Welcome to Home & Away. The economic news this week was troubling. President Trump announced on Monday that he was following through on his threat to impose tariffs on imports from this country’s three largest trading partners, an ill-advised war of choice if there ever was one. He initially put in place a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, as well as another ten percent tariff on Chinese goods (on top of the ten percent he already imposed on China just weeks ago).
The problem, of course, is that tariffs are a blunt and inefficient tool. Yes, they will raise some revenue for the government, but this will be more than offset by the likelihood that they will increase inflationary pressures, act as a drag on economic growth, cost more jobs than they protect, and undermine not just economic but also political and security relationships with trading partners, many of whom, by design, are critical friends and allies. The optimist in me predicts that the president, who has little stomach for prolonged bad news, especially when it comes to the stock market, will eventually declare victory and ease at least some of the tariffs. We saw the beginnings of this on Wednesday and Thursday, but there remains a long and expensive way to go. Markets and CEOs tend to dislike uncertainty, and that is what Trump has introduced in abundance.
The broader point is that Donald Trump inherited an economy in good shape: growth near 3 percent, modest inflation, high employment. But he just couldn’t leave well enough alone. So now we have the prospect of negative growth, renewed inflation, and higher unemployment. It all adds up to an economic turnaround to be sure, but in the wrong direction.
Paddle Ball
Tuesday night’s address to a joint session of Congress was quintessential Trump. He dominated the room, reveling in being a showman. But the 100-minute exercise in boasting and bashing was much too long (in fact, the longest on record), reinforcing the concern that there is no one in a position to rein him in. Many of the assertions were anything but facts, which is good news for fact-checkers, one group of Americans likely to keep their jobs for the next four years.
The speech was filled with any number of anecdotes of wasteful spending. Some deserved mention, others were demonstrably false. It is not all that hard to look at a $68 billion foreign assistance budget and find a relatively small number of questionable programs which, combined, total some hundreds of millions of dollars. Cherry-picking to argue any point is rarely difficult. But think about it. That all adds up to less than one or two percent of the total effort, which is already only about one percent of federal spending. How many companies could claim to have a rate of waste or stupidity that low? Not too many, I would bet. And more importantly, such waste could have been effectively rooted out through an audit rather than by gutting the entire agency and stopping almost all that it does. Lives will be lost to disease and hunger as a result. My hunch is that many of the president’s religious supporters would not be happy with this. Someone might let them know.
One more thing. To criticize the president for his excess is not to praise the Democrats. They appeared feckless and as small as the paddles many were holding. Representative Al Green’s interruption at the outset, shouting and waving his cane at Trump, reinforced the image of Democrats as the party of disorder, even though Republicans have had their share of outbursts at these events. It might have been better for Democrats not to attend at all, as this was not a State of the Union…or to stand and applaud when Trump said something they should support, be it a secure southern border or Americans whose sacrifice deserves recognition. Overall, the Democrats’ disjointed and ineffective response highlights the party’s continued struggle to define itself and to mount an effective opposition to Trump.
A Separate Peace
It has only been a week since the now-infamous Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s involvement seemed limited to sinking into his suit and the couch.) My take on the meeting can be found here. But a lot has happened since.
The White House followed up what many saw as an ambush by freezing the flow of already approved military aid intended for Ukraine, arguably another case of unconstitutional impoundment. It then doubled down by pausing intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is talking about its readiness to enter a new phase in ties with Russia, whom you’d never know was the country that launched this aggressive war of choice. If all this looks to be a concerted effort to squeeze Ukraine into accepting a flawed ceasefire, that’s because it is.
Zelenskyy has done his best to patch things up, at least to the extent any repair is possible. He didn’t quite apologize for the meeting (not that he should have), but he did describe it as “regrettable.” He also reiterated his readiness to close the deal on minerals that was supposed to be signed as part of his visit last Friday as well as his desire for peace. He seems to have dropped, for the moment, his insistence that any ceasefire include security assurances. This may prove smart, as it puts the onus on Putin to support a ceasefire or risk being blamed for ongoing war. Once a ceasefire takes hold, Ukraine could revisit the issue of security assurances and deterrent capabilities with the United States and its European partners. Next week’s planned talks between American and Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia offer an opportunity to find at least some common ground.
Trump, for his part, declared he has received strong signals that Russia is ready for peace even though what Russian officials are saying and Russia is doing on the battlefield suggests otherwise. At this juncture, I worry that the U.S. president will support Russia even though its peace terms are punitive…and blame Ukraine for resisting a flawed, likely temporary peace. Whatever ultimately happens, I find it hard to imagine this president supporting a new tranche of military aid for Ukraine, much less the country’s membership in NATO. Ukraine will be on its own with only Europe and a few others to turn to.
Shell-Shocked
Make no mistake, the damage done not just to Ukraine but also to all of Europe and the United States is considerable. And to be clear, the damage reflects not only last Friday’s meeting but also Vance’s hostile Munich speech, Defense Secretary Hegseth’s comments in Brussels, Elon Musk’s AfD endorsement, the various tariffs, and the near-uncritical embrace of Russia. The United States is correctly seen as having turned away from Europe and the most successful alliance in the history of the world. Making it worse is that the United States appears to have turned toward Vladimir Putin.
The United States does not need to trigger the so-called denunciation clause of NATO’s Washington Treaty and give notice of its intent to leave the alliance in a year’s time for the pact to become a shell of its former self. It already is. No European government can assume that Article 5 (which considers an attack on any member of NATO an attack on all, committing members of the alliance to assist the attacked ally) remains operational. Charles de Gaulle never believed that the United States would be willing to sacrifice New York for Paris in the nuclear age. I expect Emmanuel Macron, with good reason, no longer believes that the United States can be counted on to defend France—much less Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania—if Putin trains his guns on them. He said as much Wednesday night, publicly warning, “I want to believe that the U.S. will stand by our side, but we have to be ready for that not to be the case.”
Europe is scrambling to adjust to this new strategic reality. The British prime minister is advocating for establishing a peacekeeping force consisting of armed forces from several European and Commonwealth countries (a “coalition of the willing”) to buttress a potential ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Macron is signaling his willingness to open conversations about making France’s nuclear force something its European partners could depend on, in effect substituting French extended deterrence for what the United States has provided for decades. The soon-to-be German chancellor expressed his openness to the idea. And the two parties likely to form the next German government, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, are committing to raising defense spending and removing the so-called debt brake (or Schuldenbremse) that, for historic reasons related to hyperinflation during the Weimar Era, caps government borrowing at a level that now all but prevents Germany from doing what is necessary to stand up its own defense.
On one level, these European initiatives are welcome. But some caveats. Europe simply doesn’t have the military or intelligence capabilities to substitute for the United States in Ukraine in the near or mid-term. It is one thing to buttress a ceasefire but achieving one has become more difficult.
More broadly, changes in the trans-Atlantic security arrangements should have been promoted in a consensual, gradual way by previous U.S. administrations as well as this one rather than in an abrupt, haphazard fashion. Today, it is not quite accurate to speak of European defense efforts when much of what exists are uncoordinated national efforts. Time will be needed to have any chance of getting this right. But time is what we don’t have given radical changes to U.S. policy and Russian imperial ambitions.
The genius of NATO is that over eight decades it has (to paraphrase the immortal words of Lord Ismay, its first secretary general) “kept the Russians out, the Americans, in, and the Germans down.” I am not concerned with Germany again rising up and threatening Europe, but I am worried about keeping the Russians at bay with the United States increasingly throwing its weight around the Western hemisphere while absenting itself from Europe. The problem is that the 47th president has a penchant for dismantling more than he does for either sustaining or building. As a result, we are abandoning the world order that has largely kept the peace for eighty years in favor of something unknown. Rarely has so much ridden on choices that have not been thought through.
As always, some links to click on. And feel free to share Home & Away.
Richard Haass in the news
Tuesday, March 4: NPR All Things Considered (How Trump's Foreign Policy Is Reshaping the World Order)
Tuesday, March 4: Quoted in the Washington Post (Trump Inflicts Global ‘Shock Therapy’ for Uncertain Ends)
Check out The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens