Donald Trump's attack on rules-based global order hurts his own people

It is rare for high diplomacy to be accompanied by the extreme and public drama that surrounded the summit meeting of the G-7 economies in Canada this weekend. It is even rarer for a visual representation of that drama to become available to the outside world; but on this occasion one did present itself. The German chancellor’s office released a photograph of a truculent Donald Trump, sitting with his arms folded as his fellow leaders stood, leaned on a table for emphasis, or beseeched him to change his mind. It seemed that they had succeeded initially, when after a heated summit there seemed to be agreement on a final communique. Yet the US president had one last act of subversion in store: From Air Force One, on its way to Singapore to deliver him to a meeting with the North Korean dictator, Mr Trump declared that he was unilaterally withdrawing from the consensus achieved at the summit. Uncertainty now roils the global economic order; there will be severe consequences for risk appetite and capital flows.

Not in memory has an American president so willingly sundered the United States’ relationship with its key allies. At the G-7 summit, Mr Trump pounded his counterparts from the other rich economies with one stunning demand after another — he angrily asked, for example, why Russia was not being re-admitted (Moscow was expelled from what was then the G-8 after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Crimea). Reports suggested also that the president’s team objected strongly to the use of the phrase “rules-based international order” in the final statement — a truly odd, if revealing, choice. After all, that phrase is associated in Asia with the liberal order, underpinned by US military power, that is supposed to constrain and direct China’s rise, turning it from a disruptive into a constructive great power. The optics could not have been worse. As the West squabbled, across the world the Russian and Chinese leaders met in an atmosphere as warm as any seen on such an occasion since the 1950s; and other nations, including India, sent their leaders for the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit.

Mr Trump repeatedly declared that the US’ closest allies were treating it “as a piggy bank”, indicating that the country with the world’s largest trade deficit felt that it was supporting other economies at the cost of its own. Of course this is born of a gravely imperfect understanding of global economic flows and imbalances. Now, the very real prospect of a trade war on multiple fronts looms, even as the French president declared that the US was “isolated” strategically. Mr Trump tweeted a personal attack on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — and this served to unify the Canadian political class in opposition to the US, and left little room for diplomacy in the future. In any breakdown of the global trade and security order, it is the United States’ dynamic and integrated economy that has the most to lose. Mr Trump, in seeking to put America first, has once again shown that the system that his predecessors built over decades is increasingly fragile. It is the US president’s own supporters who will suffer if it collapses under the pressure that Mr Trump is petulantly applying.