Perishing Republic

 It's hard not to feel that today marks the end in some way of the American experiment. Trump's unprovoked trade war against our two closest neighbors and allies—Mexico and Canada—may not be the single most destructive decision in the nation's history. But it stands out as among the most gratuitously destructive. 

Mexico and Canada, after all, did nothing to deserve this wanton act of aggression. Up to the moment Trump declared his new levies, they were willing to make any concessions that he asked of them. But ultimately, Trump didn't even post any demands. There was nothing he wanted from them, other than to attack them and needlessly eviscerate another set of crucial relationships with our nation's friends and partners. 

This is what takes Trump's actions not only outside of the realm of justice—but even outside the domain of the rational. Joseph Conrad's definition of genuine "madness" comes to mind. To quote a passage from The Secret Agent (I was reminded of it this week because I was reading Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, which cites it): 

What is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad? Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

Of course, Trump and his propagandists occasionally cite the idea of being a "madman" as a positive good. The strategic theorist Thomas Schelling once quoted the same passage from Conrad in order to describe the "madman" theory of deterrence. Basically, the argument runs that if a state's actions are perfectly unpredictable and seemingly irrational, then others will be deterred from antagonizing it out of the fear of facing unknown consequences. 

I have my doubts about the "madman" theory as a strategy for military deterrence. After all—unpredictability goes both ways. A lot of national defense and mutual security strategy actually depends on our nation's ability to give and keep its word. If people do not trust what we say or the basic stability of our political order, then they will never conclude a peace treaty or defense pact with us. 

Plus, if confronted with an irrational actor who can't be reasoned or bargained with, they may decide that they will simply do what they wanted to do anyway. They may conclude it's better to roll the dice and try to achieve their own goals, since the other state's behavior is entirely unpredictable anyway, and it may end up attacking them for doing nothing as easily as for doing something. 

Here is where the madness of Trump imposing 25% tariffs on our two biggest trading partners and closest allies becomes a relevant example. As I say, Canada and Mexico did nothing to bring on this trade war. Nor did Trump initiate it in order to extract any concrete goals from them (when pressed on the reasons for his actions in recent months, Trump has more often than not talked about trying to take over Canada and make it the 51st state—hardly a bargaining position that a sovereign nation can meet half-way). 

Canada and Mexico, then, were innocent. They are friendly nations with close U.S. ties. But Trump attacked them anyways. Meanwhile, Trump's new tariffs on China—a U.S. adversary—were much lower; and meanwhile, Trump has made a number of overtures (including his position on the TikTok ban) that seem to indicate a willingness to cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party. 

The lesson that other countries will take from Trump's "madness," then, is that you are as likely to be attacked at his hands if you do everything he wants as if you don't. U.S. allies are as likely—if not more likely—to be attacked as U.S. adversaries. So—there is no rational reason to do what Trump wants. There is simply no logical connection between his actions and any course of action you might take. So, other nations will simply go their own way and give up on trying to comply with the U.S.'s demands. 

This is one reason why I'm skeptical that being a "madman" in foreign diplomacy is a good military strategy. Certainly, if all of your conduct indicates that you care more about gratuitously torpedoing the western alliance system than about stopping the aggression of our authoritarian adversaries, then Putin and Xi will have no reason not to invade or threaten their democratic neighbors, like Ukraine and Taiwan. 

But even if the "madman" theory were defensible in some way as an approach to military deterrence—it applies even less in the realm of economics. The functioning of a market economy depends overwhelmingly on stability and predictability. Investment requires a long-term gamble on the future. In order for anyone to be incentivized to make it, they have to believe that their wager will pay off. 

By imposing penalties on people who only recently moved their supply chains to Canada and Mexico, in order to avoid Trump's earlier tariffs on China—and by threatening even more unprovoked sanctions on European trading partners in the weeks or months ahead—Trump is effectively making it impossible to make those calculations. 

He is indeed keeping people off-balance, as he often claims to be trying to do. But off-balance means that no one will risk investing capital in new supply chains that could, in their turn, be pointlessly and gratuitously sabotaged the next day. 

The result of all this will probably be carnage on global markets and possibly a worldwide economic depression. Canada and Mexico are readying their own retaliatory tariffs, which they have every right to impose in self-defense (Trump was the one who unilaterally betrayed his own free trade agreement, after all, which he negotiated with both countries just a few years ago). 

These countries know these tariffs will hurt—but they are going to apply them because it may be the only way to get the American public to pay attention and come to our senses. 

I hope that we do so, before it's too late. But the danger is of course that Trump will just seize on the resulting economic crisis to consolidate even more power and crack down on dissent. When he discovers that the results of his own trade war are making him look bad, say, he may simply resort to even more extreme measures to try to silence the media and his critics. The words of Robinson Jeffers came to mind, from his 1925 poem "Shine, Perishing Republic":

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens [...]

Indeed, vulgarity and empire seem the watchwords of the moment. Jeffers's poem may be a hundred years old this year, but it encapsulates our time. Our republic is rapidly becoming a gaudy and mean empire, with our nation's proud foreign policy tradition and alliance system being remade before our eyes into Trump's crude conception of a vulgar scramble for zero-sum power. 

As a fellow poetic observer of the national scene—Ralph Waldo Emerson in this case—wrote decades before that—of another American foray into empire—anyone who prates of "better arts and life" in our great land should go and look at what we are now doing to our neighbors. Emerson could well have been writing of Trump's new tariffs on Mexico: "Go, blindworm, go,/ Behold the famous States/ Harrying Mexico/ With rifle and with knife!"

To all those still trying to find some rationale for Trump's actions, or some tortured means to defend his decisions as somehow benefiting the nation or serving our long-term interests—I say to them, with Emerson: Go, blindworm, go! Behold the famous States harrying Canada and Mexico—with these gratuitous self-defeating costs!