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Domestic vs Foreign Bullying
Trump's foreign policy is a disaster because sovereignty is the most important thing
mister mix
March 30, 2025
This essay about Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Germans who capitulated to Hitler is making the rounds. This part struck me:
[…] Arendt tells us “it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values for another.”
Respectability is, in fact, why they were so fluidly able to swap out the old system of values. To be respectable is to be known for your adherence to the prevailing rules; any attempt to exercise independent judgment in evaluating those rules is only to risk your respectability, and much more besides. And if that is the cost, then who can do otherwise than collaborate? […]
In “Personal Responsibility,” Arendt denigrates the “widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, the none of us could be trusted or even expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same.” But that is the precisely the conviction that Brad Karp, chair of the law firm Paul Weiss, appealed to in his defense of the firm’s deal with the Trump administration. “It is very easy for commentators to judge our actions from the sidelines,” he wrote in an email to “the PW community.” “But no one in the wider world can appreciate how stressful it is to confront an executive order like this until one is directed at you.”
Pour a tiny thimble out for the massive, wealthy law firm Paul Weiss and how scary executive orders are. I mean, how can the partners of a law firm, a place full of lawyers, be expected to defend itself against a fucking piece of paper that threatens their ability to have a vacation home and send their kids to private schools? The same is true for Columbia University, CBS News and the other institutions have crumbled so easily under Trump.
Part of the reason that Trump is successful with these corroded, hollowed out institutions is because they believe that the bully will go away if they just give him what he wants. That never works with Trump, but they don’t perceive him as an existential threat, so they start inching down a slippery slope that will end in abject surrender. They just don’t know it yet — or they sense it, but don’t want to acknowledge it.
Trump has not been successful deploying the same tactics with Canada, Mexico, Denmark and Greenland, because each of those countries understands the threat. Trump plays fast and loose with their sovereignty, and there’s nothing more important than that — without it, the country ceases to exist.
So, when Kristi Noem comes to visit Mexico, she has an unhappy face when President Claudia Sheinbaum reminds her of this:
I suppose they thought that the threat of tariffs would have Claudia quaking and running to the negotiation table, but the opposite has happened. Mexico hasn’t publicly announced any retaliatory tariffs, and there’s been very little drama over the whole thing, which is on purpose. Right after that meeting, Claudia announced a day of boxing classes in Mexico and traveled to Baja to open another hospital — business as usual. Her public pronouncements on relations with the US are almost formulaic: my economic minister will be negotiating, and we expect our sovereignty to be respected. And, you’ll notice that Trump always treats her with respect.
Similarly, when new Canadian PM Mark Carney has a dramatic news conference where he announces that the old relationship with the US is over, and that Canada will be looking to Europe and Australia for military alliances, Trump finally gets it through his thick skull that bullying won’t work with Canada, either. Now, by his standards, he’s almost groveling:
"I've always liked Canada," Trump told reporters Friday on Air Force One. At another point Friday, he said he had a very good first talk with Prime Minister Mark Carney.
"I think things are going to work out very well between Canada and the United States."
Canada stood up to Trump, Trump folded in almost a comical fashion, and he got nothing from them. Less than nothing, really, because he lost more than a hundred years of good faith from our once-ally to the North.
Kay’s already written about Denmark and Greenland, but those are utter failures, too.
Sovereign countries guard their borders, and their sovereignty is the most important thing. This is so damn basic that it’s weird that I need to write it (over and over).
That’s why Trump’s bullying campaign in the US has been more successful than probably most of us would have imagined. His foreign bullying campaign is an utter failure, and if we had an honest press, we’d have endless stories portraying it as such. Instead, because institutional media values respectability and fears Trump, we’ve only had some pulled punches and euphemisms.
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