Never Assume?

by Richard Pooley

“Never assume, because when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME”. So said Felix Unger, a character in the US TV series The Odd Couple in 1973. The joke is old, probably much older than the earliest record of it in a New Mexico newspaper advertisement in 1957.  I used it in a section of a book on negotiation entitled “Build Rapport by Asking Questions and Testing Assumptions.” I wanted to introduce a bit of humour even though the advice - never assume - is wrong. In fact, we have to make assumptions all the time. A Brit confidently steps out onto a zebra crossing in the UK as a car is approaching because they assume the car will stop. It’s not only the law, it’s a custom as strong as never jumping a queue. A Brit however would be most unwise to assume that the same is true in France even though it is also the law there.

A key to success when negotiating is to test your assumptions about those you are negotiating with. Not once but throughout the negotiation. Ask them probing questions; ask yourself if their answers invalidate or reinforce your assumptions; listen to their questions to assess what their assumptions are about you. As in business, so in life.

I have heard and read several times in the last month the quote wrongly attributed by the maverick British politician George Galloway in 2001 to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Decades have certainly been happening ever since Donald Trump issued his first executive order seven weeks ago. Assumptions which have been unquestioned and untested since the end of the Second World War (and sometimes earlier)  have been unmade, overturned, blown apart.

What constitutes The West? It was always a geographical absurdity, requiring the observer to be stationed somewhere in central Europe, looking west, taking in North America and, across the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, but ignoring the many countries of Central and South America, yet somehow including Israel to the south-east. It was, we Westerners believed, a collection of peoples with widely different traditions, histories and geographies but similar values. Its institutional embodiment was the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), even though not all members of The West are also members of NATO, and Turkey, with NATO’s second largest armed force, has never been in The West. 

Trump and his millions of MAGA fans do not have similar values to most other Westerners. Might is right. The weak must kowtow to the strong. Dictators are to be admired. Facts are alternative. The only speech which is free is that which agrees with me.

For decades Europeans like me have assumed that only a small minority of US Americans are isolationist and that the nativism* which has been present in the USA since before the country’s creation did not stop its government from building and nurturing alliances with other countries.

Already I am hearing commentators say that Trump is heading for disaster…for himself and his country. It can’t last, they say. The attention he craves and which he undoubtedly gets requires him to issue ever-more extreme and destabilising posts. He can’t keep doing this for the next two hundred and one weeks.

Maybe. But even if he and his gang crash and burn, even if his MAGA fans turn on him or, more likely, pretend they never voted for him, even if the Democrats return to power, The West as I have always known it, is no more. I can no longer assume that if my country is attacked, all NATO countries, the USA especially, will come to our defence, as required under NATO’s Article 5. The UK attacked? Many will think that an impossibility. But what if the attack took the form of cutting the undersea cables connecting us to the rest of the world? Of infecting the banks’ systems to make them unusable? Impossible? I think not.

I remember during the UK’s Brexit debate in 2016 several friends on the Leave side arguing that it was NATO, not the European Union, which had ensured peace in Europe since 1945. So, it was safe to leave the EU. I agreed with the first point but not the second. Could they be sure that the USA would continue to fund NATO to the extent it had done for decades? Would US politicians, no longer men who had fought in World War Two, really be ready to go to war to stop a far-away country of which they knew little being invaded? President Obama had already signalled that the USA was focusing more on east Asia than Europe. But my friends continued to assume that the Europeans, including we Brits, could safely outsource our defence to the USA.

Who are our enemies now? Who will the next James Bond be spying on and fighting in his next iteration? Can we assume he will be British? Can we assume, under new owner and new Trump fan, Jeff Bezos, that Russia will be Bond’s enemy. Surely not. Will it be China? Probably. Or could it be Canada? Or Denmark? Pity the poor scriptwriter.

Should Europeans and Canadians despair? No. I must admit that what Trump and his lackey, Vance, have done to the Ukrainians makes my stomach churn. But even they should not give up hope. Whatever humiliating and unfair deal with Russia Trump forces them to accept, they surely will still keep most of their country out of Putin’s blood-soaked hands. Doom-mongers predict that Putin will use any ceasefire to build up his armed forces to a point where he will try to gobble up more of Ukraine. But that will take time. Time during which Ukraine, now with the second-largest army in Europe (after Russia), can build up its defences with help from its true allies in NATO.

I am confident in my assumption that those allies include the likes of Poland, Finland and the Baltic countries. But can we assume that those not on the borders of Russia will be prepared to switch expenditure from building hospitals to manufacturing missile systems, to switch from Isaiah to Joel and beat their ploughshares into swords? There are encouraging signs from Germany, France, and the UK that we can make that assumption for now. But our political leaders will have to test that assumption continually by making the case for Europe-wide rearmament. Who will be the Churchill of our times? I assume it won't be a Brit again. Maybe it will be a Pole or, how delicious, a German?

*Nativism in the USA does not have the meaning it does elsewhere – favouring original inhabitants over immigrants. “Native” once referred to the early immigrants from England, Scotland and Wales versus the later immigrants from the Low Countries, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and, later still, Ireland, Italy and central and eastern Europe. As each wave of people assimilated, the number of “natives” grew. The true native inhabitants of the country, the indigenous “Indians” or “Native Americans”, were never the natives of nativism. What’s the betting that Trump’s MAGA troops will soon demand that they be called Red Indians once more? After all, a group called the Native American Guardian’s Association petitioned in 2023 for the NFL team the Washington Commanders to change their name back to the Washington Redskins. It seems the natives have gone native.