"Move fast and break things."

"He's a runner and he'll run away
Soon there'll be no man
Woman ain't been born that can make him stay
Woman get away while you can
He's a runner, he's a runner and he's got to run
He's got to run away"

          Laura Nyro, 1966

 
Donald Trump rang a bell that cannot be un-rung. We are in a new era.

America is a hookup, not a partner.

One school of thought about the events of these first months of Trump's second term is that this is just Trump being a world-class negotiator. He unsettles his opponent, he makes outrageous demands to move the goalposts of the negotiation, and then settles for something better than what would have been possible if he had not come in big. It is the madman -- or mad dog -- theory. You give him wide berth. He described his tactic in The Art of the Deal:

I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.

A second school of thought is that Trump has fixed policy goals built around a notion that it is a dog-eat-dog world. In this view, cooperation is just a temporary status of equal power. If other players in this state of perpetual competition seem content, it means that they are getting away with something through the disadvantage of others. He is a fighter and will fight back against this constant competition with every possible tool, which is how any realist plays the game. Play to win, not to get along. He will smash his domestic rivals, he will pull us out of foreign policy deals that are not clearly to our advantage, and he will impose taxes on goods from foreign countries if he can get away with it. A negative balance of trade is proof that they were cheating us, and Trump won't tolerate that. Therefore, in this school of thought, Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff plan is real; his abandoning alliances is real; and his efforts to sue and prosecute and de-fund domestic nodes of potential opposition is real. This time, this term, Trump is both literal and serious. He is fighting to win and win big.

Either way -- school of thought one or two -- the world has changed, because Trump put option two on the table. He may well start backing off his "Liberation Day" tariff announcement and start awarding country-by-country or business-by-business exceptions (which he is already reportedly begun doing with Vietnam after a "productive call" from To Lam, Vietnam's Communist Party general secretary who appealed on behalf of Nike and other footwear manufacturers.) It won't matter. He rang the bell and the world heard it. Trump established that the U.S. is unreliable. The U.S. will act transactionally, based on the president's interest at that moment. It is personal, unpredictable, and may switch 180 degrees based on the political contributions of a billionaire business owner or the see-saw of voters in Wisconsin. It isn't just Trump personally because the world can see that the Congress and the courts cannot be counted on to stop the whims of a president. The USA owns this.

The U.S is a hookup.  A transaction.

Trump doesn't find that disturbing or surprising. He is not disturbed by the polarity reversal on alliances. So what if allies complain? That was then; this is now. In a dog-eat-dog world every relationship is a transaction and always has been. Every employee is "at will." Any apprentice can hear the words: "You're fired!"

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney described the new world:

The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War—a system, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over.

Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.

The eighty-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership—when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services—is over.

While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.

Trump can back off the tariffs. I expect that. He will respond to events that would hurt his popularity. I think commentators who say Trump is now in the "don't give a F" zone are incorrect. Trump loves the affirmation of crowds. Without it, he loses the power to control his party. Without it, he would be bereft. 

The crowds are still there, but the rest of the world has woken up to a new reality. Trump is a runner. The U.S. is a runner.

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