not by any stretch the first person to say this but: it is darkly funny how nakedly imperialist Trump turned out to be given the lengths to which some professional opinion havers went to take his "isolationism" intellectually seriously
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There's a group of commentators who I file as being "anti anti-Trump" and they were very big on this narrative. The key to this is just opposing the mainstream criticism of Trump. The Russia probe for example they wrote as him being punished by warhawks
I never have gotten over the report from round 1 that they had to mention his name every few sentences and put his picture(s) into critical briefings to get him to read them.
I'm gonna start using the term "opinion havers" just to let you know because that really does lay bare that at the end of the day, a lot of the people we see on the "news" are just mothafuckas telling us stuff based on vibes. And they get paid a lot for it lol
“Based on vibes” is one of the better case scenarios. I think we’re way too lenient on writers who treat writing as making moves in some game rather than honest & thoughtful analysis.
Here's a photo of Raqqa, Syria after Trump gave it the "non-war" "non-interventionist" treatment, a bombing destruction so severe that Putin described it as "wiping it off the face of the earth."
Trump's opposition to foreign wars was never deeper than his general opposition to doing things that require reading more than one paragraph or interrupting his golf routine and if you ever thought otherwise it's not too late to change your mind
I think he also sees basically every war America has fought as not actually about conquest, and thinks we're suckers for it. He also likes to see his brand of imperialism as transactional and himself as the master dealmaker, but it's all still very much backstopped by violence.
I think it’s also this: he opposed wars that were unpopular and he didn’t start and win. But he clearly thinks he would start some shit and win and be popular.
Trump: I do not wish to do War in the Middle East (read about the Ba'athist party or track developments in Wahhabism). I would, however, like to buy Greenland (tweet about how Greenland should be sold to me)
Pundit: this is a foreign policy of nuance that disrupts our normal classifications
As someone else said, they need for them to be clever or secret geniuses because otherwise they would have to contend with the reality that they’ve been scammed and grifted.
The normal classifications are just sensible (good) or ideological (bad) and they're having to work very hard to justify keeping the US out of the second one.
I think he only hates the parts of imperialism that at least pretend to be win-win. Soft power, multilateralism, nation-building, &c are not okay to him because it means the country is getting “screwed”.
His opposition to foreign wars was always that there wasn't enough 'in it' for the US. Wars to defend another nation from attack or nation build are the US 'getting ripped off'. But he thinks wars of territorial expansion are good.
I think it is actually more complicated than that. He is by no means a peacemaker, but there's a reason he cannot necessarily be reduced to a warmonger.
It took me several tries to finally formulate this argument properly, but this thread does it, I think.
He tried to start a war in his first term and only failed because Iran showed restraint, and he's got his cronies out there trying to soft sell the American populace on military actions against Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Denmark.
A lot of people indexed on the fact that national security state grandees by in large dispise Trump. There are, one should not forget, worse things than neo-colonialism. There's the old crude kind.
The core of Trump's critique of US foreign policy is that it hasn't been extractive enough, and people who, whatever else one could say about them, do basically how the world works realize how self-destructive that idea is.
They do this with everything! As if there is some coherent strategy behind any of it - it’s all nonsense and boogie men and whims in service of his ego and his cushy life with money & power.
I work on the premise that everybody has an opinion and neither their pedigree nor skin color nor profession nor bank balance makes them "Incapable of Being Wrong" in my mind.
It's maddening because their words find their way back to Trump's team and are used to bolster their bad faith argument. It's like he has a free autonomous research team staffed with the kind of people who should ostensibly be opposing him.
I think both ideas are present. Trump wants basically a continent-sized Christian Nationalist America; an empire in splendid isolation from the debauchery of Europe and the masses of Asia. As a Canadian, I define our task as to poison the well as much as possible to stay outside that empire.
Trump’s policies seem like unreconstructed mercantilism - pursuing a positive balance of trade through tariffs against external markets and imperial expansionism to create a larger internal market. A 17th century vision of political economy - I’m just not sure how crypto fits in.
"Trump is an anti-imperialist/non-interventionist" is probably the Trump take that has aged the worst and ironically it was probably the most used by snarky leftists.
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https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1017/S0022381600016212?journalCode=jop
Totalitarian states tend to both have expansionist and isolationist tendencies.
Isolationism to push aside dissenting external voices.
Expansionism to feed ego/resource needs.
Truly beyond parody.
Here's a photo of Raqqa, Syria after Trump gave it the "non-war" "non-interventionist" treatment, a bombing destruction so severe that Putin described it as "wiping it off the face of the earth."
Pundit: this is a foreign policy of nuance that disrupts our normal classifications
It took me several tries to finally formulate this argument properly, but this thread does it, I think.
But yeah, sure, he's not a warmonger. 🙄
How do you "take" something that isn't yours, huh? How do you "take" Gaza WITHOUT Force?
They've all said they're not selling.
Same with Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.