Personalist Foreign Policy

 Trump is an 80 year old man who spent his whole life running a closely held company where he made personal relationships the key to his branding exercises that made him his money. As President, he has basically extended that worldview to his foreign policy. "Are you my 'friend' and can we work together in a way that will ultimately benefit me?" He is not capable of learning a new trick.

This led him to negotiate the temporary cease fire in Gaza that has - unsurprisingly - already broken down. His relationship with the Gulf States allowed him to pressure Hamas to give up the hostages, but Hamas is not ready to cede Israel's right to exist or certainly to rule Gaza and Israel still wants to kill every last member of Hamas. Since Trump has no personalist relationship with Hamas, there is no way to keep them in line and Israel won't let Hamas sneeze without bombing a refugee camp. 

The credulity with which the news media treated this "peace deal" was disgusting.

Now, we have Martin Longman laying out the same dynamic in the Caribbean. As he notes, Trump seems to be inching us towards war with Venezuela based on trumped up (ahem) charges that Maduro is in league with Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan narco-gang. At the same time, it seems pretty clear that Trump is fine with the actual close relationship that his friend Bukele has with the Salvadoran narco-gang MS13. 

It doesn't matter which gang is more deadly or more responsible for drug trafficking. All of that is noise. What matters is that Bukele has cultivated Trump and Maduro hasn't (or more likely can't). You can also see this dynamic with the bailout for Javier Milei. 

Put another way: The United States no longer conducts foreign policy on the basis of principles or long term strategic needs; it conducts foreign policy based on how well a foreign head of state kisses Trump's diapered ass. This presents real problems for global stability. We have seen this for quite some time with Trump's treatment of Ukraine. Zelensky has finally learned to kiss Trump's ass, and that has led to Trump softening his hardline towards Kyiv, but we should be supporting Ukraine because it is a fledgling democracy under assault by an imperial autocratic regime.

Principles matter, because they are fixed and predictable. Trump has no principles beyond personal aggrandizement, so America has no principles beyond what he requires from any given moment or circumstance.

The protests yesterday were great. There was a lot of sentiment about how it was only about 9 months of this shit. The list of degradations by Trump is very, very long. We are already seeing some of his policies create real problems - killing renewable and higher electricity prices; tariffs and deportations leading to inflation; trade wars leading to a collapse in American agricultural exports; personal vindictiveness weaponizing the Justice department against his critics; rampant corruption - both within his family and his administration; forcing media and other conglomerates to kiss the ring or suffer the consequences. The list seems endless.

The reason 7,000,000 Americans took to the streets yesterday (and judging by the reaction of passing cars, many millions more supported them) is that we are seeing the real time effects of having a fucking moron make economic policy. We are seeing what happens when a petty little tyrant has unconstrained access to power.

We haven't yet seen how this personalist foreign policy will play out. There's always a lag with these things as old systems slowly change.

I'm willing to bet that before long, we will blunder into a shooting war.