The Art of the Dealmaker-in-Chief

Who really thought Donald Trump’s America was about to join the stampede of first-world powers promising to recognize Palestine at the United Nations? 

“Wow!” He exclaimed this morning on Truth Social. “Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine. That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them.” 

All over the world, commentators convinced themselves that Trump’s expression of concern on Monday about “real starvation” in Gaza meant he was pivoting with global opinion and against Israel. 

It turns out, however, that Team Trump is not for turning when it comes to the Middle East. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, has accused the countries now embracing Palestinian statehood of falling for “Hamas propaganda”.

Trump himself would rather focus all his diplomatic energy on trade, a subject about which he has been positively monomaniacal in recent days. He seems very taken with the new title he has given himself – the Dealmaker-In-Chief. 

“We are very busy in the White House today working on trade deals,” said the President on Truth Social last night. Three hours later, he announced another “full and complete” agreement with South Korea, involving a 15 per cent tariff on them and $350 billion for the US. That’s on the heels of a deal between America and Japan, South Korea’s big rival in manufacturing terms. 

The real coup for Trump’s trade strategy this week, however, has been the new framework arrangement with the European Union, which he announced on Sunday from his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. 

The EU deal is not simply a major breakthrough in and of itself. It’s also, as the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested to my colleague Michael Simmons in Stockholm this week, a useful piece of leverage in the even bigger tariff struggle with China. Bessent was in Sweden for another round of negotiations with his Chinese compatriots and, for US officials, pulling Europe more towards a western trading orbit and less towards the east is an essential thing for the future of capitalism and the free world. China and the US appear to have agreed to take another pause from tariff hostilities – the two sides differ over fentanyl chemicals and Beijing’s role in supporting Iran and Russia. 

It seems that now Russia is playing on Trump’s mind. On Monday, he suggested he would impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on Russia if the war in Ukraine didn’t end within two weeks. Then yesterday, as he slapped further tariffs on India, he criticized New Delhi for buying up Russian oil and gas. “I don’t care what India does with Russia,” he said. “They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”

Then, in perhaps the most intriguing trade development of the week, Trump declared a brand-spanking-new deal with Pakistan, including an arrangement to invest in Pakistani oil. “Who knows, maybe they’ll be selling Oil to India some day!” he “truthed”. 

All jokes aside, Trump’s sudden enthusiasm for Pakistan at India’s expense marks a major shift in US policy in the last few years. Under Obama and Biden and Trump, the US state department has tended to prefer Modi’s India.  

As ever with Trump, his apparent tantrum with India might conceal a subtler move. That’s the art of the Dealmaker-in-Chief. 

In the last two decades, Beijing has made enormous investments in Pakistan, particularly in infrastructure through its Belt and Road Initiative. In some ways Pakistan has become an extension of China’s empire. 

But not all Pakistanis relish the idea of being a Chinese satellite-state. And now the thought of Donald Trump suddenly wooing Pakistan’s government – which recently nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, funnily enough – will ring loud alarm bells among the highest ranks of the Chinese Communist party. With Trump’s international agenda, scratch beneath the hilariously crazy surface and you find a more serious campaign to isolate China, China, China. 

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