Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
PaperclipPerfector
16hr ago
(text post)
150 thread views
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Following up on last's weeks topic of the US/Trump administration's trade war on Canada:
One of the more baffling aspects of Trump's foreign policy (in both terms, but especially in his second) is how he's made a point of being hostile towards long-time US allies. The US has historically led a coalition of developed nations that was fairly biased towards US interests, with the implicit tradeoff that the US was also footing the lion's share of the costs. The integration of democratic middle powers into an American-led world order both gave the US leverage over its members (see, for example, the arrest of Meng Wangzhou or leaning on ASML to freeze out China) and discouraged the emergence of a rival power center.
Of late, however, it seems that the American Right has shifted to a model that assumes that US allies have no leverage and thus have no choice but to accept wildly unfavorable terms. There's a element of truth to the idea that US could push its allies harder and that the US was not getting the most favorable possible arrangement out of its alliances. However, the maximalism of the current administration seems to be underestimating the possibility that alienated allies may simply look for ways to work around the US, and undermining US hegemony in a bid for marginal revisions in an already highly favorable status quo is a questionable strategy. What's more, it comes across as a highly emotional approach, driven more by dominance seeking and sense of grievance than material benefit.
Yes, that's exactly how said allies are behaving. I honestly don't get this impression from the US, but then again, I'm the one who has to pay the bill for Boomer cultural posturing and said Boomers have made me poorer in the first place because of that posturing, so my perspective is slanted in that way.
There isn't a damn thing Commonwealth countries are going to get from Europe outside of "more resource extraction from an even less competent ally". Canada pretends it'll just make gear for war to maintain its industrial supply chain, but it has no need for it and Germans would quite rather those jobs be made in Germany (to preserve its industrial supply chain). These deals are merely cope.
German industry is already idle, so agreements these countries make will be contingent on their winding down their own manufacturing capacity to keep European capacity (and hence political power) alive. The same wouldn't be true for Britain, but their supply chains packed it in in the Thatcher years, so they have no use for any former imperial possessions.
What now remains is the resolution of the teething pains of countries that permitted themselves to be hollowed out (and sold their ability to maintain a national identity to keep their real estate prices high) collapsing under the weight of their own bureaucratic-welfare complex. If Canada can't resist economic destruction on its own, and realistically it can't, the others have no hope either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link