At present, the president is announcing that “numerous countries have told me they’re on the way” to assist the United States in keeping open the Strait of Hormuz, an important strategic front in the ongoing and unconstitutional US-Iran War. Of course, Donald J. Trump is a liar and a fabulist, and “numerous countries” is awfully close to a contronymic phrase like “many people are saying.” So his statement should probably be given the status of, say, a rumor passed on by a distant acquaintance with a reputation for dishonesty and signs of mental impairment. But no doubt there is some germ of truth to it. He did not name the countries. They do not appear to include Germany, Japan, Australia, and Italy, and nations that have been “noncommittal” so far include France, South Korea, and Britain.
Amusingly, the president did a certain amount of low-level whining about this, complaining that it showed a lack of loyalty and partnership. For example, he told the Financial Times, “The U.K. might be considered the number one ally, the longest serving et cetera and when I asked for them to come, they didn’t want to come.” And he pointed to the help the U.S. has given NATO, as well as to the obvious fact that these nations have a significant interest in keeping oil shipping flowing through the Strait.
I wonder why, exactly, these nations would possibly help the United States in this, risking their own people and resources. At least, why would they help unless they can screw the United States to the wall, taking it for everything they can get as a price of their help? More specifically, why should they do so if we adopt the perspective of our current regime and its understanding of foreign policy and international relations?
Recall that the basic formula that informs its understanding of this area is the one expressed by De Facto Acting President for Domestic Policy Stephen Miller: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Friendships, principles, loyalties, alliances, history, debts of fairness–on Miller’s view, these are all irrelevant. From this perspective, the post-World War II perspective that there is value in stability and in sticking by one’s large and small allies is nonsense, a bunch of liberal idealist crap. In reality, as an admirer of this view has opined, our relationships with other nations “are not fixed in stone, but wax and wane based on present-day circumstances.” If Russia invades one of our allied countries, bombs its hospitals, and abducts its children, it is, “to be sure,” tragic, but that’s just how it goes. If a nation has helped us in the past but we then decline to help that nation as a matter of gratitude or reciprocity, concluding that it’s not in our interests, that’s not only not a bad thing; it’s “international law at its finest.”
Of course the European and other nations might choose to help in the Strait of Hormuz, not because of the fact–irrelevant, on the view above–that they have been helped by the U.S. in the past (that’s what waxing and waning means, after all), but because they conclude that the United States will punish them if they don’t. It’s a perfectly credible threat, given that the United States is now perfectly happy to threaten to withhold lifesaving HIV treatment to women and children in Zambia unless that country signs over more access to mineral deposits. (The other day, the president announced his intention to rededicate the country to God in May of this year. Perhaps the reason he’s waiting until May before asking the Lord to take renewed notice of us is that he wants to get the threatening of ailing women and children out of the way first.) But on any sensible application of the power-centered, spare-me-your-untermenschen-sentiments view that Miller enthusiastically trumpets, that is only one part of the calculus.
They will also consider that in Ukraine, the invasion of which is just one part of the general Russian threat to European interests, the U.S. is at best lukewarm and at most sympathetic or supine to Russia. They may also be mindful that in addition to its “why quibble and argue about who invaded who” attitude about Ukraine, the United States is currently trying to prop up the electorally vulnerable regime of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who is substantially a Russan ally and who is personally so evil that he literally keeps human beings–like Gladden Pappin–as pets. Moreover, any additional forces the European nations sent to Iran to assist with the Hormuz operation would be potentially vulnerable to targeting assisted by Russia–assistance that is greeted with a shrug on Mr. Trump’s part. They may be leery of going to the mat for a nation that seems one golf course in the Urals away from selling Europe out to Russia altogether.
As for threats of a refusal to help NATO in the future, they will factor in the fact that refusal to help NATO in the future is already the official plan. Our policy already “ask[s]—demand[s], really—that Europe polices its own part of the world and, most importantly, pays for it itself.” They may therefore feel that a threat to withhold aid to NATO is in the nature of a mugger’s threat to shoot you twice. Those states will also be aware that despite its official lies to others suggesting that it no longer wishes to give other sovereign states “lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs,” its official policy, which was already being implemented well before the formal statement, is precisely to tell European states how to live and how to govern their own affairs, and to actively endorse and support right-wing, reactionary, nativist, racist, and let us by no means omit antisemitic, political parties and groups in Europe, well outside its own borders, Fidesz (“we do not want our own color… to be mixed with those of others”) being just one of many rods in the abhorrent fascist bundle the U.S. is actively encouraging in Europe.
Keeping all this in mind, they will further reflect that Trump is facing quickly approaching midterms in which, quite reasonably, he and/or his political allies lack confidence about their chances. Mindful of the economic costs to their own citizens, they will nonetheless also be aware that the economic cost of having a blocked Strait, both with respect to oil and with respect to the economy more generally, is equally or more politically damaging and embarrassing to Trump. And they will be aware that Russia and China are busily squeezing the United States from both sides while it fights the U.S.-Iran War. Given the Millerian view of power politics, which holds that there’s no point taking any useful lessons from the years 1945-2000 when you can just skim a bad translation of Thuycidides instead, and given the likelihood that they will have to defend themselves anyway, they can view with some equanimity the prospect of sitting back and watching as it happens. After all, if great power politics is all about the power and not at all about the greatness, and if Trump is at pains again and again to draw a moral equivalency between Putin’s Russia and the United States, they need not feel constrained to deal with the U.S. instead of the other two major actors. And while they will factor in Trump’s threats, they surely will also factor in his tendency, in the tough guy realm, to be a kind of Sir Robin with bone spurs.
It seems to me that on this view, one perfectly rational response for nations allied with the United States is to refuse to help Trump and the United States unless and until they can stick it to us for all they can take–every bribe, exaction, concession, removal of tariffs, and act of submission they can nail down. They can do so without any qualms or sense of guilt or lack of reciprocity, knowing that they are acting exactly as the United States thinks they should on a sound, liberal-sentiment-free view of foreign relations. They can do it without worrying about whether it diminishes American trust in those nations, since the “waxing and waning” view of those relationships makes trust meaningless and in any event, having watched the yo-yo-ing of tariffs, along with almost every other foreign and domestic policy, they have little reason to trust the consistency or capacity (or desire) to keep promises of the current regime.
Even a liberal believer in “international niceties” can be perfectly skeptical or cynical about appeals to values in the foreign policy arena; you can be an idealist without being a fool. But suppose those nations feel a pang concerning the possibility that without ramping up their commitment to assist in the U.S.-Iran War, innocent civilians in Iran and elsewhere, such as Israel, will die unnecessarily. On their own sentimental view, this may well be a bad thing. But on the Millerian view, as expressed by others, surely it is simply of the “to be sure, there will likely be tragic losses,” oh-well, let’s-move-on variety. On the Trumpian or Millerian view, there is no moral claim on them as nations to exert any effort to minimize the number of civilian deaths in Iran, Israel, or anywhere else. Deaths like that are mere eggs in the Millerian omelette.
Nor would they be much moved by the hope that with a little extra help, Iran’s regime might more quickly be replaced by a free and democratic state. For one thing, the U.S. has forsworn any interest in that sort of thing, especially in the Middle East. Beyond that, the indications so far in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba–where Trump’s leading contender to wipe out the memory of Fidel Castro is…Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, scion of the Castro family and a veteran of the Cuban security services–are that current American policy doesn’t just not insist on replacing these regimes with free and democratic ones; it insists on actively not replacing them with free and democratic ones. The guy who says of Cuba, “I can do anything I want with it,” and whose description of the island suggests that he thinks the most poignant scene in The Godfather, Part II is the one with the gold phone is not a guy who’s especially enthusiastic about bringing democracy and alleviating suffering in Cuba–or Iran. Hell, he’s not enthusiastic about those things in the United States.
At least from the Trumpian view, in short, it would be entirely rational for European and other Western allies to tell Trump that if he wants ships to get safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, he can damn well do it himself, unless he’s willing to knuckle under to a very long list of demands. Those demands would at least start with getting his grubby little fingers out of European politics and letting the neo-Nazi parties do their own electioneering, letting Orban twist in the wind and go down to defeat, zeroing out his absurd tariffs, signing a quitclaim to Greenland, and growing a backbone long enough to apply it to the Putin regime and its imperial ambitions in Ukraine and elsewhere.
As an American citizen who was born in Canada, I’m not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, given that Canada is one of many formerly staunch friends and allies that have been abused and screwed again and again by this regime, generally with a strong stench of corruption hanging around it, it seems just and right to me that if these nations have him by the short hairs, they should yank as hard as possible. On the other, as an American, I ought first and foremost to have American interests at heart. (Of course, on the other other hand, only a moron thinks that American interests are served by taking a global wrecking ball to stability and prosperity.)
Then I think of the richest country in the world tying lifesaving HIV aid to mineral resources. And I think, “Yank harder.”