Trump ended the post-WWII, global, rules-based era.
It is now the regional-sphere-of-influence era.
I erred in a recent blog about Trump's philosophy. I wrote that it was a Thomas Hobbes world: dog-eat-dog, brutal, selfish, always at war, and everyone against everyone else.
No. Not the world, and not everyone against everyone. Trump views the world as divided into natural geographic and cultural regions. The great power in each area has free rein to do as they must inside their sphere. The regions give each other respect and space.
This foreign policy approach explains Trump's attitude toward Russia and Ukraine. Russia is the alpha country in its region and somebody needs to keep order. If Russia doesn't do it, the Georgians will be fighting with the Azerbaijanis over water or insults or religion or 200-year-old feuds, and every other ethnic or geographical special interest will make trouble. And, more important to Russia, the Ukrainians will play footsie with the West and give everyone else ideas. Squash that.
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| 1950s, 1960's and 1970s |
Trump has no respect for NATO. Western Europe has its neighborhood, and the U.S. isn't in it. Europe is ours for the purpose of insulting. It is ours to chide for being overrun with the wrong sort of immigrants. But it is not ours to support. Europe is a competitor, not a natural ally, in Trump's view. The boundary between the European West and Russia is a blurry one. Are the Baltic countries really West? Are Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova? Are we really going risk nuclear war to protect Latvia? Could Americans find Latvia or Moldova on a map?
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| Trump is dissolving this map, putting a new line down the center of the Atlantic. |
Europe, Japan, and China are trade rivals, not our dependents. If Europe is worthy of being a regional power, and if it really thinks that Ukraine is part of Western Europe, then it needs to pony up the troops and equipment to show Russia they act like one. Then Russia will adjust is goals to the reality on the ground. If Europe won't do it, then the game is settled: Ukraine is part of Russia.
The Western Hemisphere is our neighborhood and problem. This makes sense of Trump's talk of absorbing Canada, buying Greenland, taking over control of the Panama Canal, and his meddling in governance of Venezuela, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, Canada, and elsewhere.
China has a sphere. The Uyghurs in western China are theirs to manage. North Korea is theirs. In ethnicity, culture, and language, so is Taiwan. China is the alpha. Do Americans want to die to preserve Taiwan's independence?
Africa is a "shithole" place as far as Trump is concerned, and that absolves us from a duty of care. We don't care about children starving there, or AIDS spreading, or civil war genocide taking place in South Sudan or anyplace else. Not our neighborhood.
It is not illogical for Trump to think he is "the real peace president." As Trump sees it, wars happen when regional powers meddle in other spheres. Managing a sphere requires tough actions. Russia is doing it to Ukraine; we are doing it to Venezuela. Managing a region is hard, ugly work. Other regions should butt out.
In Trump's view, if the U.S. hadn't meddled and armed Ukraine, Ukraine would have been taken over by Russia in three days with minimal loss of life. Life would have gone on for Ukrainians. They would be at peace, perhaps not entirely happy with being part of Russia, but so what? Is California entirely happy being united with Alabama? Whether Ukraine is sovereign, a satellite, or a province of Russia is not Trump's concern. It is Russia's neighborhood.
This isn't the foreign policy order democracies imagined at the time the United Nations was formed but it is the one that a majority of Americans voted for in 2024. Like it or not, it is the one that has fallen into place.
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6 comments:
Okay, I guess it does make sense. The only problem is the world is getting smaller with better technology.
We don’t put our own military at risk, but we can still help others defend themselves.
Europe had better step up, or they can start learning to speak Russian. Same goes for Taiwan, except that if the Chinese are taking over Taiwan, we should immediately exfiltrate TSMC’s employees and bomb TSMC’s chip fabs flat so that China doesn’t get to control the world‘s advanced computer chip manufacturing.
Peter makes a great case for Trump‘s foreign policy. Perhaps sooner than we think, Peter will be wearing a MAGA hat. 😱😀
I am not praising it. I am observing it. I don't think we can disconnect from Western European democracies. They are natural allies. And our efforts to control and stage manage the western hemisphere backfire. The phrase is Yankee Zgo Home, not "thanks, Big, Rich Uncle." One further problem: Trump, like many American voters, doesn't like brown people. He thinks they are inferior, criminal, and either lazy or alternatively that they work too cheap and hurt White workers. Trump wouldn't bomb those boats if they had Norwegians in them.
Trump is indifferent (narcissist) to black, brown, or white. The racism is performative for the Republican base and to sell swag.
Israel is the unicorn, the world's navel, in the mosh pit that has been the Middle East.
Israel is its own sphere of influence, complete with more high-tech military equipment than the rest of the region put together, and nukes just in case. Case in point: the object lesson they made of Iran last summer.
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