Trudy Rubin
Harm your friends, help your enemies.
That neatly summarizes the first two weeks of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. And that’s before even getting to the potential damage done by his dangerous choices to head defense, health and human services, the FBI, and national intelligence.
Trump has been kneecapping U.S. allies while Russia, China, and even a broken Hamas sit back and pocket their unearned gains.
Nothing lays bare this self-defeating approach more clearly than his mad proposal that the U.S. take ownership of the Gaza Strip and build beach resorts there, all while kicking out two million Palestinians into Jordan and Egypt.
Since I first wrote about Trump’s announcement Wednesday, the president has already had to walk back his initial pledge to send U.S. troops to do the cleanup (and presumably the ethnic cleansing) in Gaza. But with the bravado of a real estate con man, he still insists the U.S. will turn the strip into the new French Riviera, and that he can force Egypt and Jordan to take two million new refugees.
What’s most bizarre about this presidential pipe dream — besides the fact that Trump reportedly told no one about it before he announced it — is that it hurts Arab states that genuinely want peace and helps a broken Hamas.
Egypt and Jordan have made clear any efforts to dump unwilling Palestinians across their borders would jeopardize their peace treaties with Israel, and might even be considered an act of war. The Saudis, whose useful peace plan has been rejected by Israel, have had to back off any prospect of normalizing relations with Jerusalem.
The only ones who benefit are radical right-wing Israeli settlers who want to build settlements in Gaza, along with Hamas, whose faded prospects will improve as Gazans desperately try to avoid becoming refugees again.
This dump-on-your-friends dynamic was also on full display with Trump’s brief attempt to start a trade war with Canada and Mexico, America’s two largest trading partners and closest neighbors. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board, hardly a left-wing bastion, called it “the dumbest trade war in history” and said tariffs would be imposed “for no good reason.”
The proposed 25% across-the-board tariffs on Canada and Mexico were intended to make them shut down fentanyl and migrant traffic across U.S. borders. Yet, less than 1% of the fentanyl entering our country comes across the Canadian border, and Ottawa had already agreed under President Joe Biden to step up border security. So what was the point?
“This is actual madness, a betrayal of America’s closest friend, an act of economic warfare,” said a visibly angry Chrystia Freeland, a former deputy prime minister who may soon replace current Canadian leader Justin Trudeau, to CNN host Fareed Zakaria. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to punch us in the face.”
The incipient North American tariff war made so little sense that stocks dived because tariffs fuel inflation and raise prices. Within two days, “Tariff Man,” as Trump calls himself, had to blink and suspend his tariffs on Mexico and Canada for at least 30 days.
And what did he gain by beating up on Canada and Mexico? Nothing but resentment and a brandishing of his tough man image with his followers. The concessions he claimed he obtained on reinforcement of the northern and southern borders had mostly been negotiated under Biden. Yet, he did manage to undercut thousands of U.S. businesses who are unsure whether he will renew the North American tariffs, or what will be the consequence of a new trade war he has already started with China.
As Canada’s Freeland sees it: “The U.S. is on a lose-lose path, and the people who will suffer from it the most are Americans. We hope we can go back to a win-win partnership,” as when she helped negotiate the trade deal known as the USMCA with Trump in 2018. At the time, he praised the rebranded North American Free Trade Agreement as the greatest. Now he denounces it, as if he had not been the one who signed and promoted it. This undermines trust in any future deal.
This Trumpian thirst for domination is all the more self-defeating because the president could resolve border or trade concerns via serious negotiations. Instead, he displays a pathological need to intimidate friendly countries.
Take his nasty phone call to the prime minister of Denmark, the details of which leaked. Trump threatened to slap close NATO ally Copenhagen with tariffs if it didn’t sell its autonomous territory of Greenland to the United States. Yet, Denmark and the Greenland government have long made clear they are eager to expand the U.S. security presence on an island that already has a U.S. base, and is strategically placed to counter Russian submarine interventions. They would no doubt be delighted for U.S. companies to sign mining contracts for rare earth elements.
Similarly, Trump’s brash threat to Panama to “take back” the Panama Canal — if necessary, by force — has angered an ally to little purpose. His beef: The canal’s ports are managed under contract by Hong Kong companies, which might threaten U.S. interests. Why not just talk to the Panamanians, who can reexamine the contracts?
Instead come threats of imperialist takeovers. Trump needs the cooperation of leaders in Latin America to push back against rising Chinese influence in the Western Hemisphere, yet his threats are more likely to unite them into pushing back against him, to China’s benefit.
The list goes on. Trump’s decision to freeze U.S. foreign aid projects — with no advance notice — has squandered overnight the soft power the United States built up over decades via economic, health, and social development aid projects around the world.
From funding soup kitchens for hundreds of thousands of refugees in war-ravaged Sudan to sending power generators and heating systems to freezing Ukraine, from fighting HIV/AIDS in South Africa with the PEPFAR program started by Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to fighting Ebola outbreaks in Africa, programs have been shuttered, workers sent home, and U.S. employees furloughed or let go.
Bizarrely, the ill-informed billionaire Elon Musk calls the aid agency U.S. Agency for International Development a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” Translation: They help poor people. This billionaire plans to lay off virtually all of USAID’s 10,000 employees while hundreds of thousands of former beneficiaries worldwide may die.
There is plenty of room to reform the U.S. aid process. But Musk and Trump seem bent on destruction, not on reform.
The Trumpists defend this madness by citing a few small-bore, silly projects, or simply lying. The president has claimed that $50 million (which he then upped to $100 million) of USAID money was being spent on condoms for Gaza — which he claimed were sometimes blown up and used as weapons! Reality check: USAID delivers no condoms to Gaza, nor anywhere in the Middle East.
In another backtrack, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he now runs USAID and will grant a “temporary reprieve” to some lifesaving programs. But with USAID offices shut, no one knows if or when the agency will reopen.
Harm your friends, break your pledges, and display arrogance and indifference that destroys overseas respect for this country.
Russia and China need only sit back and say thanks.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the The Philadelphia Inquirer. Readers may write to her at: Philadelphia Inquirer, P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, Pa. 19101, or by email at [email protected].
