By Nick Catoggio
Monday, March 10, 2025
This weekend, for the first time, I felt a twinge of
nostalgia for the Trump 2016 campaign.
Or a moment from the campaign, anyway. Whenever candidate
Donald Trump talked about building a border wall and took flak for it from
Mexico or the Democrats or whoever, he’d bellow, “The
wall just got 10 feet higher!”
In the end, the wall did not get 10 feet higher. By the
time he left office in 2021 there was barely
any wall to speak of. But his logic was fair enough: If you’re at an
impasse and your opponent is resisting, one way to resolve it is to apply more
pressure until he relents.
Trump is following that logic now in trying to broker a
ceasefire in Ukraine. But he’s applying it to only one of the parties, and it
ain’t the one keeping the war going.
“Pausing” weapons
shipments, halting intelligence-sharing,
pushing for a presidential
election in the middle of a raging conflict: The longer Ukraine resists
White House demands to come to the table, the higher the proverbial wall gets.
Yet the wall never seems to rise for Russia—even though it’s Russia, not
Ukraine, that’s depriving Trump of the peace he’s seeking by continuing to
advance on the battlefield.
How come? If ever there was a moment that called for a
bit of “wall” pressure on the aggressor, this is it. If Russia doesn’t stop
firing in the next 48 hours, we’re sending $50 billion more in weapons to
Ukraine. And if it doesn’t stop within 48 hours after that, we’re sending
another $50 billion.
Keep making the “wall” 10 feet higher until it’s high
enough to make Vladimir Putin relent. Why hasn’t Trump done that?
On Friday, after weeks of asymmetrical pressure tactics
and rising panic among Republican hawks, the president finally threatened to
slap Moscow on the wrist. “Based on the fact that Russia is absolutely
‘pounding’ Ukraine on the battlefield right now,” he wrote,
“I am strongly considering large scale Banking Sanctions, Sanctions, and
Tariffs on Russia until a Cease Fire and FINAL SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT ON PEACE IS
REACHED.”
The Russians ignored him. They continued
to “pound” Ukraine all weekend, capitalizing on the blindness in Ukrainian
defenses that Trump himself had inflicted by cutting off American intelligence.
The Kremlin is openly defying him and daring him to do something about it. What
will he do?
No one knows. In these early days of populist revolution,
American foreign policy has become a chimerical monster. Its behavior is
impossible to predict.
The head.
Imagine a creature with a head that’s Russian, a
midsection that’s European, and a lower section that’s feeble and atrophied.
That is, a country with Donald Trump as its leader, a
political and intelligence establishment dominated by Atlanticists, and a
population that tends not to care much about any policy that doesn’t directly
hit them in the wallet.
That’s an ungainly creature. Its component parts don’t
move in concert. If you’re a foreign power sizing up the chimera and trying to
gauge how it will act abroad, you’re forced to reckon with three distinct forms
of uncertainty.
One has to do with the head: How ideological is Donald
Trump, exactly? If his passion for international authoritarianism ends up
conflicting with his passion for being seen as “strong” and “tough,” which
takes precedence over the other?
Trump strains hard to keep those two passions aligned.
That’s why he’s leaned so heavily on Ukraine over the past month, punctuated by
his televised
dressing-down of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Whenever he gets to
project “toughness” at the expense of an enemy of fascism, that’s a twofer for
him. Hence the obsession with Zelensky’s alleged “disrespect”:
The leader of a weak liberal power refusing to grovel to him offends Trump on
both levels.
Ditto for his mockery of Canada, the so-called “51st
state,” which the New
York Times reported on Friday involves more than mere trolling.
Allegedly, the president told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a
phone call “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border
between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.”
I must have written a hundred pieces before the election about Trump’s fascist
tendencies but never once did I imagine him doing something as cartoonishly
stereotypical as suddenly demanding to renegotiate a neighbor’s border.
At the rate we’re going, it’s more likely that we’ll see
the Marines land in Saskatchewan during Trump’s term than in Taiwan.
To Trump, “strength” is a matter of bullying less
powerful entities into doing one’s bidding. That’s why, as Matt Yglesias
pointed out recently, the White House’s supposed admiration for toughness
doesn’t match the reality of its behavior in Europe. An isolationist America
should want Europe to re-arm and take over responsibility for defending
the continent from Russia—in short, to be strong. Instead, in nations like
Germany, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk are boosting
far-right Putinist parties that will surely supplicate to Moscow if they
come to power.
“Strength” means remorselessly subjugating the weak.
Postliberals around the world share that view, which is why Trump, Vance, and
Musk instinctively sympathize with Putin and Russia rather than the rules-based
Europeans. The problem for the White House is that, colloquially, “strength”
also denotes resolve, ruthlessness, and manly bravado—and as long as Russia
continues to defy Trump’s demands for a ceasefire, it’s Putin rather than the
president who appears the “stronger” of the two.
That’s how we ended up with Friday’s surprising Truth
Social ultimatum about “large scale Banking Sanctions, Sanctions, and Tariffs.”
Could there hypothetically be a point at which Moscow flouting Trump’s
ultimatums would make the president appear so feeble that his lizard-brain
instinct for domination would kick in and cause him to punish the Russians for
it? How long can Trump’s affinity for fascist alpha males last if that affinity
lands him in the role of a beta?
Pretty long, I’d guess. If his infamous humiliation in
Helsinki didn’t make him want to prove his mettle against Putin afterward,
presumably nothing will. The most one can realistically expect from the White
House by way of “balance” between Russia and Ukraine is a few token sanctions
for the former and demands for the wholesale disarmament of the latter. But so
long as the Russian military continues to press forward, exposing Trump as a
paper tiger whose ultimatums aren’t worth taking seriously, there’s a
chance that his ego will force him to change course.
Not
much of a chance, but a chance.
The body.
A second form of uncertainty foreign powers need to
consider is the U.S. political establishment. How willing and able are Trump’s
Cabinet, his party in Congress, and America’s intelligence bureaus to stop him
from allying America durably with the planet’s most repellent regimes?
A lot less willing and able than they were in 2017,
obviously.
The Mike Pences and Mike Pompeos have been swapped out
for postliberals like J.D. Vance and the desiccated husks of Reaganites like
Marco Rubio. Hawks remain a nominal majority among congressional Republicans,
but the conference’s members aren’t willing to risk their seats by confronting
Trump on foreign policy. And American intelligence is led by the likes of Tulsi
Gabbard and Kash Patel, guaranteeing that there won’t be a peep of resistance
to Trump’s wishes inside the Situation Room.
But what about outside of it, down the chain of command?
If you’re a foreign intelligence agent from a country allied with the U.S., how
do you navigate sharing information with a government whose leaders are
pro-Russia but whose wider establishment remains pro-Europe? Whom do you trust
in a chimerical America that’s half-foe, half-friend?
Maybe you play it safe and don’t trust anyone. Last week,
NBC
News reported that numerous American allies, including the “Five Eyes”
nations, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, are considering “scaling back” the
intelligence they exchange with the U.S. because they’re no longer confident
that it won’t be passed to enemies. “The allies are weighing the move because
of concerns about safeguarding foreign assets whose identities could
inadvertently be revealed,” five sources told the outlet.
One went as far as to say that, although the Five Eyes
nations traditionally haven’t spied on each other, that might now need to
change. Another report claimed that the British are so shaken by the White
House’s turn toward Russia that they’re considering starting
a “Four Eyes” subgroup in which certain intelligence would be shared among
the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—but not the United States. That’s
how far down the slope to a western crack-up we are after just seven weeks of
Trump 2.0.
But some foreign officials think it’s silly to try to cut
the United States, with its unmatched resources, out of intelligence-sharing.
There are plenty of traditional liberals and Reaganites left in the federal
bureaucracy who can still be counted on—for
the moment, anyway. Allied officials recently told
The Atlantic’s Shane Harris how they plan to handle the new reality:
In rare cases, allies might hold
back a very sensitive piece of intelligence altogether. But more often, they
would ask their counterparts to keep some information to themselves and not
share it higher up in their organizations, where it might find its way to the
president’s political appointees and potentially to him. The allies would not
be hiding things from Trump, exactly—just avoiding the risk of bringing him in
on things he doesn’t need to know. Another official told me their service might
ask the Americans to read intelligence only in person, perhaps at the country’s
embassy or a headquarters building. The Americans would still know the
information, but they would take no hard copies with them that might find their
way into the hands of Trump’s political advisers.
What they’re suggesting here sounds a lot like a
true “deep state” in which intelligence bureaus not only begin operating
independently of the political leadership but, in some cases, actively
undermining it. That’s incredibly dangerous business, not to mention
insubordinate—but in a chimerical government where it’s no longer clear which
states are considered allies and which are viewed as enemies or even whose
notion of morality should guide how the United States behaves, it’s
unavoidable. We’re headed for a much higher than normal quotient of
espionage cases in Trump 2.0.
Although that
was probably true even before the president made his global heel turn to
become an ally of Russia’s.
Insubordination will be a running theme of this
presidency, I expect. If Trump gives the order to bomb Edmonton or whatever,
will any military officers refuse to carry it out? They’d have no legal reason
to say no—although enthusiasts of the War Powers
Resolution might take issue with that. What about congressional
Republicans? As morally and civically denuded as they are, I can imagine a
louder than usual round of throat-clearing from the Lindsey Grahams and Tom
Cottons if Trump were to try to withdraw from NATO.
Or what if, in his zeal to pressure Ukraine, the
president proposes aiding Russia? Don’t put it past him: By halting
intelligence-sharing with Kyiv, he’s already complicit in hundreds
of Ukrainian deaths. Sending intelligence or even weapons to Moscow is the
logical next step.
Morals versus duty: Who will say no when that order is
issued?
The legs.
The last bit of uncertainty for foreign powers is the
majestic American people, who, as Churchill famously (never
quite) said, “can always be trusted to do the right thing once all other
possibilities have been exhausted.” They’re the legs of the chimera and so,
weak and wobbly as they are, they’ll probably decide in which direction the
creature will ultimately go. Could a popular backlash to the president’s
pro-Russia policy push him in the other direction?
I sure wouldn’t count on it if I were a European
official. Despite the abject disgrace of the past few weeks, Trump’s job
approval remains slightly
net positive. Voters rarely have strong feelings about foreign policy when
U.S. boots aren’t on the ground. And let’s face it: If Americans had the sense
or decency to rally in numbers behind Ukraine as the White House applies
pressure, they would have had the sense and decency to keep Donald Trump away
from the presidency in 2024. The period of history in which the people of this
country could be trusted to do the right thing, even after all other
possibilities were exhausted, is over.
But if you’re desperate for optimism, I’ll offer a
little—for once.
The most recent polling on Ukraine is grim for Trump.
Last week, YouGov
found a sharp divergence between the president and his constituents on rooting
interests in the war. Asked whether they thought he sympathized more with
Russia or with Ukraine, Americans split 43-10; asked whom they themselves
sympathized with, Americans split … 3-56. Even among Republicans, only 4
percent copped to having sympathies for Moscow.
The numbers were better for Trump on whether the U.S.
should continue sending aid to Ukraine but nowhere near the level you would
expect to justify a “pause” on weapons. In all, 35 percent said they wanted to
reduce the amount of military aid being sent to Kyiv; a combined 44 percent
thought we should either increase the amount or maintain the status quo.
A Reuters/Ipsos
survey taken around the same time found disastrous numbers for the White House
on basic moral questions like culpability for the war. For all the energy Trump
and his lackeys have spent trying to muddy
the waters around who started it, Americans are clear-eyed: Just 22 percent
“somewhat agree” that both combatants are equally responsible versus 59 percent
who “somewhat disagree.” When asked if they agree that Russia is more
responsible, 70 percent said yes compared to 9 percent who didn’t.
Enthusiasm for an isolationist posture toward Ukraine was
also weak. Only 37 percent “tend to agree” that that country’s problems are
none of our business and that we shouldn’t interfere there while 60 percent
“tend to disagree.” When asked how they felt about American-made weapons being
used to strike targets inside Russia, respondents tended to agree with letting
the Ukrainians do so by a margin of 57-40. Among independents, 61 percent
tended to agree. Even among Republicans, 39 percent said the same.
“I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy,
and the country is already protesting,” French senator Claude
Malhuret observed in a widely noted speech last Tuesday. “But in one month,
Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last
presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a
dictator supported by a traitor.”
Americans don’t like being one
of the bad guys. And the great postliberal project to convince them that
the bad guys are good and the good guys are actually bad, that in fact they
should be proud to be led by a dictator-supporting traitor, has failed
miserably—at least when it comes to a supervillain like Putin.
I suspect that Trump’s bizarre project to bully Canada,
which must be inscrutable to the average joe, will make matters worse. Most
voters won’t have the foggiest idea why he’s picking fights with our very
friendly neighbor to the north and inflicting
real economic pain on the U.S. to do so. There aren’t many red lines Trump
can cross anymore that will cause Ben Shapiro to say a discouraging word about
him, but his moronic expansionist national-greatness fantasy about “the 51st
state” is one of them.
So maybe there’s a little life left in these legs after
all. Ukrainians and Canadians might need to suffer a lot more before those legs
start to move—a decade of Trump has largely anesthetized Americans to moral
outrage—but at some point being an accessory to the wanton murder of Ukrainian
civilians could spark a pang of anger. And anger is the first step to
national recovery, replacing the chimera with a creature less abominable.
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