America is finding out other countries have agency too

About that F-35 fighter jet 'kill switch'

Mark Carney and Keir Starmer (AP)

On joining HM Treasury in 2016, I had the privilege of spending three weeks in the company of 20 or so others undertaking a crash course in, well, everything. We studied the core skills of policy-making, including economics, fiscal policy and working with ministers. We were given talks by senior civil servants, developed fake submissions (the chicken shop tax ran into, erm, presentational issues) and studied different approaches to problem-solving. But one role-playing exercise will stay with me until the heat death of the universe.

One of the advantages of being a policy advisor at the Treasury, as opposed to a spending department, is that you can ultimately tell other civil servants what to do. It is not for nothing that there is a reputation of a so-called ‘Treasury type’. Indeed, that is one of the more polite terms for them.

So, in an effort to improve relations between different parts of government, we were set a challenge. Essentially, how to say ‘no’ to civil servants from other departments without being a jerk. Because relationships usually last beyond a single set of negotiations. This also recognises a fundamental truth of human relations. Others may be less powerful than you, but if you treat them badly, they can make your life difficult. The same is true in international relations.

The Trump administration can impose crippling tariffs on Canadian goods. This will no doubt hurt Canada far more than the US, given its relative size and the flow of trade. But Canada can respond. Not only by applying retaliatory tariffs, but also by changing its own behaviour in other ways that dent American power.

Canada’s Liberal government, newly led by former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, has pledged to study alternatives to the US-built F-35 fighter jet, in the wake of continued threats to its sovereignty by Donald Trump and wider concerns about the reliability of the US as an ally. Indeed, suggestions that the F-35 has a ‘kill switch’ that the US president could press to render them inoperable led to this remarkable post by Lockheed Martin:

This phenomenon goes far beyond Canada. The European Commission revealed yesterday that money from the new €150bn defence fund can only be spent with EU defence companies – or those from nations that have signed a defence agreement with the bloc. It goes further. According to the Financial Times, the plan would “exclude any advanced weapons systems upon which a third country had ‘design authority’”. This would therefore rule out the US Patriot air and missile defence platform.

As an aside, this does not necessarily preclude UK involvement. London and Brussels have commenced negotiations on a defence pact, but talks have been bogged down by wider disagreements over maddeningly small but politically potent issues such as fishing rights. Evidence that Trump’s return will not automatically see European leaders linking arms and belting out Ode to Joy.

In his book Power: A Radical View, the political and social theorist Steven Lukes set out the idea of three dimensions of power. In the first dimension, power is the ability to make others do what you wish. In the second dimension, power is the ability to limit the scope of others’ options when conflict arises, whether through persuasion, coercion or manipulation.

But it is the third dimension that is most highly prized. That is, the power to avoid conflict in the first place by shaping others’ preferences in such a way that compliance is voluntary and even viewed as natural. That is the power of the US-led world order that Trump is collapsing.

America will continue to be able to order small states around and coerce those dependent on it economically, militarily and diplomatically. But the world in which other powerful nations automatically followed the US, bought its weapons systems and whose populations genuinely liked America and Americana, consumed its culture as if it were an adjunct of their own, walked around with I ♥ NYC t-shirts or Nasa memorabilia. That is slipping. You cannot buy or bully your way to that dimension of power, whether you are a junior civil servant or the president of the United States.