The news is so full of Trump/Musk/Vance travesties domestically it is, sadly, far too easy to miss the consequences of Trump’s geopolitics: people are dying thanks to him. The Guardian, a reliable Britain-based news source, reports “Moscow launches missile and drone strikes across Ukraine day after US stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv.” Well, duh. The article says that Trump “appeared to criticize” the bombardment. Really? Trump was surprised that Russia took the opportunity to kill more Ukrainian civilians when Trump abruptly and on his own “stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv”? Trump deserves a third impeachment for what is either naiveté or total gullibility—truth is, it doesn’t matter which. Either way, he does not belong in the Oval Office. That Guardian article is NOT behind a paywall. I recommend reading the article and financially supporting The Guardian if you can.
Remember the chance to turn out tomorrow, March 8, at 3PM at B.A. Clark Park at the corner of Division and Lacrosse. Bring a sign—which surely is not restricted only to Women’s issues.
A friend and reader of The High Ground, Doug Brown, sent me an email highlighting points gleaned from a 1 hour 20 minute Ezra Klein video podcast discussing Trump’s idea of foreign policy. Doug’s summary and commentary are spot on.
Something worth watching: "The Trump Doctrine" - The Ezra Klein Show with Fareed Zakaria
Explanatory notes and summary:
Fareed Zakaria is a Muslim-Indian-born American journalist, political commentator, and author. He has a BA from Yale and a PhD in government from Harvard. His first job was as editor of Foreign Affairs. He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post, and is a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time. He has written seven books, three of them New York Times bestsellers.
He is one of the few people worth listening to on foreign affairs, always perceptive, careful, and precise, particularly when he can avoid getting tangled up in nuances. [Shamefully, he went along with the crowd in initially supporting the Iraq invasion.]
This was the best Ezra Klein interview I've seen, clean and clear for the most part. Ezra was masterful as an interlocutor who set up questions and moved proceedings along, but I wish he would he would have stopped there. Still, it is well worth your time.
My [Doug’s] summary:
Trump's reaction to the soft power structure developed over the last 80 years is to notice only how other countries have taken advantage of the US. He looks at each of our allies separately, transactionally, and thinks he could get better deals with each one by applying our power.
He has no understanding of how the structure that underpinning the new world order developed since World War II, a whole network of relationships sustained by goodwill which the US has created by NOT applying power, but by generously making use of our enormous wealth. Since as far back as President Wilson, it has been our policy to raise other countries up and give them breathing room to make their own decisions. The result has been buy-in, which has benefitted the US politically, economically, and militarily at a far lower cost than a maze of hard-fought one-on-one negotiations, each leaving a bitter taste.
Today we live in a world where there are hardly any wars or invasions, and signing treaties for economic benefit has become far more effective than taking over land. The world has become a more open space that allows people to move around freely in it. That is the essence and benefit of soft power, but Trump can't see it. He knows only force.
Trump wants to return to simpler times when—“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must” — to quote Thucydides. He has a fascination for the 19th Century, as far as he understands it. [Somehow William McKinley is his favorite president because of his tariffs and business acumen.] It was a time of billionaires and strongmen, power and prosperity 9for some). This is the reason Trump is so fixated on taking over Greenland, Panama, Gaza, and Canada: that was the way a strongman made his mark back then.
Zakaria said, "Trump is a transaction guy. Think about every real estate deal he’s ever done. At the end of the day, the person he does the deal with never wants to deal with him again. That is basically one of the leitmotifs of Trump’s business career. He screws you in the deal and then moves on. The next time around he screws somebody else." In other words, screw the relationships and screw the goodwill; just keep one step ahead of the reckoning.
Trump ignores what he wants to, and that includes the fact that the 19th Century was filled with constant war and human rights abuses. What "America First" means to him and to MAGA today is what it meant back in the 19th Century: only Americans exist--that is, white American men. [Think another of Trump’s favorite presidents: Andrew Jackson.] No one else matters.
In this context, Trump’s fixation on tariffs is not hard to understand. They are backed by the enormous power of the US, and they are his to wield: Congress has abrogated its power and left levying them to the president.
It is true that tariffs exist in the modern world, imposed on specific goods for specific purposes. On average, they run about 3%. Trump had only to deliberately misunderstand how they worked—believing countries pay them rather than the US consumers who actually do—to create the perfect weapon for forcing countries to dance to his tune. Trump announced indiscriminate tariffs of 25% on most goods from Mexico and Canada (10% on Canadian energy goods) and 10% on Chinese products (recently doubled to 20%) for the vaguest of reasons, and in this he followed a pattern of imposing them one day and pausing them the next. Imagine his glee.
U.S.A.I.D. has been one of the wonderful things that the United States has done in the world. Foreign aid barely existed before 1945. It’s one of the revolutions in foreign policy that America in large part initiated. The impulse comes from the idea that we’re the richest country in the history of the world, so we can afford to be the most generous as well.
The US government budgets one dollar out of every 100 for foreign aid, a small amount which has an outsized impact. Out of every 10 humanitarian dollars spent in the world, the US spends four. Most of U.S.A.I.D.’s budget is food and medicine. We are literally feeding the hungry. We are clothing the sick.
[Leading USAID officials have warned Trump appointees in detailed memos that hundreds of thousands of people will die from closing the agency. The 188,000 Americans that Trump’s covid policy killed pale in comparison.]
The people who work at U.S.A.I.D. move to places like Mozambique or Ghana to build things like water filtration systems for $60,000 or $70,000 a year. They don’t do it for the money. It’s not for the glory. They’re doing it because they believe in the positive influence the United States can be in the world. It comes from a protestant evangelical desire to save the world, because all human beings are equal in the eyes of God, and it is the duty of the rich to look after the poor. That is what Christianity is about. And yet this administration claiming to be Christian has gutted the agency, pulled the funding, and demeaned and demonized the idealistic people who work there, calling them part of a criminal enterprise. It is indefensibly immoral.
My further comment:
During his campaigns, before and since, Trump senses the crowd's mood and relies on name-calling and lies to produce the feeling he is speaking their truths. He has never argued for or against an idea, because he doesn't have them. All he has are reactions, often random and spur-of-the-moment--which just as often turn on a dime (another lie) to allow him to slip away when his bombast isn't working. He moves quickly, because for his scamming to work, he needs to keep everybody off balance and stay ahead of the game. He pays keenest attention to reactions he can’t lie or bluster away, because avoiding them demands an instant change of course. (There is no argument as effective against his beloved tariffs as a headline in the Wall Street Journal saying the markets have tanked.)
Dealing successfully with Trump [advice for Zelenskyy] demands detaching from the world of facts and proofs and descending into a world of lies and reactions. Tell Trump what he wants to hear and then parse his reactions for clues to the lies you need to tell next. Truths matter only as far as convincing the revolving group of people around him, who are constantly bouncing ideas off him. Complicating the situation is media insistence that impartiality requires them to be innocent of reality, which means applying a different standard to Trump—they fill in the blanks, apply normality, and assume he is thinking. Everyone else must prove themselves.
Thanks to Doug Brown, Fareed Zakaria, and Ezra Klein.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry