Nick Westcott / Aug 2025
Image: Shutterstock
The Trump technique of striking a diplomatic deal is scarcely new. It is just that we’ve forgotten how to deal with it.
The British diplomat Harold Nicolson was born in 1886, when the British Empire was at its height, and died in 1968, when it had gone. He lived through the First World War in 1914-18, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the Second World War that it precipitated, and then the consolidation of the Soviet empire and the Cold War that followed. He knew about negotiating with autocracies, about the threat and use of brute economic and military power to achieve political ends, and the relentless lies and propaganda that accompanied it. ‘Truth itself,’ he concluded sadly in 1961, ‘has lost its significance.’
This was a world that the 1945 settlement sought to banish. Through the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions, it sought to make the world safe for small countries, for democracies and for free trade. It worked, for a while. The European empires unravelled, and the Soviet one too, eventually. The world economy grew, unequally perhaps, but more people ended up better off than ever before.
Yet this was only possible because of the engagement, support and forbearance of the most powerful country in the world, the United States.
Donald Trump’s world view was formed in the 1980s and hasn’t fundamentally changed since. He believes in power. Those with power use it to make themselves rich. If you don’t have power, tough: just respect those that have it, and they might be nice to you. He demands respect, but gives it sparingly, reflected perhaps in the fact that he has no friends, only family and people who are useful to him – for a while.
This is the approach he brings to his diplomacy. Commentators call it ‘transactional’, but there is more to it than that. When it comes to ideas and attitudes, he is a master of manipulation. His apprenticeship in property development and reality TV are perfect for this age of uncertainty, narcissism and social media (more useful perhaps – if less virtuous – than being, say, a human rights lawyer).
He uses these skills in managing US relations with the rest of the world. His chosen instrument, Steve Witkoff, is a man of like mind and experience. The art of the deal, as he has told everyone, is to soften up your opponent (because everyone else is an opponent), keep him guessing, hold the initiative, threaten with lawyers (or tariffs, or bombs), and settle only when you’ve wrung every last advantage from the negotiations. This works brilliantly in property deals. It is disastrous in diplomacy, which depends on building trust and keeping alliances.
But how do you deal with it? How do you manage diplomatic relations with the most powerful country in the world when it pursues its interests in this way? Trump’s answer is you do what he says. He only pauses to reflect when he is smacked in the face, as when the bond market reacted to ‘Liberation Day’, and when the Chinese withheld rare earths from the world market. Then he backed off. Those others, he found, had power too. He respects that.
For former allies, for small countries, for those whose existence and prosperity relied on the rules-based international order that Trump and Putin so clearly want to undermine, this is difficult to deal with. They do not want to play hard-ball with Trump if they can avoid it, as they are likely to suffer. We see the dilemmas playing out in public in the Ukraine negotiations.
One lever remains. Power comes from three things: from military might, from economic strength, and from having friends. The last of these can still count in transactional diplomacy. That is why the Europeans came en masse to the White House to support President Zelenskyy. President Xi understands this very well, and is working assiduously to build alliances. Presidents Putin and Trump do not seem to. Prime Minister Modi and President Lula are learning. African governments are going to have to learn it if they want the world to listen.
Unity, or at least close cooperation, will strengthen weaker countries in negotiating with the great powers. United, Europe has power; divided it becomes a mess of medium-sized squabbling states, easy to pick off. That is why the US and Russia are so keen to divide it by encouraging political forces that prioritise national over collective interests. They are working in fertile ground, despite the fact that populist solutions never work – as the UK found in Brexit.
So democracies around the world need a narrative that has domestic political resonance as well as diplomatic heft, if they are to preserve their freedom and prosperity from those who would undermine it. The argument runs that smaller countries can only protect their national interests if there are rules that all countries, big and small, respect. Without them conflict will spread, as it is spreading now in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and climate change will accelerate – in the long run, bad for all.
Harold Nicolson’s answer was to keep calm and carry on. Persevere: don’t give up on your principles, and keep your friends close. He knew what he was talking about.
