I promised myself at the beginning of this long, drawn out election cycle that I was not going to write about the presidential contest. I don’t believe I’m breaking that promise if I quote an article about the presidential race as a quick follow up to my post about Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness.

There, to develop my intuitions about the fundamentally non-transactional character of conversations and other cooperative undertakings, I focused on Nussbaum’s discussion of the shortcomings of transactional forgiveness, and in particular its emphasis on scorekeeping.

Today, I was pleasantly surprised to find Martin Wolf writing about the dangers of a “transactional approach to partnerships” — which would reduce all alliances, agreements and institutions to winner-take-all “deals” — in an excellent piece called “How the West Might Soon Be Lost”:

…the ability of the US to shape the world to its liking will rest increasingly on its influence over the global economic and political systems. Indeed, this is not new. It has been a feature of US hegemony since the 1940s. But this is even more important today. The alliances the US creates, the institutions it supports and the prestige it possesses are truly invaluable assets. All such strategic assets would be in grave peril if Mr Trump were to be president.

The biggest contrast between the US and China is that the former has so many powerful allies. Even Vladimir Putin is not a reliable ally for China. America’s allies support the US largely because they trust it. That trust is based on its perceived commitment to predictable, values-based behaviour. Its alliances have not been problem-free, far from it. But they have worked. Mr Trump’s cherished unpredictability and transactional approach to partnerships would damage the alliances irreparably.

A vital feature of the US-led global order has been the role of multilateral institutions, such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. In binding itself by the rules of an open economic system, the US has encouraged others to do the same. The result has been extraordinary growth in prosperity: between 1950 and 2015, average global real output per head rose sixfold. Mr Trump does not understand this system. The results of repudiation could be calamitous for all.