It seems to be a giv­en in Don­ald Trump’s world that no mat­ter how false or far­ci­cal his pro­nounce­ments, the rest of the world is expect­ed to trep­i­da­tious­ly parse them, but the U.S. doesn’t have to wor­ry about the rest of the world. Sor­ry, not quite.

Work­able inter­na­tion­al rela­tions are a give and take. America’s clos­est allies and long-stand­ing friends have agen­das, pride, resilience and spines. Their economies are no more hostage to the U.S. than it is to theirs.
Despite being the world’s largest buy­er, the U.S, “accounts today for only about 13 per­cent of glob­al imports, down from more than one-fifth in the ear­ly 1990s”
.In a ratio­nal polit­i­cal atmos­phere, those are all rea­sons not to keep putting allies and trad­ing part­ners in posi­tions where they have to sec­ond-guess, or strug­gle to make sense of poli­cies based on a scat­ter­shot atten­tion span and a bul­ly persona.
His­to­ry has shown that it’s the threat­ened. not the threat-issuer, who tend to have the most friends will­ing to stand by them, the two world wars being strik­ing examples,
That was summed up by Har­ry S. Tru­man, whom I feel safe in say­ing was the kind of U.S. pres­i­dent much of the world would pre­fer to the one about to be: “We  seek a more peace­ful world, a pros­per­ous world, a world of good neigh­bours, liv­ing on terms of equaity and mutu­al respect…”
Rather than being a strong, pre­dictably reli­able friend, Trump’s Amer­i­ca seems fear­ful, dis­joint­ed, polit­i­cal­ly dys­func­tion­al and hell-bent on plow­ing ever deep­er into debt and social discord.
To put it in terms of the 19^th cen­tu­ry, Pres­i­dent-elect Trump’s for­eign poli­cies (if that’s not over-stat­ing the state of affairs) rely on the mis­con­cep­tion that oth­er nations will cheer­ful­ly hitch their hors­es to a wag­on with rick­ety wheels, to head out on a trail filled with chal­lenges and dan­gers, both obvi­ous and unknown.

                      WHO NEEDS WHOM

The Pruss­ian leader Otto on Bis­mark called Amer­i­cans “lucky peo­ple”: “They’re bor­dered to the north and south by weak neigh­bours, and to the east and west by fish.”
NORAD, the com­bined Amer­i­can and Cana­di­an defen­sive effort, is con­sid­ered a mil­i­tary mod­el for an inter­op­er­a­ble, joint mil­i­tary ear­ly-warn­ing sys­tem, and a cor­ner­stone of Amer­i­can air and mis­sile defense. So in one case at least, “weak” is no longer applicable.
Nor, as pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed, are Cana­di­ans inter­est­ed in trad­ing an offer of no tar­iffs to become part of a rich peo­ple-cen­tric sys­tem run by the town fool. As with beer, we pre­fer our own versions.
If own­er­ship of Green­land is now so impor­tant for Amer­i­can secu­ri­ty that employ­ing mil­i­tary force against a fel­low mem­ber of NATO, which is based on the prin­ci­ple of col­lec­tive defence — an attack on one is an attack on all — it may be time to re-work the “home of the brave” line in the U.S, anthem.

                        COLONIALISM VS ALLIANCES

Threat­en­ing to use eco­nom­ic and mil­i­tary force to acquire ter­ri­to­ry, and  uni­lat­er­al­ly renam­ing a major inter­na­tion­al body of water in one’s own hon­our is colo­nial­ist expan­sion by any definition.
But the col­lege cam­pus­es where the vocif­er­ous “woke”, self-pro­claimed lib­er­als and  pro­gres­sives beat their breasts and shout them­selves hoarse over the numer­ous sins of his­toric colo­nial­ism, are strange­ly qui­et on the issue.
Is it a case of ignor­ing what you don’t want to see, or not being edu­cat­ed broad­ly enough to see it?
Either way, if the U.S gov­ern­ment and gov­erned are per­ceived as wal­low­ing in self-absorp­tion and hypocrisy, it’s like­ly to make those tar­get­ed for “absorp­tion”  more wary than willing.
By way of con­trast to the bom­bast, hubris and dis­re­gard for friends and allies that has so far char­ac­terised Don­ald Trump’s idea of inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, the late Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan summed his ver­sion up with a quote from the leader his­to­ry tends to anoint as instru­men­tal in sav­ing Eng­land and Europe from being over-run by the might of Nazi Germany.
In 1939, Sir Win­ston Churchill said the 5,000 mile long Canadian‑U.S. bor­der , “guard­ed only by neigh­bourly respect and hon­ourable oblig­a­tions, is an exam­ple to every coun­try and a pat­tern for the future of the world,:”

 

On a more joc­u­lar lev­el ( and how else can you treat Trump and stay sane for the next four years?), a bliz­zard in parts of the U.S. where such events are rare, dom­i­nat­ed the news cycle as a prac­ti­cal­ly apHav­ing thrived above the Arc­tic Cir­cle by choice for mil­len­nia, that alone seems like­ly to dis­in­cline Greenland’s 57,000 cit­i­zens from even con­sid­er­ing  Amer­i­cans as the kind of peo­ple capa­ble of telling them how to live.
Or, as songstress There­sa Brew­er chirped in a 1960s hit:
“Got along with­out ya before I met ya
Gonna get along with­out ya now…”
A sen­ti­ment with which much of the rest of the world may well adapt at one lev­el or anoth­er for the next four years.

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