Donald Trump

Trump is all about revenge. Just ask James Comey and others who failed to jump when the master called.

Secretary of Defence/War Pete Hegseth echoes the presidential instincts, and he has made it clear that the president is angry that Europeans did not fly to his aid in Iran when he wanted in the way that he wanted.

Hegseth added that if Europeans fail to support American operations, then they cannot assume that America will continue stationing tens of thousands of troops on their soil.

Hegseth’s threat follows the comment from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the forthcoming NATO heads of government summit in Ankara on July 6-7 could be the “most consequential” in the Alliance’s history.

Put together, it is easy to conclude that the president might be planning to use the summit to announce long-anticipated significant withdrawals of US troops in Europe.

There are more than 62,000 US troops based in Europe. They do more than provide a first line of defence against conventional attack from the East. They are 62,000 free-spending Yanks who support tens of thousands of jobs. Many local economies are dependent on American troops.

And that is how Hegseth and Trump view the presence of US forces in Europe. Primarily in transactional terms involving  the expenditure of US dollars outside American borders.

There is, however, much, much more involved in their presence. US troops in Europe have enabled America to project military and political power on a global scale. That projection has in turned produced trillions of dollars for the American GDP.

The 10,000 American airmen in England’s East Anglia are the backbone of the unsinkable aircraft carrier off the coast of Europe. The US base at Naples is the command centre for its Mediterranean fleet. Ramstein Airbase in Germany is a major medical evacuation centre as well as the command headquarters for operations in Africa and the Middle East.

Trump’s instinct is for revenge. But like many instincts, it is self-defeating.

The atemoya

An obscure tropical fruit has become the latest proxy in the Cold War between Taiwan and China. The atemoya, a sweet hybrid of the sugar apple and cherimoya, is at the centre of an economic and political battle that has little to do with agriculture and everything to do with sovereignty.

The atemoya originated in Florida in 1908 as a cross between the sugar apple and the cherimoya. Heart-shaped it has a pale-green skin with knobbly segments and poisonous black seeds.

But it is the inside that counts. The meat of the fruit has been described as a mixture of pineapple, pear, strawberry, vanilla and coconut. One agronomist referred to it as “the pina colada of the fruit world.”

Even better than the fruit’s taste is the price that it commands. The average export price of the atemoya is $3.16 a kilo and a single fruit can weigh over a kilo.

Some of the world’s best growing conditions for the atemoya can be found in Taiwan’s  Taitung County, a mountainous agricultural region. Before 2021, farmers made an exceptionally good living out of exporting 80-90 percent of their atemoya crop to mainland China. Then disaster struck.

Beijing suddenly banned all imports of the “green gold” of the fruit world, claiming that it had become infected with the Pacific mealybug. Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) denounced the claim as a politically motivated protest.

Taiwan’s atemoya growers faced financial ruin and just barely survived the crisis with a combination of government subsidies and a diversification into the Japanese and South Korean markets and processed foods.

But the Chinese market remained the holy grail for the atemoya growers who remembered the good times with incomes of $250,000-plus. In 2023 their hopes were raised when Beijing partially lifted restrictions. But they were dashed again when China imposed stiff tariffs and VAT on the crop.

Then came this month’s annual Straits Forum in China’s Fujian Province. The Chief Magistrate of Taitung County is Rao Ching-ling applied for a travel permit to attend. She is a leading member of the Kuomintang (KMT) party, some of whose prominent members want “peaceful and democratic” reunification with mainland China. Such language is welcomed in Beijing which has long sought closer cross-Strait engagement and favours the KMT over the DPP who pursue a legally vague quasi-independence status for the island.

Ms. Rao is not one of the KMT firebrands promoting a tie-up with China. She does, however, want to resume lucrative atemoya exports for her constituents. But her request for a travel permit to the forum was denied. So, she sent a recorded video instead. The video plus the presence of some of the county’s farmers did the trick. Export deals were signed.

Not so fast, said the DPP’s Minister of Agriculture. He warned that a return to dependence on the Chinese market—lucrative as it may be—was a political trap. “First China makes large purchases to show goodwill and encourage farmers to grow atemoyas. Next it unilaterally imposes export restrictions without warning.” The Ministry of Agriculture even has a slogan to describe the tactic: “Raise, trap, kill.”

Ms. Rao sees an opportunity to boost Taitung’s economy and her own political standing. Some KMT members see renewed agricultural trade as proof that engagement with Beijing pays dividends. The DPP sees a familiar trap in which economic dependence becomes political leverage. The farmers? They just want the money.

Pistachios

Continuing the theme of agriculture in geopolitics, there is the story of the humble pistachio nut which has played a part in the Iran War.

Pistachios have played a key role in the Persian economy going back centuries. When Alexander the Great marched into Persia, he discovered many treasures. One of the smallest was the pistachio. His soldiers acquired a taste for the nut, and before long it had travelled west with the conquering armies to Greece and, later, Rome.

In fact, the humble pistachio continued travelling westward—all the way to California where there are 950 or so pistachio farmers. And while the rest of the world reeled from rocketing oil and fertiliser prices, the Californians raked in the dollars because Iran’s pistachio nuts—along with oil and fertiliser—were not sailing through the Strait of Hormuz.

This was not the first time that pistachio farmers have profited from strained US-Iranian relations. During the 1979 hostage crisis, President Jimmy Carter imposed a trade embargo that blocked the importation of 250 tonnes of Iranian pistachios and pushed up the price of its Californian cousins.

Then, in the 1980s, American farmers accused the Iranians of dumping. Washington listened and slapped a whopping 214 percent tariff of the Persian nuts. As a result, American nuts took over as the leading producer of pistachios. At the moment 60 percent of the world’s crop is American.

The moral? Geography may have given Persia the pistachio. Politics gave it to California.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”