How Trump’s “bad manners undermine his geopolitics”

On a fundamental level, politics is a system of relationships and power. Donald Trump, who is America’s first elected autocrat, promised to disrupt and smash those relationships and norms in service to his revolutionary project to “Make America Great Again.”

Domestically, Trump has launched a shock and awe campaign against America’s democracy, its institutions, the Constitution, and the rule of law. The relationships, norms, and consensus that has structured American politics and society since the 1940s and the New Deal through the 1960s and the Great Society and the civil rights movement(s) to the Age of Trump are being tested and broken.

Internationally, for 80 years, the United States has been the leader of “the free world” and a global coalition and system of alliances and partnerships that emerged with the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The centerpiece of the American-led international order is the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), one of the most successful organizations in modern world history.

Trump’s shock and awe campaign is global. He has been president for seven weeks and he is attempting to turn, quite literally, the international order upside down.

In a meeting last Friday at the White House, Trump tried to publicly humiliate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by basically demanding that he beg for continued American assistance in that country’s freedom struggle against Russian aggression.

At The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner condemns Trump’s treatment of Zelenskyy as an act of political thuggery:

What actually occurred, of course, was that Trump and his henchmen made Zelensky a Mafia-style offer he couldn’t refuse. Give the U.S. rights to Ukraine’s minerals, and maybe the U.S. would guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty, but maybe not. Zelensky was lured to Washington on the pretense that he was coming to negotiate the final details.

But that was a ruse. Instead, Trump put Zelensky in front of the cameras, the better to humiliate him. (When were delicate agreements ever negotiated in front of the media?) When Zelensky wouldn’t play, Trump and Vance accused him of disrespect.

As an earlier Don put it: “Now you come and say, ‘Don Corleone, give me justice.’ But you don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship.”

Does the current Don appreciate who he is channeling? Maybe so.

In her newsletter “Letters From an American”, historian Heather Cox Richardson located Friday’s events in the larger context of the Age of Trump and its assault on normalcy:

John Simpson of the BBC noted recently that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change.” Seven weeks in, he suggested, 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”…

The abandonment of democratic principles and the democratic institutions the U.S. helped to create is isolating the United States from nations that have been our allies, partners, and friends.

On Monday, Trump announced that military aid for Ukraine will be “temporarily” suspended. This is a way to force Ukraine to negotiate from a position of weakness with Russia.

At the Atlantic, David Frum plainly states the obvious: “…Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it’s necessary to face it.”

Many political experts are concerned that Trump’s dressing down of Zelenskyy and growing embrace and admiration of Putin and other autocrats signals how Trump may go so far as to withdraw the United States from NATO. Until very recently, such an action was deemed unimaginable by the “conventional wisdom.” Trump, like other authoritarian populists and demagogues, has no use for the “conventional wisdom” and other norms. Such leaders bend reality to fit their needs and wants.

In an attempt to gain some perspective on these disorienting and surreal events and a world that feels like it is increasingly teetering on the edge of war and other armed conflicts and general chaos, I recently spoke with Robert D. Kaplan. He is the bestselling author of 23 books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including “The Loom of Time,” “The Good American,” “The Revenge of Geography,” “The Coming Anarchy” and “Balkan Ghosts.” His new book is “Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis.” Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic for many years, and is a former member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. 

Donald Trump recently “hosted” a White House meeting with Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. To describe what transpired as a disaster for global democracy and America’s leadership role in the world would be a great understatement. What did you see?

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat correctly labeled President Donald Trump as a leader who strips away pretenses. That was on full display when Trump and Vice President JD Vance humiliated Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the media during an Oval Office meeting. But as Douthat knows, some pretense is always necessary to grease the wheels of personal relations, especially of diplomacy. Just imagine how George H. W. Bush and James Baker, or to be bipartisan, how Bill Clinton and Al Gore would have handled such a meeting. They would have been all smiles before the television cameras, but then in private, would have administered to Zelenskyy some very tough love, all the while remaining respectful.

The Friday meeting demonstrated the Full Trump, a leader whose basic conception of geopolitics is defensible, but whose manners are deplorable. And the bad manners undermine his geopolitics. I would go further: the bad manners of this administration are indications of the decadence and decline of the West in general.

As for Zelensky’s dark outfit, which Trump felt the need to criticize as being “disrespectful,” it signifies that he leads a nation at war.

When we talk about a “global order” what do we mean?

The global order is an aspirational term. It doesn’t really exist. Basic order in each region is maintained by a balance of military and economic power. A rules-based order aspires to maintain peace through rules and negotiation. Like the American superpower or not, when it existed during the heyday of the postwar world it did not do a bad job in maintaining a semblance of order.

Your new book is “Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis.” Please elaborate on this “waste land.”

Waste Land is the title of my new book, which is based on the great modernist poem by T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” published in 1922. It is a poem of abstract horror that deals in cultural and political fragmentation. I think it’s bleak yet hopeful landscape captures well the turmoil of our world. Anarchy is the opposite of hierarchy. Without some form of hierarchy in our political and social relations, there is no order. And without order, there can be no freedom. That’s why we must always fear anarchy.

Are we experiencing a global paradigm shift? Is it that dramatic and not incremental?

Yes, we are experiencing a paradigm shift, from a postwar world defined by the political and military arrangements that followed World War II and which continued for some decades after the end of the Cold War. That paradigm featured a grand alliance between the United States and Europe. We may now be entering an era of regional hegemons: the United States, China, and Russia, in which Europe will be challenged by Russia without the United States providing the level of defense it used to.

Many experts on history, foreign affairs, international relations, military affairs, and politics more broadly are of the mind that the United States increasingly resembles Germany before its democracy fell in the early 1930s. Your thoughts?

The Weimar Republic, as I argue in my new book, was a far-flung world of permanent crisis, where little got resolved, just like our world today. The Weimar Republic ended with Hitler in power. Such a thing will not happen in our world, which is too big for a single sinister dictator. Weimar almost succeeded. It did not have to end the way it did. There was much hope in Weimar, as there still is in our world today. History is driven not only by vast impersonal forces like geography and economics but also by contingency, that is, the individual actions of men and women. That means moral responsibility. We must always keep that in mind.

How would you assess the relationship between the United States and NATO at present?

The relationship between the United States and NATO is worse than at any time since NATO was founded following World War II.

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After the Cold War ended, quite a few intellectuals assumed that NATO would disband. But it didn’t, because it was a military alliance of many of the world’s richest and most educated countries with incredible organization and protocols built up over decades. You don’t throw such a thing overboard. It’s too valuable. Yet that is what the Trump administration is, in effect, seeking to do. It’s madness. Allies allow you to project power while husbanding your own resources. And a venerable allied military organization is the best of all worlds. NATO could come in very handy as a deterrent against Russia in the coming months and years, since any peace between Russia and Ukraine is going to be very tenuous and unstable. We are facing the most unstable period in European history since 1945, and NATO is the ultimate stabilizer.

If the world is teetering on a return of great power conflicts, how do the multinationals, the megacorporations, and other powerful and extremely wealthy and influential forces – who have their own private militaries or can hire them easily — play in the story?

Never has there been such a collusion of extreme wealth and political power as exists now in the Trump Administration. The great, late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote that what ultimately makes America great is not its people or its geography, but its institutions, with their separation of powers. This collusion of wealth and power is now undermining the independence of regulatory agencies, and thus of our institutions. For decades going forward, historians will focus on the photo at Trump’s second inauguration, with his family surrounded by the tech moguls: wealth and power, a picture is worth a thousand words.

I believe in real security, which means taking care of the domestic front first. This involves such things as expanding social democracy and protecting the country’s manufacturing and industrial base. Part of this real security also means nurturing and protecting pluralism and multiracial democracy so that the American Dream is real on both sides of the color line, which makes America stronger and more prosperous. As I see it, real security also means ensuring that the United States is the most powerful nation on the planet and can protect its interests and project power abroad — not just militarily — in a way that deters the rise of peer competitors and conflict. Is that an obsolete view?

What you are describing is basically the grand strategy of the United States for decades now. The argument has been over how best to achieve it. The American military has historically been the best in the world because it draws its officer corps, and particularly its NCOs (noncommissioned officers), from all classes and races of the country. A fairer society will also be the most militarily dynamic. So, there is no contradiction between a more liberal society at home and a more powerful country abroad. The two go together. And we will need both elements to navigate a more unstable, bleaker, anarchic world.

Public opinion polls and other research have consistently shown that the average American is very ignorant about global politics. Given your warnings about a “waste land” with its anarchy and chaos, how would this impact the average American when they are so preoccupied with basics such as inflation and the cost of eggs?

The world is more tightly wound and claustrophobic than ever. For example, a war in the Pacific would adversely affect the retirement accounts of all Americans, as it would involve the world’s largest economies in high-tech conflict. No American can afford to turn their head away from the outside world right now.