325 - Causing Chaos and Consternation: A Disrupter in Chief

If, as is likely, a new orange-faced president, deep-down, is more interested in monopolizing news feeds, TikTok, X, and the like, than in governing, what is he to do and who is he to appoint? Obviously, to feed his insatiable affinity for headlines and attention, he should promise a collection of controversial accomplishments, "on the first day." He should boast. He should embroider the truth, a supreme talent that is inbred. He should threaten to unleash the powers of an office that he has abused before and will do so over and over. A perfect antidote for low esteem is megalomania.

Expansionism is an extension of in-built grandiosity. But, to be credible, such Napoleonic and Putinesque visions are better if they are anchored at least a little in reality. Turning Canada's 41 million North Americans into "Americans" with their own state (or several) makes no sense even as a blustering utterance because Canadians have grown up along or relatively near the U.S. border and know how dysfunctional and polarized our politics are. They know that their multiple party system, with proportional representation, provides much more voice to interest groups and factions than does ours. Gerrymandering gives advantages in a naked two-party winner take all system; it distorts massively and is unnecessary with proportional representation.

Canada is part of NATO. Does Trump propose to go to war or, much less crudely, to try economically to twist Canada's arm economically? Is he aware that Canada purchases much more from us than we buy from them? Trump is always going on and on about unfair terms of trade and China's favorable balance of payments. We need Canada (and Mexico) more than ever before to prosper, to grow our middle class, and ultimately to support our social security and pensions. We need Canada's petroleum from Alberta, its wheat from Manitoba and Saskatchewan, its autos and spares from Ontario, and its defensive vigilance at the edge of the Arctic.

Canada and Greenland almost bump into each other where the top of Ellesmere Island is but a stone's throw from the Arctic frontier of Greenland. Indeed, Canada and Greenland share a mutual land border on a small island between Ellesmere and Greenland. Given their proximity, their overlapping Inuit populations, and their similar frigid environments in Canada's north, it would make very good strategic and commercial sense for Canada and Greenland to cooperate formally, and for the U.S. to help sponsor a North American all-enveloping initiative for the development and exploitation of the increasingly ice-free Arctic passage parts of our hemisphere.

Contrariwise, it makes no sense at any level for Trump to make wild noise about taking Greenland by force, or even by doing a deal to spend $10 billion or so to purchase the world's largest island from the Greenlanders or from Denmark. No one is selling, but to help Canada cooperate in Greenland's digging for rare earths and drilling for oil makes good sense. Trump needs to remember that Greenland, as an appendage of Europe and NATO, is part of us via NATO. Article V of the NATO treaty obliges NATO members to defend a constituent sovereign part of NATO when attacked. Does Trump want to go to war against NATO and himself? Also, we were given to believe that Trump was some sort of isolationist, not an expansionist.

Many of those same caveats apply to Panama. Rather than threatening to take back the canal -- which is not going to happen -- Trump should instead offer to help to patrol the Darien Gap, the jungle corridor crossed daily by thousands of desperate migrants coming from Colombia (and from throughout the rest of South America). Doing so, and also spending money to help Panama stanch the flow north of illicit drugs, would be much more desirable than fomenting manifest destiny.

Governing is ultimately about providing political goods and results that satisfy the needs and expectations of citizens. That is why most of Trump's appointments to cabinet positions and to run agencies are so disappointing. Even in those few cases where ideology does not outpace experience, incompetence is palpable. Trump would argue that he wants operational managers who will do his bidding unquestionably and that all of the appointments are in a real sense patronage spoil. Trump seeks no independent initiatives and thinking.

But good governance is what his most diehard followers crave -- even if what they mean by good governance is often tainted with prejudice and partiality. They may want book banning and "Christian" textbooks. They want to keep trans athletes from competing. But they also want trains and airplanes to run on time, for roads to be maintained, for medical services to be available, and for banks to remain solvent. They want to feel safe and be well-defended. To be secure in this troubled world, good intelligence (inter alia) is fundamental. A government cannot run on words alone.

To take but one important example, Pete Hegseth, nominated for Secretary of Defense, is a sometime drunk and sex molester. He has never run anything large. And he failed at nonprofits. But most of all he is steeped in comment on television about war matters, not in helping the president or anyone else strategize. Ben Rhodes (former deputy national security advisor) says that Hegseth is "unqualified" to run anything, much less a nuclear-armed establishment with a nearly $1 trillion budget. But that is the point. Trump doesn't want us well-governed or the Pentagon well-managed. He wants Hegseth to be a "disrupter."

Trump and Hegseth disdain the laws of war. The impulses that led us disastrously to invade Iraq in 2003 are now directed against peaceful neighbors, defenseless entities, and allies like Greenland. Random belligerency is not what the post-Biden world requires. Instead, against the likes of Xi Jinping and Putin it needs tirelessly careful planning, alliance building as never before, and the shoring up of the U.S.' capabilities. Trump and Hegseth must try to remember that we are not a declining power needing something smaller to intimidate. That's Putin's game, not ours. But Hegseth has neither the experience nor the gravitas to train his boss to exert America's might skillfully.

Elon Musk is bent on helping Trump disrupt, too. He has done so brilliantly by demonstrating how all-electric cars and better engineered space launching rockets could absolutely revolutionize our economic and social expectations. But success in the engineering realm hardly plays out in foreign policy -- except as a rival to and accompaniment of Trump's absurdities. Becoming a public right winger in the US is one thing; backing the German and British extreme right parties is another. For someone with oodles of money, supporting those who would have aligned themselves with South African white supremacy (apartheid) may seem natural. But for someone now closely tied to and competing with Trump, such support undermines our European alliances and our strengthening of NATO. It is another chaotic disruption. The U.S. can and should do much better.

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