"...the blowup is a useful reminder of how unwilling President Trump is to accept the limits of American power in the world today—a refusal that risks further eroding American power over the long term."
Ok, once again, I find myself a non-Trump voter having to point out some logical fallacies going on here. The entirety of this article is based on the supposition that Trump doesn't accept the limits of American power. Have you considered what he would be doing if he did accept the limits of American power and the multi-polar world the blob has been actively trying to suppress since...hell, the 1950's?
First, you claim in the following paragraph that Canada, Mexico, etc. could just 'go it alone' or possibly pivot to some other global power. Well, that's just ridiculous. Both of those countries rely desperately on the strength of the American economy both for their own labor markets and yields on our sovereign debt. If the US were to come to terms with it's decline, retraction, w/e that doesn't mean that we all of a sudden become Togo...we're still the absolute dominating force in this hemisphere, bar none.
Now to Trump. Assume Trump does accept the fact that we live in a tri-partite world with the US, China and Russia holding all the cards (If you want to count Europe and other BRICS nations, I'm sure an argument can be made but, really?). Well, what does that look like? It looks like abandoning Taiwan and Ukraine, right off the bat. It looks like forcing NATO to tend to its own garden. It looks like securing as much defensible resource heavy land as possible and it looks like forcing its neighbors to step-up and get serious. A retreating America would necessarily look toward strengthening its dominance over North America and focusing on strategic relationships in this hemisphere.
That doesn't mean we invade Canada and Mexico (again) but it does mean we twist their arms as much as necessary to get them committed to the American 'pole' and that includes strengthening their own governments and economies. We cannot have a Chinese controlled Canada and a Russian controlled Mexico, nor can we afford for them to be internally weak and degrading. The idea that everyone can simply sweet-talk their way to a peaceful North American coalition is one of the deepest fallacies of the past 40 years.
You have to understand that I'm as old-school lefty as it comes. I completely agree with the idea of 'cognitive empathy.' I think what I fail to see here in the analysis is any consideration that empathy may demand arm twisting and it may require bluffs. If you get into the mind of Canadian Liberals and Justin Trudeau, what do you find? Serious people or a bundle of failed policies? Sometimes being nice doesn't work and that can all be true in the context of accepting America's decline as a super-power.
I'm not a great writer and I am unlikely to express myself as clearly as I hope, but I plead with you as one of the most rational and clear-headed thinkers in this space to drop the pretense of being "Anti-Trump" or whatever...and seriously consider the steelman arguments. In the context of cognitive empathy it looks to me like you are failing to apply it when its most necessary.
Thanks for the close engagement with the piece! On your first point, I understand that the US remains the most powerful actor in the western hemisphere. That's why I'm careful to say that Canada and Mexico don't absolutely have to maintain "strong" trade relations with the US. That phrasing was meant to emphasize that they have other options to make up for reduced trade with the US, especially given that any reduction would almost certainly happen gradually and over the long term. They would absolutely prefer to maintain strong trade relations with the US, but they're also clear-eyed about their options in a multipolar world.
Also: If America's economic threats are really so terrifying to our neighbors, then why wasn't Trump able to secure serious concessions? Is he just an ineffective negotiator? One other factor that I should have mentioned in the piece is that Trump is hemmed in by Wall Street, which is very much unhappy with the idea of tariffs and wouldn't be afraid to let Trump know that, thus increasing the costs if he chooses to follow through on threats.
On your latter points, I would simply say that America doesn't actually have the power to force Mexico, Canada or other middle powers to pick a side. I think the idea of a "Chinese-controlled" Canada or Mexico is a red herring (and I don't see how threatening these states with tariffs makes them more internally stable/strong). I made a version of this argument at some length in a 2022 piece for Responsible Statecraft: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/28/the-year-of-the-middle-power/
My broader point is that it's impossible to get states to definitively pick a side, so we should avoid the types of harsh, coercive policies that will damage our relations with our neighbors with no real upside. More generally, I'm surprised that you view this as a narrow anti-Trump argument. It's a short piece, so I couldn't get into everything, but my point in raising the topic of sanctions is that Trump is not the only American president who has used our economic tools in irresponsible ways that tend to reduce our leverage over time.
I believe Mexico and Canada rely on the US far more than you and their options—especially for their major manufacturing industries—are actually quite limited. This is a deep topic that won’t get hashed out in a comment thread.
What I really want to discuss is the implicit assumption in your piece that Trump is a) a unipolar globalist (in the classic Bush/Cheney neo-con sense) and b) unaware or unable to accept the US is in decline. If these are not your position then I misread your article.
While these assumptions may be true I think they are not necessarily evident or consistent with Trumps words and deeds. There are alternatives that must be considered when speculating. For instance, Trump is consistent (what a thing to say about Trump, right??) about America needing to step back from the world stage. This was the touchstone for the initial Russiagate—ie Trump’s willingness to engage with Putin in 2016~ was enough to have him labeled as a traitor. American decline is implicit in the MAGA framing. I’d go even further by suggesting that the various characters he’s surrounded himself with, RFK, Gabbard, Patel, Musk and many of the other tech billionaire types, all implicitly believe America is in decline as well and must change tack.
Furthermore I think the recent actions work in accord with these positions. Tariffs are a serious threat with asymmetric outcomes but also such that they can easily be turned on or off. They are one of the few economic levers available to the POTUS that can be easily exploited. I’m curious: why do you think they didn’t work? What additional concessions should Trump have gotten?
We could also extrapolate the chaos as an intentional strategy to shake out low-hanging fruit, both in terms of labor and geo-political alignment. I am sympathetic to the idea that threatening Canada forces Canadian conservatives to move away from Trump and towards Ottawa, but they also serve to alert Canadians to the overall weakness of their government which may incentivize greater conservative gains in the upcoming elections.
Again the point isn’t that we know what will happen or what is absolutely correct, but that when playing the speculation game we have to begin with an understanding of all the possibilities, including that Trump might know what he’s doing.
Your piece, and many I’ve seen in Substack from the left seem to presume Trump has no ethos or position, that he’s blundering around making threats he can’t back up and isolating our closest allies. I think this belief runs very deep in the minds of the left—it’s a unifying idea. Many are unable to imagine him as anything other than Dr. Evil, bound for defeat by sexy liberal agents of truth and peace. The unwillingness or inability to imagine the opposite is a failure mode and anti-Bayesian. Anyone who still thinks Trump 2025 is the same guy as Trump 2012 (his first candidacy) is making fundamental errors in judgement.
To wrap this up, the US desperately needs a strong liberal left, just as it needed a strong conservative right circa 2008. Instead we’ve had zombie parties, unable to adjust to changing political dynamics and intent on occluding investigation into their failures. Conservatives are currently in the midst of resurrection having been killed in 2016. Democrats have just been killed and it will go much better for them if they can snap out of the broken mindset that has so severely crippled them the past two decades. I think this must begin with a reassessment of who Trump actually is vs. who we choose to believe he is.
To your broader point it’s definitely forcing nations to deal with us exclusively is not the same as forcing them to pick a side and reorient regionally. And while no one likes coercion it’s wrong to say it doesn’t work. The control panel for the world isn’t a set of switches it’s an infinite number of faders, a mixer that must be played. All options are in play and the key is balance.
Thanks for the engagement! I’ll take a look at the older piece you linked. I again want to stress that I’m not a knee-jerk Trumpist. I merely think that presumptions of Trump’s mindset are dangerous when analyzing and predicting his actions and that these presumptions are hindering the left.
I'll have to be a bit brief with this, but I'll respond to a couple of points. I don't think that Trump's record indicates that he should be considered a neocon in any meaningful sense. He's clearly more skeptical about the use of military force, for example, and he doesn't show any broad vision for remaking the world in America's image. And I understand that Trump believes that his policies are making the US stronger, and perhaps he thinks of them specifically as a path to arrest American decline, but that doesn't affect my underlying argument, which is that these policies will in fact make America weaker by sapping the sources of our dominance. Military power is downstream of economic and diplomatic power, and he's taking steps that have quite a negative impact on both of those latter forms of power.
Re: Mexico and Canada, my understanding is that Trump basically got nothing—that the "concessions" he secured were already in the works, meaning that his brinkmanship was all downside. I'm far from an expert on drug policy or immigration, but I could imagine a world in which Trump got Mexico to agree to significant new steps to strengthen its own southern border in order to slow regional migrant flows, perhaps with assistance from the US. Or he could've sought to use his leverage to force Mexico to allow American soldiers to help fight the cartels. I personally think that both of those are bad ideas (particularly the latter), but they would reflect a clear victory that Trump could argue outweighs the costs of the original threat.
The hilarity and inconsistency of Trump's administration is destroying USAID, which is the agency of US foreign soft power! Literally levers the USA could use against foreign nations to go along with Trump and use as negotiable assets.
The prime example is the tremendous amount the country of Jordan gets from USAID, which would be useful for Trump with his Gaza nonsense, but nope he destroys that leverage and then wanders off to go golfing!
The "Yiddish Policeman's Union" ploy. I've been calling for it for years. If Americans are deeply invested in Palestinian welfare, make a place for them by the fire and invite them in.
"...the blowup is a useful reminder of how unwilling President Trump is to accept the limits of American power in the world today—a refusal that risks further eroding American power over the long term."
Ok, once again, I find myself a non-Trump voter having to point out some logical fallacies going on here. The entirety of this article is based on the supposition that Trump doesn't accept the limits of American power. Have you considered what he would be doing if he did accept the limits of American power and the multi-polar world the blob has been actively trying to suppress since...hell, the 1950's?
First, you claim in the following paragraph that Canada, Mexico, etc. could just 'go it alone' or possibly pivot to some other global power. Well, that's just ridiculous. Both of those countries rely desperately on the strength of the American economy both for their own labor markets and yields on our sovereign debt. If the US were to come to terms with it's decline, retraction, w/e that doesn't mean that we all of a sudden become Togo...we're still the absolute dominating force in this hemisphere, bar none.
Now to Trump. Assume Trump does accept the fact that we live in a tri-partite world with the US, China and Russia holding all the cards (If you want to count Europe and other BRICS nations, I'm sure an argument can be made but, really?). Well, what does that look like? It looks like abandoning Taiwan and Ukraine, right off the bat. It looks like forcing NATO to tend to its own garden. It looks like securing as much defensible resource heavy land as possible and it looks like forcing its neighbors to step-up and get serious. A retreating America would necessarily look toward strengthening its dominance over North America and focusing on strategic relationships in this hemisphere.
That doesn't mean we invade Canada and Mexico (again) but it does mean we twist their arms as much as necessary to get them committed to the American 'pole' and that includes strengthening their own governments and economies. We cannot have a Chinese controlled Canada and a Russian controlled Mexico, nor can we afford for them to be internally weak and degrading. The idea that everyone can simply sweet-talk their way to a peaceful North American coalition is one of the deepest fallacies of the past 40 years.
You have to understand that I'm as old-school lefty as it comes. I completely agree with the idea of 'cognitive empathy.' I think what I fail to see here in the analysis is any consideration that empathy may demand arm twisting and it may require bluffs. If you get into the mind of Canadian Liberals and Justin Trudeau, what do you find? Serious people or a bundle of failed policies? Sometimes being nice doesn't work and that can all be true in the context of accepting America's decline as a super-power.
I'm not a great writer and I am unlikely to express myself as clearly as I hope, but I plead with you as one of the most rational and clear-headed thinkers in this space to drop the pretense of being "Anti-Trump" or whatever...and seriously consider the steelman arguments. In the context of cognitive empathy it looks to me like you are failing to apply it when its most necessary.
Thanks for the close engagement with the piece! On your first point, I understand that the US remains the most powerful actor in the western hemisphere. That's why I'm careful to say that Canada and Mexico don't absolutely have to maintain "strong" trade relations with the US. That phrasing was meant to emphasize that they have other options to make up for reduced trade with the US, especially given that any reduction would almost certainly happen gradually and over the long term. They would absolutely prefer to maintain strong trade relations with the US, but they're also clear-eyed about their options in a multipolar world.
Also: If America's economic threats are really so terrifying to our neighbors, then why wasn't Trump able to secure serious concessions? Is he just an ineffective negotiator? One other factor that I should have mentioned in the piece is that Trump is hemmed in by Wall Street, which is very much unhappy with the idea of tariffs and wouldn't be afraid to let Trump know that, thus increasing the costs if he chooses to follow through on threats.
On your latter points, I would simply say that America doesn't actually have the power to force Mexico, Canada or other middle powers to pick a side. I think the idea of a "Chinese-controlled" Canada or Mexico is a red herring (and I don't see how threatening these states with tariffs makes them more internally stable/strong). I made a version of this argument at some length in a 2022 piece for Responsible Statecraft: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/28/the-year-of-the-middle-power/
My broader point is that it's impossible to get states to definitively pick a side, so we should avoid the types of harsh, coercive policies that will damage our relations with our neighbors with no real upside. More generally, I'm surprised that you view this as a narrow anti-Trump argument. It's a short piece, so I couldn't get into everything, but my point in raising the topic of sanctions is that Trump is not the only American president who has used our economic tools in irresponsible ways that tend to reduce our leverage over time.
Thanks for the reply.
I believe Mexico and Canada rely on the US far more than you and their options—especially for their major manufacturing industries—are actually quite limited. This is a deep topic that won’t get hashed out in a comment thread.
What I really want to discuss is the implicit assumption in your piece that Trump is a) a unipolar globalist (in the classic Bush/Cheney neo-con sense) and b) unaware or unable to accept the US is in decline. If these are not your position then I misread your article.
While these assumptions may be true I think they are not necessarily evident or consistent with Trumps words and deeds. There are alternatives that must be considered when speculating. For instance, Trump is consistent (what a thing to say about Trump, right??) about America needing to step back from the world stage. This was the touchstone for the initial Russiagate—ie Trump’s willingness to engage with Putin in 2016~ was enough to have him labeled as a traitor. American decline is implicit in the MAGA framing. I’d go even further by suggesting that the various characters he’s surrounded himself with, RFK, Gabbard, Patel, Musk and many of the other tech billionaire types, all implicitly believe America is in decline as well and must change tack.
Furthermore I think the recent actions work in accord with these positions. Tariffs are a serious threat with asymmetric outcomes but also such that they can easily be turned on or off. They are one of the few economic levers available to the POTUS that can be easily exploited. I’m curious: why do you think they didn’t work? What additional concessions should Trump have gotten?
We could also extrapolate the chaos as an intentional strategy to shake out low-hanging fruit, both in terms of labor and geo-political alignment. I am sympathetic to the idea that threatening Canada forces Canadian conservatives to move away from Trump and towards Ottawa, but they also serve to alert Canadians to the overall weakness of their government which may incentivize greater conservative gains in the upcoming elections.
Again the point isn’t that we know what will happen or what is absolutely correct, but that when playing the speculation game we have to begin with an understanding of all the possibilities, including that Trump might know what he’s doing.
Your piece, and many I’ve seen in Substack from the left seem to presume Trump has no ethos or position, that he’s blundering around making threats he can’t back up and isolating our closest allies. I think this belief runs very deep in the minds of the left—it’s a unifying idea. Many are unable to imagine him as anything other than Dr. Evil, bound for defeat by sexy liberal agents of truth and peace. The unwillingness or inability to imagine the opposite is a failure mode and anti-Bayesian. Anyone who still thinks Trump 2025 is the same guy as Trump 2012 (his first candidacy) is making fundamental errors in judgement.
To wrap this up, the US desperately needs a strong liberal left, just as it needed a strong conservative right circa 2008. Instead we’ve had zombie parties, unable to adjust to changing political dynamics and intent on occluding investigation into their failures. Conservatives are currently in the midst of resurrection having been killed in 2016. Democrats have just been killed and it will go much better for them if they can snap out of the broken mindset that has so severely crippled them the past two decades. I think this must begin with a reassessment of who Trump actually is vs. who we choose to believe he is.
To your broader point it’s definitely forcing nations to deal with us exclusively is not the same as forcing them to pick a side and reorient regionally. And while no one likes coercion it’s wrong to say it doesn’t work. The control panel for the world isn’t a set of switches it’s an infinite number of faders, a mixer that must be played. All options are in play and the key is balance.
Thanks for the engagement! I’ll take a look at the older piece you linked. I again want to stress that I’m not a knee-jerk Trumpist. I merely think that presumptions of Trump’s mindset are dangerous when analyzing and predicting his actions and that these presumptions are hindering the left.
I'll have to be a bit brief with this, but I'll respond to a couple of points. I don't think that Trump's record indicates that he should be considered a neocon in any meaningful sense. He's clearly more skeptical about the use of military force, for example, and he doesn't show any broad vision for remaking the world in America's image. And I understand that Trump believes that his policies are making the US stronger, and perhaps he thinks of them specifically as a path to arrest American decline, but that doesn't affect my underlying argument, which is that these policies will in fact make America weaker by sapping the sources of our dominance. Military power is downstream of economic and diplomatic power, and he's taking steps that have quite a negative impact on both of those latter forms of power.
Re: Mexico and Canada, my understanding is that Trump basically got nothing—that the "concessions" he secured were already in the works, meaning that his brinkmanship was all downside. I'm far from an expert on drug policy or immigration, but I could imagine a world in which Trump got Mexico to agree to significant new steps to strengthen its own southern border in order to slow regional migrant flows, perhaps with assistance from the US. Or he could've sought to use his leverage to force Mexico to allow American soldiers to help fight the cartels. I personally think that both of those are bad ideas (particularly the latter), but they would reflect a clear victory that Trump could argue outweighs the costs of the original threat.
The hilarity and inconsistency of Trump's administration is destroying USAID, which is the agency of US foreign soft power! Literally levers the USA could use against foreign nations to go along with Trump and use as negotiable assets.
The prime example is the tremendous amount the country of Jordan gets from USAID, which would be useful for Trump with his Gaza nonsense, but nope he destroys that leverage and then wanders off to go golfing!
If Trump wants to relocate Palestinians from Gaza, he should invite them here.
Give them one of the Dakotas. We’ve got a spare.
The "Yiddish Policeman's Union" ploy. I've been calling for it for years. If Americans are deeply invested in Palestinian welfare, make a place for them by the fire and invite them in.