Foreigners Have Feelings Too

Imagine you’re the leader of a (rapidly imploding) global superpower.

There’s a large, resource-rich, strategically important island off your northeast coast. The bad news is that enemies are angling to gain access to it, which would place them on your doorstep militarily.

The good news is that the island happens to belong to a close ally, one that’s willing to prioritize your strategic interests.

Question: How should you go about increasing your country’s presence in and around the island? Maybe you dial up that ally and ask?

Or should you berate them, demand that they cede their sovereignty over the island to you, and threaten them with severe economic penalties if they resist?

I’m not asking which approach is “nicer,” I’m asking which is more likely to produce the desired strategic result. If browbeating that ally will get you what you want, there’s a case to be made that it’s the right way to go. Diplomatic politesse is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

But browbeating plainly isn’t the right way to go. That’s because foreigners are patriotic too.

One would think Donald Trump and his nationalist lackeys, of all people, would understand that. Restoring national pride is the raison d’être of his movement, embroidered in big white letters on the red baseball cap. He’s not above hamstringing a country that’s fighting for its survival because its leader insulted him by not wearing a suit. No one appreciates better than our president, a man with skin as thin as tissue paper, that wounding someone’s pride is a sure way to make them less cooperative.

So it’s strange that since Election Day he’s proceeded to insult one American ally after another, seemingly oblivious to the predictable effect doing so would have on nationalist sentiment in those countries and how that sentiment would limit their ability to work with him.

Take Denmark. Soon after Trump grabbed that nation by the lapels and demanded that it fork over Greenland, the Danish king changed the royal coat of arms to feature his country’s claim to the island more prominently. A subsequent poll found 78 percent of Danes opposed selling the island to the U.S. and 46 percent said they considered America a “fairly big threat”—higher than the share who said so of North Korea or Iran.

Perhaps, with a little diplomatic charm and a very big check, Trump might have persuaded the Danish government to sell Greenland. (Although it remains unclear why American ownership, not merely American access, is so important to him.) But once he undertook to bully Denmark into doing his bidding, the Danes’ national pride swelled. To accept that check and sign away the island now would be seen as a dishonorable capitulation, not a mutually beneficial exchange.

Why is our nationalist kakistocracy so bent on offending America’s allies, despite having every reason to know that doing so will leave them less likely to cooperate with Trump?

The 51^st state.

In yesterday’s newsletter, I called Trump the least ideological president of my lifetime, a man whose policy non-negotiables include tightening the border, starting calamitous trade wars for seemingly no discernible purpose, and not much else.

That being so, you would think he’d be more sensitive than the average president to other nations’ chauvinism. If everything is a transaction to him, he should want to ensure that those with whom he hopes to transact remain agreeable.

So why does he keep insulting Canada, America’s closest ally and one of its biggest trading partners?

I don’t understand what he wants from Canadians—and neither do his own advisers, apparently, or else they wouldn’t need to justify Trump’s policy by resorting to insane accusations about Mexican cartels taking over the country. But whatever it is the president wants, he’s plainly making them less willing to deal by babbling about Canada becoming the 51^st state.

It seemed like a joke when he first floated that idea, then began to feel more like a taunt as he kept it up, and now appears to be official White House policy per his press secretary’s comments to the media on Wednesday. Either way, asking Canadians to forfeit their national identity for the ability to purchase slightly less expensive U.S. goods seems almost lab-designed to offend their sense of patriotism. Is their pride in their country so cheap and easily shed that it might be sold for a 25 percent discount on American-made stuff?

If Trump’s goal really is to persuade Canadians to join the United States, the insults and hardball tariff tactics are about as counterproductive as a strategy can be. Never in my lifetime has there been more hostility to the United States north of the border than there is right now.

It’s not just a matter of Canadians lustily booing America’s national anthem, which has become commonplace at sporting events over the last two months. There are economic consequences too. Some Canadian stores are removing American products from the shelves; some Canadian tourists are canceling their U.S. vacations; and on Tuesday, Ontario’s premier threatened to slap a 25 percent surcharge on electricity exports to New York, Minnesota, and Michigan, leaving open the possibility of restricting the supply altogether later on.

Canadians are angry. It is very strange that our not-so-ideological president, who relishes his reputation for being a good economic steward, would invite meaningful damage to the U.S. economy by taunting the other side into digging in for a destructive confrontation. As one reporter put it, “If Canadians view the stakes of the trade war with the U.S. to be ‘does Canada continue to exist as an independent country,’ it is far more likely to be able to endure—or even strategically self-inflict—economic pain than we are.”

So intense is the backlash that it’s already caused a sea change in the coming election. Polling had long shown Canada’s Conservative Party routing Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, but the last two months of Trump’s bullying has driven Canadians to the left. An Ipsos survey published last week found the Liberals suddenly up 2 points; as recently as six weeks ago the Conservatives led by … 26.

A new Canadian government elected on a wave of nationalist hostility to Trump will not lightly make concessions to him, needless to say. How did the president foresee his “keep on insulting them” approach working out?

A Ukrainian quisling.

Canada isn’t the only nation whose continued existence as an independent country has irritated the White House into a series of moves practically engineered to stoke patriotic antipathy to the United States.

On Thursday, Politico reported that four members of Trump’s “entourage” have held not-so-secret talks with two of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political rivals back home. Meddling that way in Ukraine’s politics would be risky under the best of circumstances given the country’s sensitivity to being ruled by puppets propped up by domineering world powers. But at this moment in particular, why would any Ukrainian candidate want to be known as Donald Trump’s choice?

The supply of American military aid had already begun to dry up after Inauguration Day, but this week Trump shut it down entirely when he formally “paused” weapons shipments to Kyiv. Then, on Wednesday, the administration announced that it would also stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, including “some intelligence about advance warning of drone and missile strikes that Russia has been carrying out against military and civilian targets,” per the New York Times. Moscow greeted that news by hinting that it would take full advantage of the sudden blind spot in Ukrainian defenses.

And it did. Ukraine was bombarded by missiles yesterday, including one that struck a hotel in Zelensky’s hometown and killed at least four people.

Unless and until the United States resumes shipments of Patriot defense systems, millions of Ukrainians will remain at risk from similar attacks. And that might include some who are momentarily out of harm’s way: A Reuters story published this morning claimed that the White House is planning to revoke the temporary legal status of nearly a quarter million Ukrainian refugees who are currently living in the U.S. (Trump’s press secretary insisted, not very reassuringly, that “no decision has been made at this time.”)

All of this is happening, mind you, without any similar American pressure on Russia to halt its advance or make any other concessions in the name of peace. In fact, Secretary of State and alleged Reaganite Marco Rubio described the conflict yesterday as a U.S.-Russia proxy war, using the same framing that the Kremlin itself began using in 2022. One can’t fairly say that the president is working for Vladimir Putin, but one can fairly say that, given the cartoonish villainy to which he’s stooped, he’s behaving as if he did.

So tell me: In this context, with the White House forming an alliance in all but name with the fascist butchers in Moscow, how would you like to be a Ukrainian politician known as Donald Trump’s pick to replace Volodymyr Zelensky? Do you think that would boost your chances at the polls if an election were called?

Or would you be viewed as a Ukrainian quisling?

It speaks volumes about how gravely Trump has offended Ukrainian patriotism that the one man with a realistic chance of unseating Zelensky sounds more hostile to the United States than Zelensky does. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s former top general and now its ambassador to the United Kingdom, accused Trump on Thursday of nothing less than “destroying” the world order. “Washington is taking more and more steps toward the Kremlin regime at a time when Russia and the Axis of Evil are attempting to dismantle the global order,” he said in a tweet, entirely accurately. 

Zaluzhnyi is currently in second place in Ukrainian presidential polling with 20 percent, far behind Zelensky at 44 percent. The two would-be quislings being courted by Trump’s team have a combined 16 percent. As with Canada, so too here: If Trump wants something out of Ukrainians, why did he pursue a strategy of mounting hostility that was plainly destined to stoke patriotic resistance to his intentions?

Which chapter in Trump: The Art of the Deal explains why it’s good for business to make your negotiating partners despise you as intensely as possible, especially when those partners have a lot more leverage over you than you’d like to admit?

Strategy or psychology?

I don’t know why nationalists are so intent on offending the national pride of others, but I find it notable that it’s not just the naturally boorish Trump who’s prone to it.

A few days ago, our ostensibly intelligent vice president babbled his way into an international incident when he scoffed at the idea of European peacekeepers being sent to Ukraine. A minerals deal with the U.S. is “a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years,” he crowed during an interview.

Thirty or 40 years?

The countries whose leaders are the most vocal spokesmen for a peacekeeping force are Britain and France—and both suffered hundreds of casualties in Afghanistan fighting with Americans when the U.S. invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty after September 11. Vance tried to clean up his mess afterward by insisting that he wasn’t referring to those two countries, but no one is buying it. And even if he truly hadn’t meant Britain or France, more than two dozen other “random countries” also lost men by supporting the U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

The nation with the third-highest number of soldiers killed in action was Canada, as a matter of fact. The nation with the second-highest share of soldiers killed per million citizens was Denmark. 

Those “random countries” all have a sense of national pride and that pride can’t help but be wounded when their sacrifice in an American-led war is callously impugned. Foreigners have feelings too, it turns out. Why don’t American nationalists understand that? Or do they understand it and just not care?

As is often true with Trump and his deputies, it’s hard to say whether their motives are primarily strategic or psychological.

The strategic theory of nationalist callousness is this: The more enmity there is between the United States and liberal nations like Canada, Ukraine, Denmark, and the U.K., the easier it’ll be to convince Americans to stop viewing those countries as allies. The postliberal project won’t succeed as a purely logical exercise, you see, as there’s simply no intellectual case to be made that America will benefit more by partnering with an economic backwater like Russia than with a relative powerhouse like the European Union.

It needs to be an emotional exercise too, which happens to be Trump’s forte. Maybe he’s trying to bait nations like Canada into the same sort of hostile, polarizing, emotional displays that we saw from Democrats during his joint address to Congress on Tuesday. The more footage Americans watch of Canadians booing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the less interested they’ll be in preserving an alliance with Canada. You can dislike Vladimir Putin for serially murdering and mutilating Ukrainian children, but at least he’s not disrespecting the stars and stripes, right?

Trump is freakishly good at polarizing domestic politics emotionally. Why wouldn’t he, J.D. Vance, and the rest of the menagerie try it internationally as well? The more hated the United States becomes in the liberal West, the more receptive Americans might become to the civic morals practiced by authoritarian snakepits like Russia and China, our “true” allies. It’s not that nationalists don’t understand national pride abroad, in other words. They do—and they’re weaponizing it for their own ideological ends.

That’s the strategic theory of what’s going on. The psychological theory is simpler: Nationalists are tribalist bullies by nature, and like any bully, they can’t resist opportunities to demean those who are weaker.

There have been no insults to Russian or Chinese national pride from the White House since January 20, you may have noticed. That’s because, to Trumpists, American power should be wielded with a taunt: What are you going to do about it? Respect is reserved for “peer” countries that can in fact do something about it, and who are prone to conducting foreign relations with the same sort of bullying, might-makes-right approach.

For everyone else, the weaklings of the planet, the Trumpist instinct to dominate and humiliate is irrepressible, even when American interests clearly call for a more thoughtful approach.

“What the Trump administration seems to be most interested in is engineering a strategic rapprochement with Russia, not in ending the war in Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov observed recently. “Ukraine is supposed to be just currency for that deal, which is why it causes so much anger when it shows agency of its own.” That cuts to the heart of it: Trump and his toadies find their overweening sense of power and status offended when a weakling minor power like Ukraine—or Canada, or Denmark, or the U.K.—dares to complicate their plans by asserting their own national agency. And so their contempt for those minor powers comes spilling out, counterproductive or not.

I almost can’t blame them. After nine years of watching every trembling, loathsome Republican coward in Washington dutifully assimilate into the degenerate cult they’ve built, they’re not sure how to react to defiance or dignity from people they’re trying to strongarm. Look no further than Trump’s own secretary of state, a man who once rightly called him an unstable con artist but who now spends his time saying preposterous things on television like, “I’m glad we have a president with moral clarity in Donald J. Trump.” If you’re used to dealing with spineless creatures like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, of course having to deal with Volodymyr Zelensky will cause you to lose your mind.

And unfortunately, I think the mind-losing is likely to get worse, not better.

That’s not just the pessimist in me talking. Trump could reverse course, I suppose, and launch a charm offensive with Ukraine, Canada, et al. to reboot relations and make them more amenable to his wishes. But I don’t know that he’s capable of it temperamentally and I suspect he’s already alienated so many citizens of those nations that their governments will resist complying with him for fear of further inflaming their constituents’ already wounded national pride. To get compliance, he’ll need to be more threatening, more contemptuous, more brutal, and hope that at some point the sheer amount of pain forces a surrender.

By reelecting a coup-plotter, Americans voted for the moral debilitation of the United States. If U.S. foreign policy turns into a theater of ruthlessness that makes the country broadly hated across the civilized world, let’s not pretend that we didn’t ask for it.