"He destroyed 80 years of eager European cooperation with America"

 

In Boiling Frogs on Thursday, Nick Catoggio focused on the damage that Trump had done to NATO and the broader post-World War II legacy of cooperation between the U.S. and Europe.

He destroyed 80 years of eager European cooperation with America. For nothing. Worse than nothing, actually. He’s incentivized Western powers to form a sort of “neighborhood watch” aimed at preventing future muggings by the United States. I thought a casino would be the most profitable thing Trump would ever bankrupt, but bankrupting global trust in the world’s dominant power since 1945 in the span of a year is a catastrophe that warrants “Great Man of History” treatment. When scholars write about America’s decline, they’ll cite this episode as a hinge point. It’s genuinely one of the stupidest, self-defeating things a U.S. president has ever done.

Touching on a similar theme, Benn Steil wrote that Trump’s actions exposed a vulnerability that had always existed within the international rules-based order. Steil pointed to the various institutions established after World War II—the United Nations, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, etc.:

As extensive as this legal latticework was, it could neither cover all exigencies nor resolve contradictions. In practice, it relied on the United States to initiate action as a kind of Aristotelian uncaused cause, godlike from outside the system, while generally forgoing the type of nakedly self-interested behavior that would openly deny the order’s authority. By historical standards, the project was astoundingly successful—not in that all nations conformed, since the United States itself at times strayed willfully and radically, but in that virtually all nations felt compelled to align themselves with it, to argue for alternative understandings of it, or to justify their deviations from it.

Meanwhile, Scott Lincicome in Capitalism explored how Trump’s (revoked) tariff threat highlights a bigger problem on the home front: We have an “emergency” emergency. Trump has cited the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to justify unilateral tariffs throughout the first year of his second term, and Scott notes “there’s simply no plausible case for the situation in the Arctic to constitute a ‘national emergency.’” He predicts that the threats over Greenland will motivate countries to seek trade opportunities with nations besides the U.S. Thank you for reading. If you are in the path of the huge winter storm that is supposed to hit this weekend, stay safe and watch out for exploding trees.    -Dispatch Weekly