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Make America … Alone?
Is the free world lost without America, or is America lost without the free world? We are looking for your answers today.
It’s a question no one thought about when Donald Trump assumed office just 38 days ago.
Though he promised to be a transformative, “drain the swamp,” America First leader, Trump 2.0 is exponentially more radical and less restrained than his first term as the 45th president.
In less than five weeks, Trump has upended the postwar world order, forcing America’s longtime allies to redraw their maps, literally in the case of the Gulf of Mexico/America and strategically in every other way. It is a new world.
To Trump supporters, he is simply fulfilling his campaign promise of delivering deep change to the “deep state.” After all, with a clean sweep of the presidency, Congress, and the popular vote, he has a genuine mandate — one that is strengthened by a right-leaning majority on the Supreme Court. Cue Elon Musk’s DOGE chain saw.
But let’s pause for a moment and ask what exactly was included in the promise to make America great again:
- Tax cuts? Those are coming as he just won a big victory in the House of Representatives on that.
- Cutting the size of government? Sure. Finding inefficiencies matters.
- Border security and cutting down on illegal immigration? That has already started, and he has support on that too from a wide array of voters.
- Ending the war in Ukraine? Yes. Who would be against that in principle?
But the details of these things matter. You can treat a broken foot by amputating the whole leg with a chain saw, but then you can’t walk. In less than 40 days of mass policy amputations, you might start getting the sense that the treatment is already worse than the disease.
For example, do Republican voters, who wanted a more isolationist foreign policy, really want the US to take over the Gaza Strip? What part of the MAGA agenda saw that one coming?
Do they want to take over Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal too? Imperial land grabs were never part of Trump’s campaign promises.
What about threatening to destroy Canada’s economy in a trade war? Was that part of the promise? Because that’s a lot different from negotiating better trade deals with friends.
Trump is threatening to slap a 25% tariff on all EU goods because he argues, wrongly, that the EU was created in order to “screw the United States.” It was not. The EU was formed out of a desire for stability on a continent that had bled through two world wars. Do Trump supporters really think Russia is a better ally than the European Union?
What about the war in Afghanistan? Do MAGA supporters genuinely want US troops to go back to Afghanistan and take over the Bagram Air Base as the president promised on Wednesday? “We are going to keep Bagram,” he announced. “We are going to keep a small force on Bagram.” A small force? How small? Trump believes Bagram has strategic importance as a forward operating base near China and its nuclear weapons. He also wants to take back the over $7 billion worth of military equipment that the Biden administration left there in 2021. How will he do all this? With another invasion of Afghanistan?
Maybe Republican voters believed Trump would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, but did that include siding with Russia, blaming Ukraine for starting the conflict, and calling President Volodymyr Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin, a dictator?
This past week at the UN, the US sided with Russia, Belarus, and North Korea against a resolution to mark the third anniversary of the Russian invasion. “This war is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” Trump said as he moved the US further away from its longtime allies. “We have a big, beautiful ocean as separation.”
Separation. That is the watchword of the moment. The Trump revolution that is meant to Make America Great Again is making America Alone and for the very first time.
The costs of reversing 80 years of US foreign and domestic policy are still being calculated, but here is one measure: A recent Leger poll found that more than a quarter of Canadians, 27%, now regard the US as the “enemy.” The enemy. Meanwhile, 56% of Americans view Canada as an ally, while only 30% of Canadians see the US as an ally.
These are remarkable pieces of data, especially for countries that fought side by side in Afghanistan, Korea, and two world wars and worked together on countless peacekeeping missions.
To its closest allies, the US is giving away its reputation as the “indispensable nation” and risks becoming an indefensible nation.
Yesterday, Trump announced his new “gold card” idea targeted at “wealthy people” around the world. “We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship," he said. Would he welcome Russian oligarchs to the program? There was no hesitation. “Yeah, possibly,” he said with a smile. “Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”
If you can afford the $5 million gold card, you are nice enough for America these days, even if you are a Russian thug.
Russia and China are cheering on this new alignment because it comes at a cheap price. Both are poised to test the limits of a world without US guardrails, a world where there is no global cop on the beat to enforce the rule of law. Watch to see how China moves to expand its influence in the South China Sea, around Japan and the Philippines, and, of course, Taiwan. Russia is already clamoring to digest 20% of Ukraine, with Trump’s blessing. Does anyone think that’s enough to satisfy Putin’s imperialist appetite?
What will this mean for global trade, where US enforcement of secure shipping lanes has been the foundational insurance policy of globalization? It is why you can buy such cheap goods from around the world at places like Costco. That backstopping of sea-lane security is now as up for grabs as the Panama Canal. As Ian Bremmer says, this is now the law of the jungle.
All these are deeply polarizing questions, and coming at such a pace that people may take refuge in the certainty of partisanship to avoid the hard work of answering them.
So I want to ask you for your thoughts. Do you think the US is still a trusted ally to its longtime friends in democracies around the world? Do you consider the US an ally to its fellow NATO members, an enemy, or just neutral?
We would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please email us here.
What do Donald Trump, Bad Bunny, and the Panama Canal have in common?
Donald Trump wants to take back the Panama Canal, and Bad Bunny’s new album "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS" is the most streamed record in the world right now. What do these two things have to do with each other?
More than you’d think. That’s because reggaetón, the genre Bad Bunny is best known for, actually has its origins on the the banks of the Panama Canal.
And American foreign policy played a key part in that story.
When the Americans built the canal in the years before World War I, they brought in thousands of workers from across the West Indies, but especially Jamaica, to do the hard labor. Afterward, those laborers were permitted to live and work in the Canal Zone, a strip of US sovereign territory inside Panama that flanked the canal, ensuring US control over the waterway.
The Panamanians didn’t love this arrangement. Many felt the original canal treaties were illegitimate, and resentment at the US presence grew. In 1964, when the US stopped students from flying a Panamanian flag in the Canal Zone, a mass riot left four American soldiers and 22 Panamanian police officers dead. The Soviet Union blasted Washington’s “colonizing policy.” Fidel Castro decried “Yankee imperialism.”
In 1977, US President Jimmy Carter decided to give the canal to Panama. Carter thought this would improve America’s relations with Latin America, and avoid a more costly crisis around the Canal itself.
“Fairness, not force, should lie at the heart of our dealings with the rest of the world,” he said at the time.
Carter’s plan was unpopular at home. The stiffest opposition came from a telegenic young California governor named Ronald Reagan. But Carter’s dogged lobbying – and some help from John Wayne, whose first wife was Panamanian – helped to win narrow passage of the handover treaties. The canal itself wouldn't be given to Panama until 1999, but the controversial canal zone was dissolved almost immediately, in 1979.
And that’s where the music comes back into the story. Many of the Jamaicans and West Indians living in the Canal Zone moved to nearby Panama City. And when they did, they brought with them the popular new sound coming out of Jamaica at the time – “dancehall,” a rawer, streetier, more club-oriented successor to the reggae of the 1970s.
It wasn’t long before dancehall was reinterpreted in Spanish, becoming a new genre called Reggae en Español, a unique mashup made by the West Indians of the Canal Zone and Panama’s own Afro-Panamanian communities.
But we still aren’t in Puerto Rico yet! Right. We’re getting there.
In 1985, one of the pioneers of the Panamanian scene, known as El General, moved to New York. There he introduced the sound to the city’s huge Puerto Rican diaspora, who helped popularize it back on the island where, in turn, local artists brought hip-hop and Puerto Rican traditional styles into a musical mix that would soon go from the streets of Panama and Puerto Rico to the whole globe.
The first documented use of the term reggaeton dates from this period, when a young Daddy Yankee (whose song “Gasolina” would become the first global reggaeton hit in 2004) used it in a freestyle on an early 1990s mixtape. And just a few years after that, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico.
You now know young Benito as "Bad Bunny."
So why does Trump want the canal back anyway? He thinks it was a “mistake” to give up a canal that handles more than 5% of global trade. As Trump sees it, the US is locked in a zero-sum economic competition with China, and controlling that canal is critical, whether the Panamanians like it or not.
This is the inverse of Carter’s formulation – Trump's world is one where force is squarely at the center of America’s dealings with both friends and foes.
Trump's view echoes older ideas about America’s natural right to expand and dominate the Western Hemisphere. His America will, he says, be one that “expands our territory ... and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” as he pledged in his inaugural address.
But do you know what the last major US territorial expansion in Latin America was? It was the takeover, in 1898, of Puerto Rico, as a result of the Spanish-American war. The island has been, in effect, a colony of the US ever since.
And to come full circle here, the negative impacts of that 127-year relationship – political repression, exploitative neglect, mass emigration, and creeping gentrification – are all major themes of … Bad Bunny’s new album.
If you want to learn more about this story – including the complicated issues of class, gender, and race that are part of reggaeton’s evolution – check out the podcast “LOUD,” a history narrated by Ivy Queen, one of the pioneering women of the genre.
What kind of foreign policy do Americans want?
What role do US voters want Washington to play on the global stage?
That’s the basic question posed by a new survey from the Eurasia Group Foundation, a public education nonprofit founded by Ian Bremmer that is separate from Eurasia Group, our parent company.
The report is called “Views of US Foreign Policy in a Fragmented World,” written by Mark Hannah, Lucas Robinson, and Zuri Linetsky.
The Foundation surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 voting-age Americans for their opinions on US foreign policy. Here are a few of the more provocative findings that highlight differences among Americans as we move toward the 2024 presidential election.
The most important finding is that respondents who identify as Independents agree more often with Republicans than with Democrats on most foreign-policy questions included in the survey.
- Americans approved of the US response to Russia’s war in Ukraine by a margin of 43% to 26%. About a third hold a neutral opinion. But almost twice as many Democrats support America’s response to the war as Republicans or Independents.
- A clear majority of all respondents (58%) said the United States should push for a negotiated settlement in the war in Ukraine, but Democrats are much more supportive of Ukraine’s NATO ambitions than Republicans or Independents — 84% vs. 64% and 62%.
- Republicans and Independents are about twice as likely as Democrats to list a potential war with China among the top three threats facing the US — 37% and 33% vs. 18%. It’s ranked in the top two threats among Republicans and in the bottom two among Democrats.
- Republicans (33%-23%) and Independents (37%-32%) are more likely to want to decrease US engagement in organizations like the UN or NATO. Democrats (37% to 9%) are four times as likely to want to increase it.
There is one area where Independents fall between those aligned with the two big parties.
The priority national security topics for Democrats are human rights and climate change. For Republicans, it’s immigration and defense policy. For Independents, it’s immigration and human rights.
There are two major questions where Independents aligned more closely with Democrats.
- Twice as many Independents and Democrats support a decrease in the defense budget, rather than an increase. Republicans are about evenly split.
- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all tilt toward intervention in a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan — but Republicans are 40% more likely than Democrats or Independents to “strongly support” a military operation.
There are also several differences in foreign-policy views between racial and age groups in the report. The full document is worth a read.
An Unstable World with Senator Chris Coons
This week Ian talks trade wars and TPP. Then he sits down with U.S. Senator Chris Coons to discuss the politics of instability around the world and in Washington, DC. And of course, we've got your Puppet Regime.