He says that, but what do you call being aggressive and hostile to allies -- i.e. threatening military force to take the Panama Canal and Greenland -- while aligning with Russia and China, who play the long game and will pretend to be friendly until the moment they see an opening and take it?
1. People think he's crazy, so he's taking advantage of how they underestimate him.
2. He's taking advantage of anchoring bias: he makes a completely outrageous first offer which then makes any subsequent offer seems more reasonable, even if it was higher than you would otherwise accept. He does this all of the time, and it's a standard negotiating tactic in general, but it sometimes works well for Trump because of how people see him (see point 1).
Yes, he's of the opinion that the alliances in security and trade have not been a net benefit to the US. Is that shocking to you? He's literally been saying that for years. And thus, he's acting to change those agreements to make them more advantageous and to stimulate domestic production to compete with foreign labour (that's ultimately what tariffs do). He's going about it in his usual bombastic and ham-fisted way of course, but he's doing exactly what he's always said he wanted to do.
It's completely self-evident that lots of manufacturing has left the US due to trade agreements. This has resulted in certain classes of cheap goods but also made the US vulnerable in key goods (like electronics), and inhibited automation.
It's also not at all obvious that the US has been more secure in its role as world police. Arguably, it led directly to 9/11 and decades of pointless death in the Middle East.
All of the arguments that the status quo was more secure and better economically are weak, at best, given the complexities of the counterfactuals.
I think the arguments in favor of a globalized economy, as well as the transition to a knowledge economy, are abundant and pervasive. I’m not going to argue in favor of them because they are already so powerful and obvious.
If people conflate their current economic misfortune with a US foreign policy of encouraging global cooperation and participation, then they haven’t thought much about cause and effect.
Someone who cared to address the newfound lack of upward mobility in our society would insist on domestic policies that ensured economic surplus was explicitly invested toward the public good.
It has nothing to do with "current economic misfortune". It's simply a fact that globalization makes a country more vulnerable on many dimensions. This was clear during COVID when all of the supply chains collapsed upon countries closing their borders.
While globalization certainly has advantages that have been espoused at length, little thought has been given to their clear downsides, like decimating domestic production and the vulnerabilities inherent to distributed supply chains.
As for the "transition to a knowledge economy", this too entails similar problems. The previous trajectory was simply untenable.
I’m against these vulnerabilities as much as anyone, but if we want to move the world forward as a whole, nationalist protectionism cannot take us there. If every country wasted its resources building up its own fully independent industrial supply chain, and kept it fully modernized abreast of other nations, the average citizen’s standard of living would have a very low ceiling indeed. There’s a reason why corporate mergers happen.
If you want to see truly prosperous societies then you have to maximize peaceful international cooperation through shared democratic values. That takes educated citizenry with post-material values who will be invested in the stability and longevity of such an international system.
And they need to cooperate against authoritarian bad actors like Putin, who seek to divide and conquer.
Trump's for whatever is good for Trump. Stopping a war so he can bring his buddy Vlad back in to the fold? Sure. Starting a war so he can annex Greenland? Probably also sure.
That's the other fun side of Trump. He says a ton of outrageous things but, if you like him, you just pick and choose which bits are ridiculous and jokes and which are truthful when it's actually impossible to figure out which is which. Is he going to take over Greenland with force? His followers will say probably not because they don't see it. Is he going to introduce tariffs to Canada? His followers will say yes because they do see it. Has he done either? Not yet. Will he? Who knows!
But whether he's serious or not about a claim really comes down to whether someone likes it or not. Regardless, I'd argue that's a really poor way to lead.
I don't like Trump at all, but I'm not blind to history. He likes building things, particularly with his name on it. Even with Gaza his inclination is to build something in that completely devastated area.
He's also very sensitive to public opinion of him, and he knows public opinion is against military conflict. People are sick of it.
So war is the complete antithesis of everything he's ever demonstrably cared about. That's a pretty solid piece of evidence that lets you distinguish what seems reasonable, but that gets conveniently ignored by people that let their feelings about him influence their judgment.
I think there's more going on with the war than just he's anti-war, but I can kind of see this argument. But if we take it as true, it would seem that he's bad at working towards the things he professes to want. He either doesn't understand them or he pushes to get the fastest result without thought as to whether that would be the best.
I don't like it, but I can't deny that he's made it work more often than expected. Possibly with some negative downstream effects we haven't seen yet. Time will tell.
> Even if you take him for his words, which you shouldn't
This is exactly the kind of unhinged take on Trump that drives me crazy, and I'm not even a fan. On the one hand you say he's a liar and you can't believe anything he says, but when it's convenient for you, suddenly everything he says is completely literal.
The fact of the matter is that Trump has never initiated any serious military action, and he has a deliberate and predictable tactic of making outrageous offers and threats to put people off balance to make them compliant and accept worse offers than they otherwise would have (anchoring bias). This is a standard negotiating tactic, Trump just does it bombastically like no one else.
> He's stated that he would let Putin "do whatever he wants".
The US is not the world police. Other people being warmongers doesn't make Trump a warmonger because he "lets them".
> He plans to "level Gaza" (which means genocide) so he can build luxury hotels.
No, he didn't suggest killing anyone, he explicitly said they would be relocated. That's closer to ethnic cleansing, but decidedly not genocide.
