariffs on most European produce going into America, and literally nothing coming the other way. Europe sought to placate Trump by actively harming its own affairs – giving America such a preposterous trade advantage that it’s an act of spectacular daftness for the President to abandon it now.

And that speaks to the biggest lingering issue from the crisis at hand: the idea that a deal today may not hold tomorrow. The EU’s immediate priority is to de-escalate the brewing row, finding some accommodation in which Donald Trump claims to “get” something out of Europe, so that the White House can save face and a trade war is averted before it even begins.

But… how can you know that arrangement will hold? The abandonment of last summer’s trade accord is now demonstrable proof that, even when Europe rolls over and gives the White House what it wants, a deal isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. No detente can be relied upon, and any concession (which in itself is usually self-harming) is only a case of buying time.

That’s the most unsettling part for the international orthodoxy: usually in a president’s second term, the third and fourth years are ‘lame duck’ territory because the world is already focussed on the primaries to choose their successor. That won’t be the case with Trump: he is so disinterested in process, and has bypassed Congress so routinely in his first year, that the mid-term elections are meaningless as a hypothetical finish line for his moral authority.

Unencumbered by electoral concerns, and unbothered by procedural norms, Trump will continue to impress his view upon the world with even more zeal. And nobody – nobody – will have any idea how to back him down, at least without the force of arms.

What a cheery note on which to begin the second – only the second! – year of his tenure.