The US can no longer be trusted by any of its allies

[muriel_volestrangler]

This is a section from a weekly blog about Brexit; this week it includes Trump's effect on the global order.

When it comes to Trump’s new tariffs, these can be seen as an attack on economic liberalism, and to an extent they are motivated by economic protectionism. But they are not really, or at least not simply, about waging trade wars (although trade wars with China and the EU may be the result). More fundamentally, Trump is using trade as a weapon to intimidate other countries into doing his bidding in both economic and non-economic matters. The non-economic motive was most evident in the threat to Colombia, but was also present in those made to Mexico and Canada, and carried through against China.

The fact that Mexico and Canada struck last-minute deals on border protection to avoid the tariff attacks is in part an illustration of this, but it is also an irrelevance. For one thing, they are only temporary deals, and there is every reason to believe that, like a blackmailer, Trump will come back for more (and, even if he doesn’t, this episode will have done long-term damage to, for example, US-Canada relations). For another, the very rapidity of the reprieves is all of a piece with Trump’s almost cliched desire to ‘do the unexpected’ as a weapon designed to de-stabilize his perceived enemies. Indeed, as legal commentator David Allen Green has pointed out this week, although Trump is often described as ‘transactional’, his approach to deal-making is actually “anti-transactional”, so that “an agreement offers an opportunity to gain leverage, for a new negotiation, for a new exertion of power.”

However, whilst what is happening may be inflected through Trump’s baroque psychology (£), it is not reducible to that. He is both an expression of, and a vehicle for, a deep seam of sentiment in the US which sees the country as the put-upon victim of the international order (despite that order being largely the creation of the US). In that sense, Trump’s tariff attacks are part of the wider picture of a regime determined to use force to dismantle the constraints of law and convention abroad quite as much as those within the domestic sphere. That he has even spoken of the use of military force, extending to the sequestration of territory, against some of the US’s own allies means that, at the most basic level, the US can no longer be trusted by any of its allies.

Trump’s words and actions have therefore already fractured global society. It’s tempting to reach for historical analogies, which might range from Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to the America First Committee, to the endless debates about whether Trump is a fascist. But they really aren’t necessary. It’s enough to observe that he is what he is, now; doing what he is doing, now. Perhaps in the future it may seem an overblown claim but, just at the moment, it is plausible to say that we are seeing the beginning of a new global divide between rules and brute force. It is also not necessary to romanticize ‘the rules-based international order’, or to sanitize the history of US foreign policy, to see this as a momentous and highly dangerous development, with the potential to shatter previous alliances and enforce more-or-less binary choices on almost every country in the world.

https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/02/trumps-new-world-chaos-offers.html

[Mike 03]

1. Yes, I wish MAGA gave a crap how we are perceived internationally

but they think only they exist.

What's so deeply tragic and heartbreaking is that the world DID give us a second chance after the catastrophe of T's first term. And President Biden met that challenge and excelled in every way imaginable (except Gaza).

He rehabilitated our reputation to a huge degree--an extent I didn't believe was possible.

And then now...

There won't be a third chance.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. It's akin to leaving an abusive family.

Yeah, they're "family". But you don't want to stay where you know the abuse will continue, if not escalate.

And the family doesn't care that you've left.

[Scrivener7]

3. I disagree with the idea that there's "a deep seam of sentiment in the US which sees the country

as the put-upon victim of the international order ... "

There really isn't. There may be among people who have been spoon fed Fox news for decades, there may be among those who believe the felon's mouth dribbles (which, both of those are descriptors of largely the same group) , but that is definitely not a "deep seam."

It's the people currently in power, yes. But they were put in power by a minority, they weren't put in power because of that issue, and they don't represent most US citizens on that issue.

However, I do agree that we should not be trusted with a damn thing right now. Or going forward, because the re-election of a madman after his first disastrous term says nothing is safe with us.

[cachukis]

4. You are certainly on a run, Muriel. Thanks.

[C0RI0LANUS]

5. Our allies are now sanitizing intelligence before sharing it with us. And the USIC has given them new PIRs.

If the UK has a HUMINT source in the Kremlin, MI6 would be wary of sharing the intelligence the source is providing to CIA.

Before Trumpf, US and NATO PIRs were strategic CBRN threats, Russian espionage, Chinese military strength, al-Qaida, ISIS, etc. US and allied HUMINT sources, satellites, wiretaps, and SIGINT would be collecting intelligence on these issues.

Trumpf is now reshuffling the PIRs, de-emphasizing Russia and most likely accentuating Iran, China, and the drug cartels, as we saw with the proposed buyout of CIA personnel.




The Five Eyes Program of collecting SIGINT may still be intact, but I am long retired and not sure how the UK, Canada, Australia, and NZ are responding to the Trumpf regime.