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I think that the US has sound strategic reasons to supply Ukraine, and that these are orthogonal to how much Zelenskyy is willing to grovel before Trump's throne. I do not think Zelenskyy disrespected Trump in a way that would have harmed him. I can not imagine an opinion piece by the (very pro-Ukraine) liberal media about how Trump was letting Zelenskyy walk all over him by tolerating him wearing his trademark army fatigues.
A typical rational actor does not like to grovel. Making the other party grovel will lower their utility function, so in turn their more tangible demands will be higher. If one buys a house only if the seller is willing to give a blowjob as part of the deal, it seems very likely that one will severely overpay for the house.
Again, there is an optimal amount of aid the US should be willing to give to Ukraine for strategic reasons, and likely other amounts will be less effective.
I do not think India and Pakistan were that keen on a big nuclear war. The US (which is kinda allied to both) probably helped, but I think this is something which the Biden administration would have done just as well.
Regarding Hamas, his strategy was basically to give Nethanyahu the card blanche. This (questionable) victory is Bibi's, not his.
I remain skeptical if Trump really manages to get China and India to forgo cheap Russian fossil fuels. In general, with Trump, the winning move seems to tell him "yes", and continue as you did. Chances are he will either have another good phone call with Putin or a bad phone call with Zelenskyy and go back to not caring about Russian oil exports.
It's more about bargaining position and how much respect is due to Zelensky. He's a debtor here to beg after his nation's corrupt bullshit caused us (Trump) internal problems; letting him show up in the outfit of a heroic frontline operator sets a very different tone for the discussion.
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I don't think it is about groveling. In the past countries like Germany or Canada took USA for granted and even outright mocked Trump when he gave his speech as in this example. I am not even US citizen but I do think that other NATO members really held their noses too high, it was as if they were entitled to everything that USA provides either trade or security wise in exchange of mockery and disrespect. I think demanding respect was absolutely in order.
Paradoxically Euros or other western countries do not have problem groveling before Xi Jinping or Saudis or even before Iranian dictators. But suddenly they are too good to show some respect to USA just because they think they can farm internal US political dispute.
I think the actual motivation was that the European leaders understood that Trump doesn't have any actual, real power over the military industrial complex which decides these things. Trump doesn't have the ability to stop the MIC (hell, they don't even tell him the truth about military operations) so who cares what he thinks? Zelensky knew that no matter what he did the flow of materiel was completely outside Trump's control.
This is conspiracy level thinking. When you say Trump doesn't have "power over" the MIC, what do you mean?
Budgets, which pretty much everything is down stream of, are firmly the responsibility of congress.
Military operations, short of a declaration of war, are 100% an executive branch function with WIDE latitude. Remember, the President is the commander in Chief.
But I feel like what you're trying to hint at is a shady world of lobbyists and backroom deals and executives at Lockheed etc. If this is what you mean a) say it and b) provide some evidence. Because the very, very sad truth of the matter is that most of the companies within the "military industrial complex" are welfare-parasite companies that are reflections of growth (or decline) in Congressional Budgets. The most recent CEO of Raytheon was literally trained as an accountant. These people aren't out there moving and shaking, they're inside (indoor kids) who can stomach the tedium of working budgetary processes and Pentagon PPBE processes over decades. In terms of FMS (Foreign Military Sales), that process is mostly about convincing the State Department that you aren't exporting anything particularly advantageous (the US doesn't let the really good stuff go overseas), and doing all of the paperwork that says your sales team wasn't trying to bribe the foreign government*.
On the Ukraine specific issue, it's hilarious to think that the big players in the MIC really care about arms deals there. Ukraine is dead fucking broke. The US assistance to them, although not insignificant, is not the prize pie for MIC. They're after the multi-decade long domestic deals. The F-35 program, over its entire lifetime, will bring in revenue for Lockheed in excess of $1 trillion. The ground based updates to the Nuclear Triad will get Northrop half a trillion. According to the State Department from this March total US assistance to Ukraine has been about $70bn all in from the start of the war. But wait! that's mostly direct transfers of equipment - i.e. things that the US already purchased (in budgets!) years prior. It's not like that was a $70bn check to Ukraine or even $70bn of new military purchases.
That number is less than $5bn (same link). That's the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) number. That is the "help Ukraine pay for stuff" budget. $5bn isn't anything to sneeze at but you have to think - like the MIC does - in terms of ROI and opportunity cost. Do I, Lockheed / Northrop / Raytheon / General Dynamics et al., really care want to do all of the extra and politically fraught work of supplying to Ukraine for a share of $5bn when I can just make more patriot missiles for the Army at home and collect $2.7 bn dollars.
There are several good reasons to not support supporting Ukraine. There's a bunch of threads here on that topic. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing this idea that the MIC "loves war" because it means sales go up and that, furthermore, they're so gifted as to be able to manipulate a whole host of world leaders.
That's not the case. The MIC's wet dream are a bunch of hyper expensive programs, run mostly domestically, that go nowhere. Government IT, for instance, is, annually, on the order of $100 bn. Government IT is also were money goes to commit suicide because it's all horrific mismanagement of dated computer systems that provide no value to the taxpayer but are mandated by Congressional budgets. See where we end back up at? Budgets. American, Congressionally approved budgets. That's where the MIC spends most of its energy. Budgets. And it isn't sexy hollywood lobbying. There are no steak dinners, cigars, and cognac with Senators who give you a wink and a nod so long as you donate to their campaign. No, it's a lot of repetitive zoom calls and in person meetings with the Budgeteers at the Pentagon and staff on Capitol Hill and then hoping that the paperwork shuffle ends up with a single number next to your Program Element Number going up.
On FMS bribery, I should do an effort post but it would be too specific to not be doxx bait. The long and short of it is that every American arms company knows that for close to all foreign governments, bribery is required for a deal to go through. For the Europeans its a lot of soft bribery - fancy dinners, sales meetings at resorts, whatever. All of this can actually get written off totally legally. For those countries with less of a Western sensibility, however, bags of cash, coke, and hookers are often part of the deal. With the State Department going over everything with a fine toothed comb, however, no American firm is going to take a chance. What exists, then, is an actual shadowy network of lawyers and "consultants" based out of places like Switzerland, Barbados, and the like who provide "advisory" services to the American firms, for a fee, and then act as a liaison to the foreign government.
You might think "oh, so it's just pass through bribery!" But, no. There's actually a tremendous amount of risk here. The American firm can't simply say to a foreign government "Hey, here's a bunch of money to help us get the contract. But, it's going to come from Shady-Uncle-Hans over here." That's transparent. The American firms have to have real not just plausible deniability of knowledge of any illegal activities. So, they hire these "consultants" and the consultants go, of their own accord, to the foreign government parties and do whatever they think needs to be done. Then, they send a bill for their service fee to the American firms.
In effect, the American firms are pushing money into a black box and hoping that the magic bribery fairies are on their side. This is often not the case. Anecdotes are crazy - literally comic book levels of fraud. There's a lot of middle manning and skimming off the top. Over promising and then disappearing late in deals etc. Ultimately, the American firms who do FMS hate these people and see them only as a necessary overhead expense. They prefer to work directly with a non "bribe me" government to work out actually good security deals.
But, again, what the MIC firms really want is domestic program dollars. The largest arms deal in history was with the Saudis at $142 bn. That's big money, for sure. But there's no guarantee that it all gets paid out, that there aren't weird changes to the contract, or that it could grow to, I don't know, $1 trillion. In the domestic market, the government always pays (unless you really fuck up), if the contract does change it will do so slowly and, most of the time, it's an opportunity for the contract to charge more and, finally, if it's a big enough program in enough congressional districts it can literally turn into $1 trillion over the course of several decades.
First of all, I'd just like to say that I agree with the vast majority of what you wrote. That's a great takedown of MIC corruption and how the sausage actually gets made in certain sectors.
First of all, I don't think "conspiracy level thinking" is much of an insult. When I look at the Iraq war and try to understand it, I have no problem believing the conspiracy theory that they didn't actually have any WMDs. Similarly, I believed in the conspiracy theory that the NSA was spying on domestic communications even when James Clapper went and said that they weren't doing it to congress. All of the conspiracy theories about Trump being surveilled by the intelligence agencies on false pretexts were completely true as well - and the mainstream, non-conspiratorial theories on these topics are just transparently false. This line of attack probably would have worked in the 90s, but that dog just won't hunt in a world where I can go and read the PRISM documentation or the full story of the Carter Page FISA warrant.
But as for what I mean, I mean exactly what I said - the military-industrial complex has more power over the actions of the US military than Trump himself does. The military directly lied to his face about circumstances on the ground and encouraged him to take actions which he explicitly said he did not want. Trump famously said that to attack Iran would be the mark of an incompetent president with poor negotiation skills, and he relentlessly promised in his campaign that there'd be an end to the pointless foreign wars. Once he got into office, the pointless foreign wars kept on going and nothing changed.
I understand that this may seem a bit trite (of course politicians aren't going to keep all of their campaign promises) but it reflects a serious problem in the mechanism of democracy. A candidate ran promising an end to wasteful foreign wars and military adventurism - only to get the US involved in more wars, bomb additional countries and start getting ready to invade another country for oil (Venezuela). A politician wanted to do something, received a democratic mandate for it... and then absolutely nothing happened. I'm not going to claim to know precisely where the actual decisions are being made, nor do I think there's some shadowy figure behind the throne or learned council of elders deciding everything (my belief is that the US state has multiple competing power groups with divergent interests, and the actual actions taken by the US government emerge from that competition).
What I am claiming is that the actions of the US military/empire are very clearly resistant to the desires and will of the voting public. Maybe Trump is corrupt, maybe the generals are lying to him again, maybe he's being blackmailed by someone with access to the Epstein tapes, maybe the military has gone rogue and explicitly does not answer to civilian leadership - I can't tell, and until the dust settles I don't think anyone will be able to tell. But the fact that I can't explain precisely why the actions of the US war machine grind on regardless of the expressed wishes of the populace doesn't change that reality.
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Except of course when he did in fact shut off the flow of materiel and intelligence for a week and a half to demonstrate his power over Zelensky, and the next time Zelensky visited the US he wore a suit in deference?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93United_States_relations#Second_Trump_presidency_(2025%E2%80%93present)
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The same Canada that got into a diplomatic mess with China because the US wanted to cause an issue Huawei? The lumping is doing a lot of work here.
This seems like a microcosm of a lot of Trumpian foreign policy: it's all a blend of vibes. What all of these groups have in common is uppity vibes, not actions.
Trudeau comes across as an Obama-wannabe -> this naturally means he comes across as the sort of person who would look down on Trump -> when Trump does something totally arbitrary against Canada it's then read through the lens of legitimate vengeance for ?? because the class of people who look like Trudeau/Obama include people who have ignored US strategic interests at some point or been mean to Trump.
Ultimately it just seems like the general grievances of red tribe have just metastasized to the international realm (because Americans are somewhat insulated from global affairs and so can turn foreign policy into a narcissistic affair).
It’s just DeCarlos Brown muttering to himself that the tiny white woman called him a nigger. It isn’t anything unexpected: he was already angry, as many loners are, and was desperately hoping to hurt someone. When he didn’t receive a justification, he manufactured one so he could stab someone anyway.
I actually think the reasons were more prosaic. Trump wanted secure borders and more favorable trade relations with some additional things like increased defense spending as part of NATO pledge etc. Canada dug their heels and decided to go for trade war and insults back. It of course does not help that both sides were let's say ideologically opposed to certain extent, but the dispute is a real one. Also let's not pretend that the same does not work the other way around as when EU representatives strongarm other countries like Hungary or post Brexit UK or Italy, when elections do not go the way powers that be like.
But in the end it is all besides the point. Canadians may learn the ancient truth of the strong do as they will and weak suffer what they must. USA is not Hungary or some random African nation. Good luck to Canada for next 3 years and potentially number of more years, if some MAGA candidate wins next elections.
When Trump wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and slap his name on it, that happened. The idea that Canada's response is to just never do anything when it comes to US demands doesn't stand up to scrutiny. USMCA also has a mandated renegotiation period coming up so all parties agreed in principle that negotiations are part of the deal, Trump decided to jump the gun and impose tariffs outside of regular order (which is why he had to claim an emergency).
The idea that Canada is the party that "dug their heels in" and threw insults is...Like, I'm legitimately wracking my brain here because it's just so far from my experience of what happened. Trump started the conflict, Trump insisted on the idea of annexing a neighbor in a trade dispute, Trump then said a few times that there was nothing to be done to remove tariffs and Canada should just accept being annexed.
It would be vibes-based idiocy to base trade policy on that in the first place
But this isn't even really consistently true. Starmer is probably worse than Trudeau on all of the major woke indices and he somehow gets along with Trump.
If it is besides the point why bring it up? Why lump it in with legitimate strategic concerns like NS2? Why not just say from the start that the US is just thrashing about for advantage any way it can?
This is another hallmark of this sort of vibes-based, personality-driven "policy": frog-boiling and essentially apathy once it's done (for reasons no one could have predicted beforehand or hell, even articulate consistently today).
It's not a debate that Canada is weaker than the US (in fact, that's my argument against the idea that some meaningful defiance was going on), or that it has behaved in an indolent fashion that makes its dependency worse.
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I kind of hate to use this example, but EY nailed this dynamic in MoR with the clerk who was happy to enforce petty tyranny on the heroes, because they were heroic and would not retaliate, but careful to show respect and deference to the villains because they would retaliate viciously to disrespect. Frankly, I don't feel like Europe and Canada have acted like allies for a long time. They rather act like freeloading "friends" who hate us specifically because we do most of the work and pick up the tab all the time and they can't forgive us for it.
Many such cases!
Yep, many people view kindness and benevolence as stupidity and weakness bordering on entitlement to it. It reminds me an old joke about a businessman and a beggar:
Businessman sees a beggar and takes pity on him as he reminds him of his own turbulent past. So he gives him $100. The beggar is happy and thanks profusely. Next day the situation repeats and beggar is absolutely besides himself. This goes on for several days but then the businessman does not come anymore. After a month the businessman suddenly appears again with $100 bill in his hand and the beggar asks: Where were you last month? The businessman answers - Oh, I was on a vacation with my wife and my kids. The beggar then mutters: I guess it had to be a very nice vacation given all my money you spent.
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