{"text":[[{"start":6.58,"text":"The decision of Japan’s new prime minister to park a gold-tinted Ford F-150 pick-up truck on the driveway of Tokyo’s Akasaka Palace, just where the visiting US president would catch its all-American glint, was a diplomacy index for a new era."}],[{"start":26.380000000000003,"text":"Donald Trump’s weaponisation of tariffs has created a crisis among America’s closest friends of what might be called deliberative derangement — the preparedness to justify barking like a duck, if the US is quacking like a dog. "}],[{"start":45.160000000000004,"text":"Japan, which has a great deal to lose from a serious degradation of its relationship with the US, has now provided observers with a helpful symbol of the situation. The positioning of the gold F-150 was part of a bigger diplomatic dance with Trump that centred on negotiating down tariffs that could maul Japanese automakers and retaining the protection of the US security umbrella."}],[{"start":72.14,"text":"To sweeten relations, the newly-minted administration of Sanae Takaichi let it be known ahead of the US president’s arrival last month that her government might buy an unspecified number of the American-built Ford behemoths to serve some unspecified official function: tunnel maintenance, perhaps, or snow ploughing. These are jobs, it barely needs noting, that Japan already does perfectly well without a fleet of gas-guzzling, left-hand-drive Fords."}],[{"start":102.73,"text":"A debate on the pros and cons of Japan buying the Ford pick-ups would be lopsided. Japan has 14 major vehicle manufacturers and at least four of those make world-class, fuel-efficient pick-up trucks. The F-150 is too bulky for many Japanese roads and the national infrastructure for providing repairs and spare parts is shallow. Trump has repeatedly suggested that American cars are unfairly excluded from the Japanese market. But the reality is that nobody in the country wants or needs them at scale."}],[{"start":141.52,"text":"Weighed against this, however, is Japan’s calculation that transactions, in and of themselves, play well with this White House — especially when the offerer may appear debased by the offer. The concept of Japan’s government buying a fleet of unnecessary F-150s with taxpayers’ money, therefore, exists in a Trump-scape where, from Tokyo’s point of view, the idea is simultaneously irrational and completely rational."}],[{"start":172.76000000000002,"text":"It works, for now, because Trump has used tariffs, and the incentive of their reduction, to persuade Tokyo that everything in US interests is, by definition, also in Japan’s. The perniciousness of this realignment is all the worse for being imposed with such energy upon friends."}],[{"start":194.60000000000002,"text":"The same painful irrational-as-rational calculus applies, on a far bigger scale, to the main tariff deal struck in July. This was accompanied by a memorandum of understanding in which it appears that Japanese companies (possibly with government-backed loan guarantees) will put up $550bn for investment in the US, with Trump as the ultimate arbiter of where and how those funds are directed. Worse, once any projects have returned the initial investment, 90 per cent of all subsequent profits will accrue to the US. These accommodations seem entirely rational for Japanese negotiators because the Trump administration has so comprehensively messed with rationality."}],[{"start":249.48000000000002,"text":"Japan’s ongoing adventures in irrational-rational-land are revealing, both for its own likely next steps and for the possible contortions required by countries that are further behind in the negotiations. Acting so that a counterparty behaves irrationally is classic Art of War strategy; Japan, and others, must accept that whether they are negotiating as friends or as adversaries, Trump’s intention is to defeat."}],[{"start":281.51,"text":"Just as revealing, though, is the fact that Japan has not, as yet, bought any F-150s beyond the gold-hued one used for display purposes. The noise of irrationality is high but the actual reading on the scale remains low. "}],[{"start":298.90999999999997,"text":"On this offer, as on the $550bn investments, there is a supplementary calculation going on — both within the Japanese government and the country’s private sector — about how long it is possible, with this US administration, to extend the lag between promising to do something and actually doing it. "}],[{"start":321.05999999999995,"text":"Trump left Japan with a curiously worded “factsheet” listing apparent pledges from Japanese companies to invest in the US. Most of them attached huge numbers to extremely vague timescales, with no clear sense of whether they formed part of the $550bn target or not. Trump is compelling friends like Japan to bet heavily on whether they can be strategically irrational longer than they can stay diplomatically solvent."}],[{"start":359.16999999999996,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1762507941_5348.mp3"}