Philip Stephens, opinion writer at the FT concluded his examination of the current state of the liberal international order by saying:

I am sometimes asked what I consider to represent the biggest threat to global peace and stability. A nuclear North Korea looks dangerous, but containable. Mr Kim is not a madman. So the temptation is to reply that the risk is found in China’s rise or in Russian revanchism. The real answer is Mr Trump’s retreat.

Having just completed a podcast with my colleague Bruce Jones, the Vice President and Director – Foreign Policy, Brookings (the podcast at Oxford’s Global Summitry should be up next week)  I decided to find a small hole to crawl into it. 

All right so that comment is a bit exaggerated. But the point is:  ‘America First’ is not just about Trump skepticism over the global economy and the continuing attack on the value of the multilateral trade regime.  No, it is also a mighty scepticism over the value of the multilateral security arrangements.  Let’s just contemplate for a moment the likely Trump bullying over the upcoming NATO Summit. 

But meanwhile his eagerness to question the deployment of U.S. forces in Korea and to accept apparently without consultation the suspension of ‘war games’ with his Korean allies leads to  a general expert view, that of course may be wrong – that a big winner on the Peninsula  after the Singapore Summit is a non-attendee – China. A Stephens suggests: 

Absent from the Singapore summit, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, was nonetheless a big winner. In Mr Trump’s world of everyone for themselves, China will replace the US as the pre-eminent power in east Asia. Japan, Taiwan and, in time, South Korea itself, may choose to take a tip from Mr Kim. If you want to be safe, build a bomb. 

What an unhealthy result that would be. 

Image Credit: cnn.com