Swagger or Stagger? The Trump 2.0 Foreign Policy in an Age of Grand Strategy M.I.A.
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 3
It is not easy to be a serious evidence-based analyst of U.S. foreign policy or global affairs in these still-early weeks of the second Trump Administration. For that matter, it is not easy to be a serious evidence-based analyst of American domestic politics either. The reason is the same in both cases, for it is really one case with different aspects: Trump is a disrupter—an agent of chaos if you don’t like it, of “creative destruction” if you do—and he now has the power to disrupt in a way and at a pace and scale he lacked after January 2017. How so?
He has totally suborned what used to be a reality-based, pro-democracy Republican Party and turned it into an authoritarian-leaning servile cult of personality. He won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College this time around in the November 2024 election, having both Houses of Congress more under foot than on his side, and having a usually functional Supreme Court majority behind him.[1] With a single exception all of his nominees for senior political appointments in the Executive Branch were confirmed. For an evanescent while at least, too, his popularity ratings topped 50 percent for the first time because he was perceived as “doing something”—as if deliberately employing reality-TV gimmicks designed to create spectacle really amounts to doing something useful and functional. By any reasonable measure—the smoke-and-funhouse mirror aspect not excluded—that formula spells power in contemporary surrealist-leaning America.
Trump is using the power to disrupt with alacrity. Things are happening, changing so fast that it is hard to keep up with them.[2] Many pundits have taken to quoting Lenin’s famous remark: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The proof is that this is the Lenin quote, of all his quotes, that now pops up first in search engines. I found its precise language in less than ten seconds; cyber-crowdsourcing is great when it works like that.
Some observers think Trump’s disruption engine is a good thing, or at least a necessary thing. Thus Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent likened the chaos of recent weeks to a “de-tox” period, after which the patient recovers and thrives. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick not only said that the disruption to international trade caused by Trump’s effusion of tariffs will not harm but strengthen the United States, he even claimed that: “It is not chaotic, and the only one who thinks it’s chaotic is someone who’s being silly.” At a press conference House Speaker Mike Johnson likened the chaos to the typical opening break in a game of billiards: Hit the rack as hard as you can and then once the balls are spread out “play the strategy of putting them in the holes. That’s what we’re doing right now. It is a shake up. . . .but this is what’s required to start the process of repairing and restoring the American economy.”
Others have warned, however, that whacking the rack as hard as you can with the cue ball sometimes sends other balls flying off the table, and in games of Eight Ball has been known to sink the black beauty in the corner pocket right off the break. Dean Acheson once said, without so much as a wry smile, “Things are not always as they seem, but sometimes they are,” suggesting strongly as he said it that this was one of those latter times—old words to the would-be newly wise. P.J. O’Rourke, of blessed memory, once put a worthwhile distinction like this: “It’s one thing to burn down the shithouse, another to install plumbing.” House Speaker Sam Rayburn put the same point sans scat decades before: “Any idiot can knock down a barn, but it takes a skilled carpenter to put one up.” And then there is the popular automotive metaphor: Powerful engine, car can go from zero to ninety in ten seconds, but it can neither be readily steered nor stopped, and the clueless driver has no idea where the track went.
So which is it? Is Trump swaggering, playing four-dimensional chess with a clever coherent strategy and using the appearance of chaos to loosen up possibilities and put adversaries foreign and domestic—Zelensky and Hamas, also Netanyahu and maybe even Putin, assorted Danes, Canadians, Mexicans, and Panamanians…..not to speak of the hapless Democrats—on their back feet, as his cultic fans insist? Or he is staggering, lurching from one idea-free emotional tic to the next, his frothing authority wreaking havoc like the Sorcerer Apprentice’s out-of-control magic broom? Is his out-of-the-box brilliance in the process of serving up epochal achievements, or is his arrogant encyclopedic ignorance carrying him, us with him, lurching forward as he dances from rock to rock in a cold lake, with an icy plunge his mis-administration’s inevitable fate?
Well, we can suspect whatever we like, but being prematurely certain can rapidly become awkward. When I together with the editor of Quillette put to bed on February 28 (what a day that was for live TV from the Oval Office) the essay that appeared next day, on March 1--“The End of NATO, or the Sixth Impossible Thing”--I was sure that NATO had been all but permanently and shockingly defenestrated, and that the strategic somersault of dumping democratic Europe to embrace authoritarian Russia was a done deal. I expected U.S. military aid to Ukraine to be soon ended, and it was. I expected just-as-critical intelligence sharing to quickly follow, and it did. I expected the Russians to take advantage of that shift as soon as possible by killing Ukrainians they could not so easily have killed beforehand. They did that, too. It feels good to be proven right, even if it feels very bad to observe the evidence.
But then, to my and most others’ shocked confusion, the Trump Administration and the Kyiv government stunned us all by agreeing to ceasefire terms and challenging the Russian regime to agree. “The ball is in the Russian court,” said our Pinocchio-like Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The head spun, the eyes glazed, the body lost its proprioceptive cunning….
It is clear at one level what has been going on: Zelensky, facing disaster without U.S. help and needing to buy time until the Europeans can muster replacements for U.S. weapons and intel, decided he had no choice but to have his arm bent back on the minerals deal--which was his idea originally, thinking it would tie U.S. interests to an independent Ukraine mostly free of Russian predations--and on the question of borders. But under discussion has been a ceasefire, not a peace agreement, so agreeing did not require any formal Ukrainian concession of territory.
Fine: What is a lot less clear is what happens if Russia spurns the offer—as it seems to have done between the time I began writing this essay and the moment I am writing this sentence. (Sheesh!) Or worse, if Russia accepts a further-negotiated ceasefire offer but then violates it as its leadership has repeatedly done with others in the past. What does Trump do then? Does he again bow to Moscow and kick Kyiv even harder? Or does he get ticked at Putin and step up support for Ukraine? Does he perhaps even offer U.S. troops to serve as tripwires and symbols of commitment in Mitteleuropa to backstop European troops emplaced on Ukrainian soil?
We don’t know, because Trump probably doesn’t know. It’s not easy to guess the next move of someone who doesn’t understand his interlocutors’ aims and interests and who is moving too fast to be able to think….if he is capable of that even at leisure. [Update, March 17: But a sign of bad things to come is the March 15 Reuters report that Trump de-credentialed Lt. General Keith Kellogg as negotiator with Russia after the Russians complained that he was too sympathetic to Ukraine, and now he will only operate on the Ukrainian side of the diplomacy.]
But maybe, just barely maybe in my view, NATO isn’t dead after all despite the torrent of anti-Article V rhetoric in recent weeks. Maybe the U.S. commitment will be restored first implicitly and maybe later explicitly in a Europe more balanced toward its own self-defense. If so, that would be all to the good, finally punctuating a U.S. peeve that goes all the way back to the Mansfield Amendment of 1972. If that turns out to be what happens, and if what happens is revealed—or is persuasively scripted post hoc—to have been meticulously planned and implemented from the start, a great 20th-century American philosopher, Casey Stengel, will have become prophetic: “They say ya’ can’t do it, but sometimes that ain’t always true.” If Casey cops the final word on this one, a lot of people, myself included, will deserve their chagrined layer cake served very, very cold. I’m not grabbing for my fork just yet; but I know where it is just in case.
And it’s not just the Ukraine/Russia portfolio that illustrates Trump’s somersaulting apparent incoherence. As striking is his Levantine loop-de-loopiness, and the two portfolios are in some ways perhaps related.
Try to imagine yourself not as a Ukraine sympathizer but as a rightwing Israeli. If you can, you see that what started off as a near miraculous prospect that the United States would expel two million Palestinians from Gaza and then plunk down American money and protective power right on Israel’s southern border, and to boot give permission for the Netanyahu government to pursue the war against Hamas to total victory (whatever that could mean under the circumstances), suddenly lurched into direct U.S.-Hamas negotiations in Doha that cut Netanyahu out of the picture exactly as Zelensky had been cut out of his. Those negotiations, as Hamas spokesmen have intimated, were of themselves very valuable since they further legitimated Hamas in the eyes of the world. Well yes, Mahmud Abbas agreed, and did not like it one bit.
So there then stood, or slinked, Benyamin Netanyahu, fecklessly facing disaster, finding his best option a retreat toward extending the hostage deal with Hamas, which he correctly identifies as a genocidally-minded, unreconcilably Jew-hating terrorist organization. As with Trump’s Ukraine-related gymnastics, there were modified official statements and contradictory clarifications that clarified nothing at all. That is too easy to understand: It is not possible to clarify a policy that doesn’t actually exist as a stable, knowable concept even in the mind of its supposed policy architect.
What do these two diplomatic theaters otherwise have in common? Well, a hint resides in the fact that twice now Ukraine-related negotiations have taken place in Saudi Arabia. Why there? Because Trump wants to honor the Ahl-Saud as heir apparent to the crowning glory of extending the Abraham Accords: Israeli-Saudi normalization would seal a phalanx of U.S.-supported pressure against Iran that Trump would presumably use to get a better deal with the mullahs….quite possibly at Israel’s ultimate expense if a ragged deal fails to prevent in due course an Iranian nuclear breakout. Netanyahu is thus revealed as a strategic dunce for genuflecting to Trump during the campaign, but Trump enjoys that—see below…..
Trump badly wants the Nobel Peace Prize, not because he knows what it is, cares about peace that might benefit other countries, or grasps the “international community” credentials of its Norwegian bestowers, but only because Obama got one. This is how a petulant insecure nine-year old thinks, and if the shoe fits….. So Trump wants to end both wars and get credit for it—the Gaza War and the Ukraine War, and in his mind Saudi Arabia is a better than average pedestal for the performance (especially if the Saudis pay for it all).
The two cases also have in common that the men Trump means and needs to muscle to achieve his goals are Jews. The anti-Semitic undertones of the televised mugging of President Zelensky on February 28 were obvious to those who know how to listen and see. Trump’s punching down on Netanyahu from Doha and Washington, to punish him for his insouciant hesitations, recalcitrance, and stalling, has fit a similar pattern. Many claim that Trump cannot be an anti-Semite because he has Jewish advisors (Stephen Miller, Steve Witkoff, Howard Lutnick) and, more important, a Jewish son-in-law complete with a converted daughter and three Orthodox-raised Jewish grandchildren. Those who make this claim clearly have no idea what a hofjude—a court Jew—was and evidently still is. Trump’s reflexive behavior toward Jews—and he has known many over the years in the New York real estate business, and considered most his adversaries and nemeses—does not reflect a thoughtful ideological anti-Semitism. It is ingrained, mimetic, mindless, routinized, and unshakable. He really can’t help the way he acts, and is probably unaware of it.
***
It’s not just me who lately got my suspenders caught in the bumper of a moving vehicle and thus got flung around too much for comfort. Here is a another example of what happens when an analyst tries to explain and give advice in what quickly developed into a profoundly abnormal situation by assuming that it was for the most part normal whilst he was writing. A Foreign Affairs essay published online on February 25, 2025 made the following three statements, everyone of them, apparently as of that date and certainly a mere three days after that date, embarrassingly wrong.[3] “Trump cherishes the superpower status of the United States.” “He is sure to increase military spending.” “Just as Putin cannot afford to lose a war to Ukraine, Trump cannot afford to ‘lose’ Europe. To squander the prosperity and power projection that the United States gains from its military presence in Europe would be humiliating for any American president.” In the author’s partial defense, who would have thought that a second Trump Administration, or any American administration, would avidly want to squander such assets? If I knew any such people I’d want to keep my distance from them.
The author also offered advice about how the Trump Administration should handle the Ukraine-Russia war. The advice was based on sound analysis, but it proffered the following--obviously written before mid-February’s fallout in Brussels, Munich, Washington, and Riyadh: “To allow Russia to curtail Ukraine’s sovereignty might provide a veneer of stability but could bring war in its wake. Instead of an illusory peace, Washington should help Ukraine determine the rules of engagement with Russia, and through these rules, the war could gradually be minimized.” This, the author suggested, would auger for a pragmatic compartmentalization of relations, such that the two sides could “look for possible points of agreement on nuclear non-proliferation, arms control, climate change, pandemics, counterterrorism, the Arctic, and space exploration.”
Climate change?! As if…… That is one of the many now banned words and phrases no one in the Executive Branch may use anymore.
***
Again, we do not yet know if the Trump 2.0 foreign policy cage shaking has positive ends in sight and can actually achieve some of them, or if it’s all just an Ortega y Gassett re-run of a “reason of unreason” spasm of anti-humiliation nihilism tightly connected to Trump’s domestic political posturing. I lean far toward the latter view, and one of the reasons is that we’ve seen this show before.
What do I mean? Well, on February 28, 2018 I published an essay entitled “Beyond the Blobbers” in The American Interest, a now-defunct magazine of which I was editor at the time. The gist was captured by the essay’s blurb: “The chatter that passes for foreign policy debate these days is not happening at the level of grand strategy, and fails to look broadly at the circumstances the United States finds itself in.”
That levels-of-analysis sensitive critique is now more than seven years old, yet today I would not change a single word of it, or even of the whole essay. You can read it for yourself--it’s easy to find online. But for now, let me lay just pieces of it down in italics with connective tissue, for shortening purposes, in normal font, and the main point of so doing will come clear.
It is tempting for members of the so-called American foreign policy blob—thank you Messrs. Obama and Rhodes for the felicitous term—to think about foreign and national security policy from a fairly close-up perspective. Indeed, if you are a blobber as a day jobber, to coin a phrase, you almost have no choice because following the daily and weekly action is what keeps you busy enough to justify your paycheck.
And that can be a problem. I wish I had a nickel for every punditry session I’ve attended over the years . . . where the level of analysis was so down in the weeds that the discussion was obsolete before the luncheon leftovers were cleared away. . . . What goes missing most of the time in the blogosphere is any sort of practical strategic thinking and indeed, the entire domain of grand strategic thinking. . . . In general terms, I would date its absence from a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall until maybe a year or three ago. And the reasons for the temporary absence, I think, are fairly clear.
Between triumphalist liberalism vindicated and the press of suddenly obvious domestic political dysfunctionality, spending time on grand strategic thinking seemed either unnecessary or a luxury, depending on your point of view. We should add, probably, the fact that we suddenly lacked a single, ideologically defined adversary made the whole business much more complicated and difficult for even well educated Americans to get their heads around. And it is human nature that the difficult tends to be avoided.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 seemed to promise for a short moment to restore focus to U.S. strategic thinking, but ultimately that did not happen for two reasons. First, the actual source of the problem evaded the understanding of the political elite of both major parties, leading to all sorts of policy errors both major and minor—and cleaning up after those errors took most of the oxygen out of the relevant rooms. Second, the danger actually posed by salafi terrorism failed to live up to the level of paranoia we generated for ourselves in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
The sum total of that experience served only to further disorient our sense of strategic thinking, and only the so-called return of geopolitics—said geopolitics never having left in the first place, of course—got our attention once again. Once it did, thanks largely to Russian efforts, the number of projects on grand strategy multiplied like grasshoppers in midsummer. All began with the premise that we had regrettably failed to do this kind of thinking in recent years, which was true. But most ended with committee reports, which were something less than scintillating and analytically compelling. But at least we were trying again. . . .
Today, much if not most up-close blob commentary on foreign and national security policy comes down to a debate about the character of the decision-making process, such as it is, that we behold from time to time. Supporters of the Trump Administration, as well as those willing to give it the benefit of much doubt, see careful deliberation in what it does. They take at face value the claim that the President is a master negotiator who may stake out extreme, even outrageous, opening positions, knowing full well that these positions will be yanked back to practical outcomes—regression to the norm, as social scientists call it—once the intended targets have been softened up and rendered ready for negotiating harvest. . . .
Of course there is precedent for this sort of thinking in real existing history. Plenty of Americans and Europeans were sure that Ronald Reagan was going to start World War III during the Euromissile crisis of the early 1980s, but instead Reagan’s posture in facing down the nuclear freeze movement and the cascade of anti-nuclear “peace” demonstrations in Europe resulted in the INF agreement, which not only eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, but also paved the way for what amounted to, but was never called, détente 2.0. I would not be the least bit surprised if before long we had articulated for us a Trump Doctrine based on these principles, radically thin though they be, with a nod to Ronald Reagan as a selling point.
Other observers, however, . . . have suggested that the President’s rhetoric . . . has very little to do with foreign policy despite the apparent subjects at hand. When the President appears to address foreign and national security policy issues, they say, what he’s really doing is signaling to his existing and potential domestic political base in accord with his relentless quest to realign American politics. He is posturing, as some call it, in ad hoc Jacksonian mode, because that is where he thinks the torque points for domestic political realignment are located.
In other words, he has no strategy or plan, just some instincts, mainly about domestic politics. His is a populist convolution of emotions and paragraph-length slogans masquerading as a foreign and national security policy strategy that amounts to making things up as he goes along. That leaves the rest of us to hope that his more experienced staff will save him, and us with him, from the consequences of any truly enormous seat-of-the-pants blunders.
So who is correct? Not being privy to the internal discussions of the National Security Council, I don’t know. The first argument may be accurate from time to time, at least as far as first instincts go, but I suspect that the skeptics of strategic coherence make the better case overall. But whoever turns out to be correct, this is not a debate at the level of grand strategy. It does not step back and look broadly at the circumstances the United States finds itself in. . . . In other words, this kind of analysis is completely within the guardrails of conventional blob thinking, and so its utility is limited. . . .
Is the current indeterminacy of American strategy . . . solely a consequence of changes in the world that have made the old ways obsolete or too difficult to maintain, or is there something internal to our society that we need to consider as well as part of the explanation?
I think the answer is clear: The changes within are more important even than the changes without. A more than typically religious people, and especially an elite, that no longer believes in its own virtue will be unable to persuade itself that it has any special role in history, hence in the world—let alone a role that demands exertion, discipline, patience, and studied flexibility. And without that belief, American foreign policy—whether in its various inward-looking or outward-looking modes over the past two centuries—is truly in uncharted waters. If indeterminacy beyond the blob is truly the watchword of the day, then the sound making of strategy may have become a vision too far for any likely president these days.
That was more than seven years ago and, as I’ve said, I wouldn’t change a word today. The essay then dwelled for several other paragraphs on why U.S. grand strategy went missing, but the essence is easily summarized. For more than 70 years the United States pursued a twin anti-hegemon strategy that left us at Cold War’s end still forward deployed, still wanting to prevent the rise of hegemonic powers (aside, of course, from our own in the Western Hemisphere). We still want to suppress regional security competitions, limit the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and generally supply global common security goods for both noble and selfish purposes.
But we wanted all those things out of reflex, and were suddenly without an obvious and compelling reason for it. Until China emerged some two decades later as our primus inter pares peer competitor, our post-Cold War adversaries were multiple, essentially non-ideological in nature, and weak, not singular, ideological, and strong like the Soviet Union. The American mind, christologically Manichean at base, flees from theoretical complexity, thus making nuanced pragmatic priority assignments all but impossible. Additionally, during our delusional holiday from geopolitics we failed to invest in defense and we let our defense-industrial base decay, impoverishing our policy options to the point that we failed to choose any path beyond the stale but habitually overactive status quo. Meanwhile, the world at large could detect our leaders’ weariness and drift, thus undermining our reputational credibility and inviting fresh challenges both minor and potentially major.
To close the point let me again retreat to my original, for nothing has changed: Finally, in this regard, during its duration one could at least imagine the Cold War ending—as it happily did—simply because even the barely tutored person can be brought to realize that all empires based on conquest, coercion, and brawn eventually fall. But it is very hard to imagine the “return of geopolitics” in its current diffuse form ever ending, and Americans do not like stories without endings, happy endings if at all possible. LBJ said it best at a November 1967 press conference: “Our American people, when we get into a contest of any kind—whether it is a war, an election, a football game or whatever it is—want it decided and decided quickly; get in or get out.” That is not the sort of national temperament best suited for doing geopolitics as strategy, which Lord Vansittart described aptly as “an endless game played for joyless victory.”
So here we are, in mid-March 2025, and we still lack anything remotely like a grand strategy based on a genuine grasp of our geopolitical circumstances. We have again a President whose foreign policy instincts are thought-free extensions of his domestic political pretenses; everything he does is based on a constant bitter resentment about how other countries cheat, scam, dupe, hate, secretly ridicule, and take advantage of us—just the way Trump’s core supporters feels about their own imagined woeful circumstances.
Presumably, the essence of Trump’s political strategy in foreign policy—a strategy of constant motion and attention grabbing, but with no actual policy core at all—is here made plain. It is by nature impatient, striving to do everything at once—although these days that shortfall barely garners notice given how sped up and impatient the entire culture has become. It is also strictly performative, and the script is of necessity—considering the target audience—as simple as can be, more or less to wit: “The outside world and our own American liberal elites in cahoots with the deep state hate you, and hate me for calling them out in order to protect and exonerate you. I alone can protect you; I alone can fix it. Things are terrible, desperate, so we must ignore the niceties of law and custom and give me the power to do that which only I can do.” Curtain closes, rapturous applause, President for life, power passed along re-patrimonially to…..Eric or Don, Jr.?!
This is a Marvel cartoon-quality storyline at best, you object. It is, yes; and so what? Remember what Charles Frankel said years ago when it was but barely true compared to today: “. . .ideas should not be dismissed out of hand as so obviously simple-minded as not to be taken seriously. Simple-mindedness is not a handicap in the competition of social ideas. . . .”
***
Now, this is much too embarrassing a truth to be allowed to stand unanswered. So we have witnessed in recent weeks, specifically in the context of the Ukraine-Russia portfolio, a Potemkin-Village case put forward for a brilliant Trump grand strategy presently at play. It is contexted by an amoral balance-of-power, spheres of influence systemic premise, and it has two adjunctive sharp lances pointing forward.
One is that the new order is, like Metternich’s Concert of Europe, designed to suppress looming revolution on behalf of conservative virtue—then socialist, now woke. Prooftext? J.D. Vance’s February 16 speech in Munich. But the other is supposedly more pragmatically brilliant: the “reverse Nixon” argument.
Just as Nixon and Kissinger used China to balance against Russia, so now the genius strategist Trump is determined on using Russia to balance against China. In both cases a U.S. partner/proxy at war had to be dumped to implement the larger strategic turn: then, South Vietnam was in the way, now Ukraine is. You, dear reader, may be too young to remember some of the condescendingly nasty things Henry Kissinger said to Nguyễn Văn Thiệu when South Vietnam’s president demurred about having his own ass handed to him, but it was not wildly unlike what happened to Zelensky on February 28. The only main difference was that the former punch down was private and the latter was televised live to the whole watching world.
This argument is so much steaming cow flop, and it stinks on at least two layers. Heretical as it may be amid the blogosphere to ask this question, I will ask it anyway: What did the U.S. policymakers actually achieve in all those years of trying to use China to balance against the USSR? The myth is that this worked great, but what is the evidence for that conclusion? (At a National Interest magazine dinner at the Hay-Adams Hotel in March 2000 I asked Henry this question at table, with Al Haig looking on; Henry just smiled, ate a cherry tomato, and changed the subject.)
In 1972 the new Sino-U.S. relationship was unfurled and became uber-public. Did that stop the Soviets from supporting Hanoi, and Hanoi in turn what remained of the Viet Cong after the 1968 Tet Offensive? No. Did it buy time for Vietnamization so that the Nixon Administration could withdraw the U.S. combat role safely, meaning without a huge and embarrassing collapse in Saigon? No.
Leonid Brezhnev came to Washington in mid-June 1973 for the vaunted Washington Summit, and all sorts of détentish words there were spoken as documents and statements solemnly crafted were signed. But did détente at its apex prevent Moscow from encouraging and even helping to coordinate just four months later the October 1973 Middle East War, with the subsequent quadrupling of world oil prices, as a direct assault on the U.S. and Western position in the Middle East? No. Did the agreements signed in Washington moderate Soviet strategic weapons programs? If anything, they accelerated them.
What screwed the Soviets ultimately was nothing much that we or the Chinese ever deliberately did to them. But irony ever abides: The Soviets overextended themselves—say, by using Cuban mercenaries in Africa in the aftermath of the Portuguese Revolution—so weak and reeling did Moscow think Nixon and Kissinger’s America was. In other words, we inadvertently lured the Soviets into a false sense of opportunity. They thus sallied forth in December 1979 into their disastrous adventure in Afghanistan even as they continued manufacturing their own profound stagnation at home. Even Jimmy Carter figured out, with a helpful nudge from Zbigniew Brzezinski, how to take advantage at the margins, the Poles soon Catholically smelled lamb’s blood, and the rest is history.
Why did the “original Nixon” not work as planned? To oversimplify a bit, the essence is that China was too weak and internally distracted in the immediate wake of the Cultural Revolution to worry the Soviets. A “reverse-Nixon” won’t work any better for much the same reason: The Russians are too weak to worry the PRC, which of course has its own problems, but problems the Russians cannot help it to solve.
American grand strategy under Trump 2.0 thus consists so far of two monumental, counterproductive stupidities, the second perhaps even worse in the long run than the first.
First, as already noted, to cashier the U.S. relationship with the European democracies in a futile effort to draw Russia away from China won’t work, and turning over to seek a belly rub from Putin is not the sort of posture that will force Moscow to choose or do anything. What will turn that trick eventually is Russia’s rising fear of China, which may come to resemble panic when the Chinese drop the veil and actively trash the imposed-under-duress 19th-century border in Siberia. Then, after Putin has left the scene most likely, Russia will come as supplicant to the West, begging protection on our terms. Dividing the West now, as Trump has done, turns a position of lasting strength viz both Russia and China into a position of fawning weakness. It also scares yesterday’s supper out of small and medium sized countries whose leaders will now rush to self-help, including WMD proliferation—something that is in the interest of no great power or really anyone else, for that matter.
Second, as every even halfway competent American strategic thinker has understood for more than a century, the United States since the January 1815 Battle of New Orleans has enjoyed a geopolitical advantage perhaps unique in recorded history. We have had either friendly or feckless neighbors north and south, and, as it is often put, lots of fish to the east and west. A World Island, therefore, Halford Mackinder called the United States, and rightly so: As Britain-qua-maritime power was situated advantageously to Europe, so America-qua-maritime power has been situated advantageously to the entire globe.
Now, it’s one (stupid) thing to gratuitously squander American soft power by, say, rejecting the principle of humanitarian disaster relief and foreign aid/capacity-building. Those policies were never predicated on charity; they were investments in a reputational posture that invited U.S. diplomacy and its disinterested offices in ways that have redounded to U.S. interests far and wide for decades on end. Far stupider, because galactically trust-shredding, has been the vicious and utterly gratuitous punching down on Mexico and especially Canada—and over what? Over a moronic misreading of what a trade deficit actually is under conditions of U.S. dollar-dominance of international trade.
How will I ever explain this to my grandkids when they get older? I pray for the chance anyway.
[1] The 5-4 SCOTUS vote against the Trump Administration in the case of USAID on March 5 was the first exception to the general rule. Hopefully it will not be the last.
[2] So explicitly and hence honestly proclaimed even Claire Berlinski, “GLOBAL EYES: I can barely keep up,” Cosmopolitan Globalist, March 14, 2025.
[3] Michael Kimmage, “The World Trump Wants.” Hal Brands’s February 25 Foreign Affairs essay “The Renegade Order: How Trump Wields American Power,” comes across as far astute than Kimmage’s, but even it—written before the Zelensky Oval Office made-for-TV mugging of February 28—could not wholly protect itself from Lenin’s warning.