By admin 
Trump critics have long warned that “America First” means America Alone, but now the proof is flashing neon-bright before our eyes. To a degree that even critics could not have foreseen a year ago, the United States struts and frets on the world stage alone.
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There are very few, if any, leaders in the world who respect or admire America in the Age of Donald Trump—who would serve U.S. interests to the point of compromising their own, whether out of loyalty to our alliance, gratitude for our security umbrella, or fear of our sheer power.
Two events just this week have stiffened this impression: the breakdown in Trump’s trade talks with Canada and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s caution—an admonition that proved toothless—of a “D-Day” in economic warfare against Iran.
The fiasco with Canada, more than any other single event, signifies the president’s mindless exertion of American force. The latest twist in Trump’s ill-conceived war on Iran exposes just how much that potency is now diminished.
We are blessed to share a northern border—not just a peaceful border, but the world’s longest international border of any sort—with a country that possesses our values and language (for the most part) and whose people are stereotyped for their niceness. Yet Trump has denounced Canadians as “nasty,” repeatedly threatened to subsume their country as his 51st state, and now blown up this week’s trade talks—compelling its prime minister, Mark Carney (a financial technocrat who is also politically popular), to walk out—by demanding not just one-sided reductions in tariffs but a surrender of sovereignty on key issues.
Back in January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Carney set an agenda for what might be called the post–post–Cold War era by rallying the “middle powers” to join forces so they can escape the domineering clutches of the previous era’s superpowers, mainly the U.S. and Russia. Months later, during a press conference last Saturday, he was taking the first big steps out of the cage, announcing that he would soon be moving closer to the European Union—and, more importantly, showing that, contrary to the belief held by so many otherwise influential people and institutions over the past year and a half, it is possible to reject Trump’s demands—it is possible to ignore his intimidation and simply walk away.
The rest of the world’s leaders gaze at this spectacle in wonder. They might also have mused: If Trump cannot get along with such a congenial neighbor—if he launches a trade war, for no reason whatever, against his country’s second-largest trading partner ($872 billion in goods and services, topped only by Mexico)—then why should anyone negotiate with him in good faith on anything?
A telling tidbit from the New York Times’ detailed account of the trade talks: At one point, the president was asked whether he would stick to the tariff levels on the table if Canada agreed to them. Trump said no, he might alter the terms at whim. This explains Carney’s jab, at his press conference last weekend, that the United States’ signature is sometimes “written in pencil.”
There is no rhyme or reason to Trump’s decision to plunge the two nations into a trade war—and it seems to have been a deliberate move, not some inevitable impasse. It was simply a display of arbitrary power: Trump flexing his muscle to show the world he has a muscle.
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Perhaps he did this because the world is now doubting that he has much of a muscle—doubts bolstered by Bessent’s ham-fisted effort to shore up Trump’s failing war against Iran.
On Monday, Bessent announced that he would soon clobber Iran with “the single greatest financial offensive ever”—an “economic D-Day” that would “asphyxiate” the Islamic republic by severing its “economic lifeline” to the rest of the world.
This would involve imposing sanctions on not just Iran but any entity doing business with it. However, Bessent conceded, he wasn’t doing this now—only firing a “warning shot,” saying what would happen if those entities didn’t pull back. Even then, he omitted from his threat list China’s banks, which do business with Iran, and China’s teapot refineries. China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s oil exports, and Iran is still making almost as much from oil exports now as it was before the war started. Thus, China’s exemption from Operation Economic Outcast, as the D-Day policy is called, renders the sanctions meaningless.
China may be exempt in part because Trump has invited President Xi Jinping to a summit in Washington, where they will discuss “stabilizing” their relations, something a trade war would set back considerably.
Bessent acknowledged as much. Asked at his press conference why he was merely issuing a threat and not taking action, the Treasury secretary replied, “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”
And there it was: He admitted that this so-called policy is another empty threat. If Trump carried it out, the world economy would “blow up,” and not even Trump wants that to happen. All the world’s leaders understand this. They don’t need a first-class intelligence service to spell it out for them. The American Treasury secretary, who announced the policy, spelled it out himself.
In doing so, Bessent also spelled out another reason why nobody needs to take seriously anything that Trump or his Cabinet members say about anything.
And so we have a power-mad president who holds astonishingly little power, owing mainly to his misuse of very lethal power in a war that was never necessary and that he now finds impossible to win or escape.
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