Donald Trump’s Chimerical Foreign Policy

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.

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 “51^st 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.

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 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 51^st 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.