Home and Away
Is anything going where you thought it would?
Tuesday morning.
Tariffs, as announced in February with a delay of a month to let the bureaucracy get all the paperwork and computer programs set up to deal with it.
Trump’s White House cut off aid to Ukraine temporarily to further the extortion scam in Ukraine.
Tuesday night with the American economy in a first quarter recession and a second day of a sinking stock market, American commerce secretary Hiwsrd Lutnick announced Donald Trump will change the tariffs again, calling it a comprise instead of a failure.
Meanwhile, European NATO plus Canada met over the weekend in London to announce new sanctions against Russia and lots more money for Ukraine as well as a massive European plan to re-arm. Donald trump may want to shift American focus off Russia but European s live under the threat in the east.
“500 million Europeans ask 300 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians,” Polish prime minister Donald Tusk reminded Europeans in advance of the London meeting, noting the absurdity of the way people have been thinking about European defence and security for too long. “If you know how to count, rely on yourself.”
This is not what the Americans around Donald Trump expected, really. Some people picked up early on in the Trump rhetoric about Europeans and Canadians the idea everyone was freeloading off the United States but that is a 40 year old line and it is no longer reality even before this weekend’s meeting. It’s like Trump’s tirade at Ukrainian president Volodomir Zelenskyy about thank-you or the nonsense that Canada needed to fight fentanyl or else. The lines are performance. A distraction. It’s the “or else” part you have to follow to see what is really going on.
The reality of the 21st century, after 40 years of increasing free trade around the world, is that the United States is no longer the superpower it once was. The world is not the same. Others are as strong or stronger economically and politically. Americans like Trump and his legions are insular. Isolated. Nostalgic for a time that never existed. They think it is the 1950s but what they see is the Marty McFly re-imagined version of it. Trade secretary Howard Lutnick, nudnick like Trump, wrapped up in themselves, Lutnick imagines 1900 was an idyllic time. America isolated from the world, tariffs on everything.
Trumpish Republicans think it is not merely possible but easy to put everything back to the way they imagine things used to be. Conservatives worth the name believe in old values in the modern world. This is something else. This is a photo opportunity for a shot at redemption. Trump and his goons are cartoons in a cartoon graveyard. Call him Al.
Al and his mopes think they can extort minerals from Ukraine or cash from other countries through tariffs. They think this stuff is easy because do not know anything but they think they know it all. These Americans are too crude, too simplistic and literal to know how to get what they want without creating more opposition and pushing away their prize. As it will be in Ukraine, so it will be in tariffs and eventually as it will be back home as the shock wears off of the deliberately manic first few weeks in office. They know they have only a few weeks, maybe even days to get something moving. Every president is the same before it settles into the normal politics. As with everyone else, including Trump 45, so it will be with Trump 47. Once the bureaucracy and the political reality of Washington congeal around the Mob Squad, they will be neutralized and absorbed like all the other fools before them.
The United States is not the superpower it was even 20 years ago. But some Americans think they can undo the economic shifts from free trade. They are ego and nothing else, which makes them both dangerous and also weak. In 2018, Trump and his first administration tried tariffs on steel and aluminum. They cost the American economy 75,000 jobs and gained a mere 1,000 new ones but strategically - in the big picture - they did nothing. Nothing.
As the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Johns Hopkins put it last month, the American steel industry employs in total 80,000 people but the steel using industries employ 12 million. With allies and in the globalized world the Americans built, the United States is part of a much stronger bloc than it used to be. That world needs someone far more capable and sophisticated than Donald Trump and any of the goofs around him. The result is that as the Trump Republicans attack that American economic power for misguided and unattainable aims, they actually weaken the United States even more than they imagine.
Look at the chart of shipbuilding power. Now change the political allegiance of South Korea and Japan, currently two American allies already alienated by Trump’s clumsiness and arrogance. Every current American ally, including Canada, can do the same thing and re-orient to a European-led bloc that retains their values against China and a resurgent, American-affiliated Russia.
Logic, facts, and evidence are not on the Trump Americans’ side but then again they aren’t people who care about facts, evidence, and logic. Bobby Kennedy Junior is typical. trump is ego. Look at Trump’s comments about Pierre Poilievre, who many ignorant Canadians imagine is a Trump clone. Pierre isn’t. Far from it. He’s a Canadian. “Well, I think his biggest problem is he’s not a MAGA guy, you know? I mean, he’s really not — he’s not a Trump guy at all.” That’s Trump in The Spectator (via Paul Wells) when asked about Poilievre and the Canadian Conservatives.
“He’s… different. Making a big mistake. They all make that mistake. You know. They think they’re going to be the tough guy and they’re going to knock out Trump, and they end up getting the hell beat out of ’em. So I don’t know. I mean, I can’t tell you. Pierre. I just don’t know. I don’t like what he’s saying about me. It’s just not positive about me. And we’ve done a great job.”
When Trump doesn’t actually know anything or forgets - he is aging rapidly, after all, and is not in great physical health and therefore not great mental shape either - he defaults to his egocentric replies. That’s why the business in Ukraine with Zelenskyy descended into what was a ludicrous moment *for Trump.* The only people who think it is brilliant are people on his payroll or the known loons like Marjorie Taylor Green and her leg-over, who works at Fox News. He’s the idiot who asked the suit question like he was reporting about the Kardashians. Forget all the stuff you’ve read online. Just look at the moment. Ignore the things others have told you about what’s going on. Just look at it yourself. See the absurdity. It is naked.
Sometimes, you just have to laugh.
There was a curious moment during the joint media availability at the White House on the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most of you missed it, most likely, especially in light of the feeding frenzy of the conventional media and the online commentariat over the Zelenskyy ambush a few days later. But those of us who watched it live will not forget the moment when French President Emmanuel Macron leaned forward, interrupted Donald Trump by touching his arm gently, and corrected what Trump was going to say. Broke his train of thought. Stopped Trump cold. Never let him say whatever moronic or superficial thing Trump was going to say.
The key thing is that the French President cut off Trump’s comment, which was off script from whatever the two countries had agreed to privately. It was an obvious moment but not crude in the way Elon Musk - in ball cap and branded tee shirt and casual clothes - and his equally annoying sprog were obvious in their ridiculous media appearance with Trump weeks earlier. Macron’s intervention obviously kept the whole thing on track and kept Trump from wandering off into one of his stream-of-unconsciousness monologues that tend to fascinate American media but do no one any real good.
Leave aside the deep historic connections between the French and American republics. That moment on camera and Macron’s presence in the American capitol showed the deep connection between the two as well as Macron’s skill at managing Trump in his own office in his own language. Macron speaks English very well to the point where the gap between Macron’s way of speaking simply and clearly and Trump’s vagueness - not mere simplicity of speech but actual meaninglessness - was striking. In the larger sense, this session, the events in Kyiv, the London agreement, and all the messages coming from the NATO countries were a powerful antidote to the “NATO is dead” hysteria that has spread easily across the brain-dead western media since the Trump conversation with Vladimir Putin and the subsequent meeting about Ukraine without the Ukrainians.
By the end of the week, when the Zelenskyy thing happened, no one in the conventional media or the online commentariat in North America noticed the Macron and Keir Starmer visits and the difference between Trump’s pro-Putin ravings and what Trump actually did when the larger partners in the alliance worked on the Americans behind closed doors. They only picked up on the Zelenskyy thing and slotted it into the pre-programmed binary extremist camps of American domestic politics. Most North American media and certainly the major conventional bunch are like the politics they are part of: local, self-centred, and ultimately blind.
If you are interviewing Kevin O’Leary as a serious commentator on anything besides self-promotion or if you are watching the ultimate self-promoter parade that should be rebranded as Cochrane and Friends on CBC, you are not getting any intellectual protein at all. These are not people who actually know anything, generally speaking. They are there for something other than giving you insight. There are others - like Bob Rae - but they are the exception that proves the otherwise low-protein rule of conventional media and most of the online commentators in both Canada and the United States.
What’s going on with Ukraine and with tariffs is a reaction to a long term shift of power globally and economically, going back to at least the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War and now shifting again thanks to the economic and political realignment brought about by the Americans and Europeans. Lots of people last week found a revelation in an interview with Alex Younger, former head of Britain’s overseas spy agency. It is good and not the sort of thing North Americans are used to hearing. Younger starts with the idea we are seeing a shift that is decades long in coming and suggests we are headed to a world of strong men - Putin, Xi, and Trump - in contrast to the European approach or the pre-Trump world of co-operation and collaboration.
Forget the bit about strongmen, including the analogy to the Second World War Yalta Conference. This view relies too heavily on the short-hand of referring to what leaders do and that can obscure the more complicated nature of power and how countries exercise it. We are also too soon into this period to give Trump and his heirs on the Republican right dominance or coherence in American politics they don’t yet have and may never get.
Focus instead on Younger’s point about the world shifting to one that is not the unipolar world of the time right after the Cold War or even the more bi-polar world of more recent times. We are headed into a time when there are potentially four power centres: China, Europe, the United States, and Russia. Canada, Australia, Japan, and other smaller countries will straddle the European and United States blocs, which, for all the events of the past few weeks let alone the past few years still share more common values and economic ties than they differ on.
The Americans may cozy to the Russians severely weakened by the Ukraine war while also staying connected to NATO, while at the same time turning more to deal with China. There is a certain logic after all in not pursuing the Ukraine war to the point that Putin collapses. Better the weakened devil you know than the completely unknown. Things are shifting globally but as much as no one can say for sure where events will go, they are unlikely to end as extremely as some would suggest with the collapse of NATO, an American-Russian alliance, or anything of that sort. There is more at stake than the fragile egos of the child-men currently shagging around literally and figuratively in the White House and it those other interests represented by other people who will influence what comes out of the current unsettled world.
And as all those events unfold away from Newfoundland and Labrador, we have our own situation closer to home to sort out. There’s a Liberal leadership - settling quickly down to John Hogan, favourite of the party Establishment against outsider John Abbott, with maybe one or two others for fun. Either of those as Premier would not change the trajectory of where the election was going except, potentially, to increase the odds of a Pea Sea victory or at least a much stronger showing than some expect. Against the grey Pea Seas,. The Liberals will trade the insipid beige of Andrew Furey for the foggish grey of John Abbott Hogan.
Home and away, things are changing and there is no way to know how things will play out.
