Of all the changes in US foreign policy that President Donald Trump’s administration has made, the most consequential is the adoption of a confrontational stance towards China. Replacing a decades-old policy of engagement, Trump’s approach has not only resulted in an economic cold war between the world’s two largest economies; it has also raised the spectre of armed conflict in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

Within the first year of his presidency, Trump labelled China a strategic ‘competitor’ and ‘rival power’. But it’s not just Trump: for the US national security establishment and leading Republican members of Congress—as well as some Democrats—China represents the most serious long-term threat to America’s global pre-eminence and vital interests.

Geopolitics has been the primary cause of the rapid deterioration of US–China relations over the past two years, and Trump’s trade war must be viewed in this context. US tariffs may be focused on undermining China’s long-term economic potential, but the underlying motivation is to weaken China as a strategic rival.

This should be clear from the fact that, despite Trump’s economic justifications—protection of US businesses’ intellectual property and correction of the huge bilateral trade imbalance—his tariffs are likely to do serious harm to the US economy, as they unravel an economic relationship built over four decades. In substance, if not in name, America’s China policy has become entirely adversarial.

This shift has alarmed some of America’s most experienced China scholars and former policymakers. In an open letter, nearly 100 of them—including both Republicans and Democrats, and many vocal critics of Chinese policies and behaviour—recently called on Trump not to treat China as an enemy.

The American public seems largely to agree. There is, to be sure, widespread antipathy towards China throughout the United States: according to the Pew Research Center’s most recent survey on the matter (conducted in August 2018), only 38% of Americans view China favorably, while 47% view it unfavorably. But only 29% of respondents cited China’s military might as a cause for concern. A much larger share— 58%—are worried about its economic prowess. This suggests that, in the eyes of most Americans, the primary objective of relations with China should be to protect their livelihoods, not to initiate a geopolitical confrontation.

Yet a geopolitical confrontation seems to be precisely what the Trump administration is engineering—possibly at the expense of many Americans’ livelihoods. This disconnect reflects the extent to which the shift in America’s China policy has occurred out of the public’s view and without open debate.

Such a debate is urgently needed. Though the trade war has been dominating headlines since it began, much of the American public is unaware of the extent of the transformation in US policy towards China, which exposes their country to an open-ended conflict with what will soon be the world’s largest economy and its leading emerging power.

In a democracy, a government cannot pursue a long-term struggle with a powerful geopolitical adversary without sustained political support from an informed public. Special attention should be paid to young people (who, according to Pew, have a significantly more favourable view of China than their elders do), because they will bear the brunt of the costs of the unfolding Sino-American cold war.

For such a debate to be credible, the Trump administration will need to answer crucial questions about its China policy. First and foremost, what is the policy’s ultimate objective? Possible answers include modification of certain Chinese behaviours or policies, containment of Chinese economic or military might, or outright regime change.

The Trump administration would then have to explain how it intends to achieve its stated objective. Is ‘economic decoupling’, favoured by the China hawks in Trump’s orbit, an effective or feasible strategy? The authors of the open letter argue that US efforts to decouple China from the global economy ‘will damage [America’s] international role and reputation, and undermine the economic interests of all nations’. And could other countries—even traditional US allies—be convinced to support those efforts? Would the US be willing (or able) to go it alone?

Whichever policy it chooses, the Trump administration must be able to justify it. Last October, Vice President Mike Pence effectively declared ‘cold war’ on China in a blistering speech that contained a litany of accusations, including interference in US politics and oppression of its own people. What Pence—and the rest of the Trump administration—didn’t offer was a reasoned justification for America’s treatment of China as an existential threat.

The final question that must be asked concerns multilateral cooperation. To confront shared challenges—some of which, like climate change and nuclear proliferation, actually are existential threats—the world needs such cooperation more than ever. Can the US embrace a policy of confrontation towards China without precluding collaboration on issues where it is required?

The signatories of the open letter—as well as a slew of renowned economists, politicians and thinkers—have presented an informed and thoughtful statement of their collective views on China. The Trump administration must illuminate its own vision and goals to the people it is supposed to represent.

Kim Jong-un’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok in late April demonstrated conclusively that the North Korean leader has no intention of retreating from the international stage after February’s ill-fated summit with US President Donald Trump in Hanoi. Over the past 12 months, Kim has held at least one leadership summit with each of the region’s major powers—with the notable exception of Japan.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe claimed as recently as March 2018 that ‘talks for the sake of talks are meaningless’ when it comes to North Korea. But in a stark reversal, Tokyo has dropped its preconditions for a summit with Kim, a shift that reflects the uncertain yet sustained openness to dialogue that’s arisen in the region. Abe now says that the two leaders need to meet in person to ‘break the current mutual mistrust’.

Several unresolved issues between Pyongyang and Tokyo have contributed to the two leaders’ reluctance to meet in recent years. On the Japanese side, chief among these is the controversial abduction issue. Resolving the case of the Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s has long been championed as a foreign policy priority by Abe. Japan was also angered in 2017 by North Korea’s repeated shooting of short- and medium-range missiles around and over Japanese territory.

Tokyo has failed to endear itself to Pyongyang by continuing to be a staunch advocate of ‘maximum pressure’—and by playing a leading role in monitoring North Korea’s illicit ship-to-ship transfers. Since early 2018, North Korea’s state-run media outlets have regularly denounced Japan, even as their criticism of other major powers has at times become less strident.

The last round of bilateral negotiations between Japan and North Korea commenced in 2002 and fell apart in early 2016 when Pyongyang embarked on a new round of nuclear and missile tests. Tokyo has since attempted to get the abduction issue onto the agendas of both US–North Korea summits, but that approach has failed to lead to observable diplomatic progress.

Recognising that its own unique national interests are stake, Tokyo has slowly begun signalling a softer approach in an attempt to create the conditions for its own bilateral summit with Pyongyang. Notably, the Abe administration dropped the term ‘maximum pressure’ from its most recent annual foreign policy report, known as the ‘diplomatic bluebook’. It also, for the first time in more than a decade, declined to submit an annual motion to the UN condemning North Korean human rights abuses.

While the fundamentals in the relationship between North Korea and Japan haven’t changed, there are two key factors behind Abe’s decision to drop conditions for meeting Kim. The first is Tokyo’s and Washington’s diverging interests on North Korean issues. During the ‘fire and fury’ days of 2017, Abe and Trump met frequently, reaffirming their shared hardline approach to dealing with North Korea. After the president’s shift to diplomacy with Kim in 2018, the Abe administration publicly supported dialogue with Pyongyang but also warned against trusting North Korea, holding firm to its policy of maintaining maximum pressure.

In the year since the Singapore summit, however, it’s become clear that the US hasn’t been an effective spokesperson for Japan. By all accounts, Trump has avoided discussions of human rights topics in his meetings with the North Korean leader, making it difficult for Tokyo to effectively deal with the abduction issue through its US ally. During the recent Abe–Trump summit in Japan, Trump met with the families of some of the abductees, and Abe informed the press that the president had told him he would ‘spare no effort’ to help resolve the matter. Despite those assurances, there’s been a growing appreciation in Tokyo that the diplomatic support of the US won’t be anywhere near enough, on its own, to produce a breakthrough.

Nor has much progress been made on halting the development of North Korea’s nuclear or missile programs. Washington remains more focused on addressing its own vulnerabilities to Pyongyang’s long-range missiles than on dealing with the short- and medium-range missiles that currently threaten Japanese territory. Tokyo has likely calculated that Trump is determined to strike a deal with Kim and will once again cast Tokyo’s interests aside.

The other factor is related to internal politics in Japan. The timing of the latest move towards a summit with North Korea is advantageous for Abe. With parliamentary elections expected at least once in the next few months, Abe could use foreign policy issues to bolster his party’s position. And he has certainly built up enough capital as a hardliner over the past nine years to give himself space to propose an unconditional meeting with the North Korean leader without risking being depicted as weak by his domestic opponents.

Unfortunately for Abe, the decision to hold a summit isn’t his alone, and it’s quite possible that Kim will continue to decline Tokyo’s entreaties to meet. Kim would arguably accrue some additional prestige and status by ‘completing the set’ of summits with Northeast Asia’s leaders, but he may decide that he has more to gain by continuing to portray Japan as the natural enemy of the North Korean people. After all, Japan can’t offer anything to North Korea it can’t get from China, Russia, South Korea or the United States.

The massive financial benefits and diplomatic recognition that Pyongyang might hope for in return for resolving the abduction issue are unlikely to be forthcoming from Tokyo unless progress is made on curtailing North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Moreover, a summit with the Japanese leader would almost certainly lead to additional international coverage of the abductee issue—a particularly regrettable part of the Kim dynasty’s legacy. Even a successful resolution of the matter could well provoke more anger towards Pyongyang in Japan and across the world than it does bonhomie. As long as Kim maintains his relationship with Trump and moves towards economic cooperation with China, Russia and South Korea, Kim is in a position to decline involvement from Japan.

Ultimately, now that the leaders of China, the US, South Korea and Russia have all met with Kim and advocated dialogue, and there have been no serious plans to revive multilateral diplomacy à la the long-defunct six-party talks, it has become increasingly difficult for Japan to make its voice heard on peninsula issues. Unless Kim breaks from his current stance, it appears that this isolation could continue for some time.

Welcome to ‘The Strategist Six’, a feature that provides a glimpse into the thinking of prominent academics, government officials, military officers, reporters and interesting individuals from around the world.

1. British Prime Minister Theresa May has now lost a range of symbolic and substantive parliamentary votes on Brexit. At the same time, Europe is sticking to the line that it won’t reopen the text of the withdrawal deal. Do the prime minister’s challenges today stem mainly from Westminster or Brussels?

It’s a combination of the two and the interaction between the two. For a long period the prime minister was focused on getting a deal from Brussels and maybe wasn’t able to concentrate on what Tory MPs would find acceptable. That approach ran into problems and now she’s trying to find some mid-way point. Although she denies it, her policy is about running down the clock and then facing the Tories with the prospect that they could lose Brexit altogether if they don’t accept something very close to the deal that they previously rejected. I think it might well work—we’ll find out in the next month or so.

2. With the various options for ‘how to Brexit’ having been given a good public airing, do you think that the British people should be given an opportunity not only to reconfirm their desire to leave the EU, but also to nominate how the country forges ahead with that intention?

Remainers tend to be the ones who want a second referendum. I voted ‘remain’ and part of me wants a second referendum, because I don’t think it has worked out the way it was sold. In fact the ‘leave’ campaign was quite deliberate in being very unspecific about what Brexit would actually look like; they basically said, ‘It’ll be fine.’ Over the last two years the British people have discovered that a lot of the claims made for Brexit were wishful thinking at best. But I’m genuinely divided. While I’ve written that we should take May’s deal, I find that whenever that deal comes close to fruition I feel depressed because I don’t actually want to leave the EU. So, intellectually, I’m in one place; emotionally, I’m in another.

I personally don’t have a problem with a second referendum, and I think it’s likely that Britain would vote to stay this time—certainly opinion polls for the last few months have shown a narrow ‘remain’ majority. But I don’t say it with much joy or confidence, because I think it would be a highly divisive move and would play into the narrative of the leavers, who have always said, ‘This is an elite conspiracy which shows remainers aren’t interested in what the people have to say.’

So if you were to turn around and reverse Brexit—even by perfectly legitimate democratic means—there’s a risk of political disillusionment tipping into something that’s quite corrosive for British democracy. Leaving the EU will really be damaging both for the British economy and for Britain’s clout in the world. But equally, it’s not obvious that endangering the UK’s traditional political stability in favour of staying inside the EU is the right trade-off.

3. In the long term, is the goal of a ‘global Britain’ made more or less likely by Brexit?

I think it’s a pretty empty slogan. Britain is already global in the sense that it’s a global trading economy with international interests and with—perhaps as a legacy of empire—an unusually wide network stretching all the way to Australia and the Pacific. I think the slogan meant to convey that Britain had become locked into a European mentality and set of markets, and that we should reorient ourselves to the dynamic, emerging markets of the world—particularly those in Asia. The trouble is that it’s a false choice. I don’t think that being a member of the EU prevents the UK from taking advantage of such opportunities. Arguably it makes it easier: the EU has just signed a big trade deal with Japan, and it also has a deal with South Korea. Britain as a global hub is much more attractive inside the EU than outside of it, so the danger is that Brexit makes us less global, not more.

4. You wrote recently that the ‘era of populists’ could last decades if nationalist governments deliver tangible results. Two years in, how successful has US President Donald Trump been in ensuring that those who elected him feel he has improved their lives and arrested their sense of relative American decline?

It depends on who you speak to. America at the moment is so divided along partisan lines that nobody is really shifting their position, sort of like Brexit. So Trump’s supporters, unless they’re directly affected by an event, be it a factory closure or whatever, will tend to say, ‘Yeah, he’s going well.’ His opponents don’t see it that way.

There hasn’t yet been that defining event that will fix in people’s minds whether Trump is seen as a success or a failure. Jimmy Carter’s failure to respond effectively to the occupation of the US embassy in Iran, combined with the second oil shock and Carter’s own demeanour, created the sense that his was a failed presidency—even though he lost quite narrowly in the end. For Ronald Reagan, there was the resurgence of the American economy, the invasion of Grenada oddly enough, and a few other things that created momentum and led to his being seen as a success. But Trump isn’t yet fixed in people’s minds as a success or failure, and maybe it won’t happen anymore because America is so divided. Barack Obama’s supporters see him as the greatest president ever, while his opponents still detest him.

5. What is your view of Chinese President Xi Jinping—his premiership, his agenda, his authority, his grip on power?

Pretty negative, to be honest. I think he’s been very bad news for China. You don’t have to embrace the naive idea that China should move instantly to one person, one vote and a full liberal democracy; I have some sympathy for the argument that you have to play that carefully. But Xi is moving China backwards in the sense that the cult of personality is very retrograde. It is infantilising for what are very sophisticated people. This isn’t the Cultural Revolution generation who were cut off from the outside world; these are people who are well educated and know the world yet have to follow this line.

I don’t claim to know China very well, but I have been going every now and then for quite a while. It seems to me that the scope for debate—what intellectuals are prepared to talk about in public or in private—has narrowed. People are scared now in a way that they weren’t five years ago. In fact, I remember five years ago going out for dinner in Beijing with a bunch of professors from the top Chinese universities who were prepared to have a very lively discussion in a restaurant about whether China should aspire to be a democracy. I just don’t think they would do that anymore.

My impression is that there’s a climate of fear now under Xi, and it’s not just about politics but it’s also about business because of the anti-corruption drive. Now, obviously the system was deeply corrupt, but the sense now that anybody’s vulnerable is destabilising. It’s very worrying for China and for the world.

6. Are you pessimistic or optimistic about the state of global affairs in 2019?

I’m not terribly optimistic and the reasons are fairly clear. If you’re of a ‘liberal’ disposition both in economics and in politics, we had a very good 30 years from 1978—the opening of China, and Thatcher and Reagan reinvigorating the West. That was followed by democratisation, which is commonly and understandably associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Things were going in the right direction.

We also saw state control of the economy going out of fashion and it seemed there was a formula that worked and was going global—a combination of political and economic freedoms advancing. But, significantly, 1989 was the year not only of the Berlin Wall but also of Tiananmen Square, where China didn’t take the same route yet it has since been successful beyond anyone’s imagining, despite being a one-party state.

Then the Western system had its own seismic economic shock in 2008 from which we never fully recovered, and in the aftermath we’ve had a rise of illiberal politics, which Donald Trump exemplifies in the West. But it’s not just Trump. If you look across Europe, the AfD is the official opposition in the German parliament, Brexit is here in the UK, France has the gilet jaunes, Spain is threatening to break up, democracy is under threat in Poland and Hungary, Russia has gone backwards to become a menacing player in the international system. And strongman politics is back in fashion, not just in China but even in India, the Philippines and Brazil, and along with it a rise in economic nationalism, which is potentially dangerous.

So no, I don’t think it’s a particularly great period. The question is how long it will last. The other thing that makes me anxious is actually the environment. The sense that we’ve failed on climate change, that the goals aren’t realistic or probably enough in themselves. And with things like species extinction and so on—I see you had one in Australia very recently—it’s very alarming.

The only thing I would say, though, is that one can misread these things. I was actually talking to my mother about it recently—when I was born in ’63 she had a strong sense that I had come into a world gone wrong because the Cuban missile crisis happened just a year before, everyone was terrified of nuclear Armageddon around the corner and things looked very dangerous. And yet, I’ve lived in a very blessed era of peace, prosperity, steadily expanding freedom and reduction of poverty around the world. So you can have a snapshot of a time and think, ‘Oh well, it’s obviously terrible.’ But we may be wrong. I hope so!

Welcome to ‘The Strategist Six’, a feature that provides a glimpse into the thinking of prominent academics, government officials, military officers, reporters and interesting individuals from around the world.

1. As an American and German in London, what surprised you the most about Brexit?

Well, I was surprised that Brexit happened in the first place! But I was also surprised by the election of Donald Trump—I think many of us who follow these events missed, or at least underestimated, the populist movements. We’re now trying to interpret them and understand where things might go, but I’m not sure the received wisdom about populism is correct. Unfortunately, we’re still going in the wrong direction in terms of resolving the enormous divisions in societies; people aren’t talking to each other.

2. How healthy is the special relationship between the US and the UK today?

There are different layers of the US–UK relationship: there’s the relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Theresa May, which is not great. At the working level, though, there are strong, committed relationships, whether it’s in intelligence sharing or between parliamentarians and congressional members or between officials in the Foreign Office or the State Department. Those relationships are very strong, but the senior level is fraying and fragmented. It’s worrying.

Trump isn’t treating traditional US partners such as the UK well, in the same way that he also isn’t supporting NATO appropriately in his public pronouncements. I recently attended the Munich Security Conference, where a number of NATO countries were concerned about rumours that the US was going to put unhelpful pressure on them to reach their 2% commitments. That can only serve the interests of Russia, and won’t help to preserve and strengthen NATO. But the other thing that was interesting about Munich was that over 60 congressional members were there to emphasise bipartisan support for the Atlantic alliance and the European Union, while Vice President Mike Pence and Trump were sending very different messages. This was the largest US congressional delegation in the 55-year history of the Munich Security Conference

3. In light of the Shamima Begum case, what should the UK do about Britons who now seek to return home after fighting for or supporting ISIL?

There are laws governing what the country needs to do and the ways it should manage these cases. For dual nationals the government can—in exceptional circumstances—revoke their British passport, though at the same time, they can’t be left stateless. If they return on their own accord, the government will have to figure out whether it prosecutes or whether to enlist them in one of the programs to try to deradicalise them. But they’re not going to go out of their way to facilitate their return—as we’ve heard from senior government officials, they are not going to put lives at risk by sending anyone to Syria to collect people like Shamima Begum. However, once ISIL is defeated in that last remaining enclave in Syria, you will have hundreds of family members or ISIL fighters who are going to try to return to the UK or want to return to Europe, so it’s an emerging challenge and it could be a significant challenge for law enforcement here and in other countries.

4. Looking around the globe at various hot spots, pressure points and leadership styles, what is most concerning to you?

I don’t think today’s challenges are that different in scope and scale from past challenges, but it’s a far more dangerous world because the US is not providing the leadership it used to provide. You see some world leaders talking publicly about not relying on America anymore, and asserting they will do more on their own—Angela Merkel has probably been the most vocal, but the Canadians have also made similar comments. You’re seeing this fragmentation because the US is no longer the global standard-bearer of the rules-based international order. There are a number of challenges, whether it’s Russian interference in US and European elections, the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, Chinese hacking, the catastrophic Syrian civil war or the conflict in Yemen. All need committed leadership, and the US is not leading in the way that it has traditionally done. So, it’s now about what like-minded countries or multilaterals like the UN or the EU can do to provide that leadership.

5. What are the major challenges or opportunities facing think tanks like RUSI [the Royal United Services Institute] today?

With all of the security challenges we’re facing right now I think it’s important to have fresh ideas and to convene smart, creative people—those with very different perspectives, from the public sector, private sector and scholarly worlds—to consider a range of practical responses. Sometimes we host such meetings privately and other times we do them as public events. It’s important to provide evidence-based research and practical suggestions for dealing with today’s challenges, and then disseminate the ideas through the variety of means that are available, be it via social media or in newspapers or on our website. But I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to provide workable, practical ideas, not pie-in-the-sky proposals.

6. In RUSI’s In Context podcast, you conclude by asking your guests what they would say to young people who aspire to work in international affairs. What advice would you give?

People tend to have two different approaches to their career. Some know from day one what they want to be when they grow up and they chart their path very carefully. Most of the rest of us don’t really have that kind of foresight or we don’t necessarily know what we want to do. Careers are changing so much now that it’s potentially smarter to not have such a clear idea because maybe that career might not exist by the time you get to the right age.

My advice is that you should find good mentors and work for those you really respect and think you can learn from. It’s also about trying to figure out what you’re good at and getting better at things you’re not good at. But I believe in playing to your strengths, as ideally the teams you work in have a mixture of people with different strengths, all bringing something unique to the table.

It was at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that Russian President Vladimir Putin first signalled a cooling of Russian–Western relations. Soon thereafter, Russia invaded Georgia; and in the years since, it has annexed Crimea, launched incursions into Eastern Ukraine, and carried out cyberattacks against Western democracies. Today, Russian–Western relations are in a downward spiral.

The annual Munich Security Conference is to geopolitics what the World Economic Forum’s meetings in Davos are to business. The gathering has evolved from its Cold War–era focus primarily on German–American military cooperation to viewing global issues through a much wider lens. Participants now discuss topics ranging from foreign policy and international security to climate change.

This year’s three-day conference, which had record-high attendance, will most likely be remembered for years to come. The speeches delivered by US Vice President Mike Pence and German Chancellor Angela Merkel could not have been more different, in terms of both style and substance. At a gathering originally designed to facilitate German–American cooperation, Germany’s and America’s foreign-policy positions have rarely been so far apart.

Pence delivered a hardline ‘America first’ message and celebrated the Trump administration’s adamant refusal to accept longstanding rules and international agreements. Europeans, he declared, have no choice but to follow America’s lead, even—indeed, especially—if it means renouncing the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement that European diplomats did so much to bring about. As with his previous appearance at the conference, Pence refused to take any questions after his speech. Many of his ‘applause lines’ were met with stony silence.

Prior to Pence’s appearance, Merkel had delivered a speech that might well go down as one of the best of her career. With energy and aplomb, she mounted a vigorous defence of multilateral efforts to confront climate change, Russian aggression, development in Africa and a range of other challenges that lie ahead. The overall thrust of Merkel’s remarks was obvious to everyone. She delivered a pointed rebuke of ‘America first’ unilateralism.

Merkel’s speech received a standing ovation, which is unusual for the Munich Security Conference. She also took questions, which she answered with confidence and a hint of humour, winning herself another standing ovation.

Like Putin’s aggressive remarks in 2007, Pence’s and Merkel’s speeches will be remembered for what they augur for the future. Taken together, they confirm that Donald Trump’s presidency has ushered in a period of escalating transatlantic tensions that show no signs of abating. It was only a year ago that Europeans were told to ignore Trump’s tweets and focus on the substance of US policies, which were being overseen by the ‘adults in the room’. But with the departure of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and others, the adults are now gone, and there is ever-less daylight between the policies and the tweets.

Nowhere is the disconnect between US and European priorities more obvious than in the Middle East. When Pence browbeats European countries to abandon their efforts to save the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—which imposes clear, verifiable restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program—one can only wonder about the Trump administration’s endgame. If and when Iran restarts its nuclear-weapons program, US–Iranian tensions will almost certainly escalate to the point of crisis. The question is whether that is the outcome Trump and his advisers have sought all along.

The tensions on trade issues are also acute. The Trump administration has already designated European steel and aluminium exports a threat to US national security, and now it may be preparing to add European cars to that list. If it does, the transatlantic trade conflict will enter dangerous territory.

Trump seems to have a particular aversion to German cars, which account for only 8% of US auto sales (though they do command a much greater share of the luxury/premium market). Moreover, as Merkel pointed out in her speech, the world’s largest BMW plant is not in Germany, but in South Carolina, where a substantial share of production is exported to China. By pursuing dramatically higher auto tariffs, the Trump administration is threatening jobs not only in Europe, but also in the US; both would suffer from a disruption to global value chains.

A year from now, many of the same leaders and policymakers will gather in Munich once again. If the worst-case scenario suggested by this year’s gathering comes to pass, we might be heading for open war in the Middle East and a devastating trade war across the Atlantic.

Or perhaps this year’s conference will have set off the alarm bells needed to prevent the worst from happening. The transatlantic relationship is complicated enough as it is. No one should place it at risk of unraveling further.