Ezra Klein, The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy, NYTimes, March 1, 2025. Klein interviews Fareed Zakaria. Here's Klein's statement of Trump's foreign policy:
Let me try to reflect what Trump’s people tell me. There is this, as people call it, rules-based international order. And the thing that people like Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan and Fareed Zakaria say is that America benefits from that order — and benefits from being part of that order.
There has long been a critique from the left that America, in fact, dominates that order and doesn’t play by its rules. We break international law. We do the things we want to do and then use those rules on others when we don’t like what they’re doing.
But the critique from Trump is that’s not true: Of every country, America, as the strongest, is harmed the most by these restraints, rules and laws. Because we have so much leverage we could be using. We could slap tariffs on anybody for any reason and get them to do what we want. We have the strongest military of all the militaries. Everybody wants to be on our side, and everybody fears being on our bad side.
And what Trump is doing is systematically searching out the strength America has — the ways we can wield our weight and leverage. He’s untying our hands from behind our back.
Zakaria's response:
There is a certain truth to that. The United States does have enormous power. And by the way, they’re even right about the fact that the United States is more open to, for example, the world’s goods and services than the world is to ours. The United States has long practiced a kind of asymmetrical free trade.
After World War II, we decided we would open up our markets to Europe and East Asia, to Japan and South Korea. And the reason we did that was we were trying to build an international system where everyone benefited, where there really wasn’t that feeling of a beggar-thy-neighbor, zero-sum game, where everyone went into a competitive spiral, which then ended up in nationalism and war.
We were trying to build something different. And we thought: We can be a little generous here. Let’s let everyone grow, and we’ll do fine in the process.
And of course, the data is overwhelming. Yes, Europe, Japan, South Korea and places like that grew. But the United States absolutely dominated the world. Because it’s a classic positive-sum game. We created a much larger global economy — much larger trading system, huge capital flows — and we were at the center of it.
The dollar was the reserve currency of the world, which alone gives us incredible advantages. We’re the only country that doesn’t have to worry that much about debt and deficits, because we know that, at the end of the day, the dollar is the reserve currency.
And my feeling is, if you take that system and say: OK, we’re going to look at each bilateral relationship and see if we can squeeze this country for a slightly better deal, you probably will get a better deal. But two things will happen: The first thing is you will end up fracturing your alliances. Because the people with whom you have the most leverage are your allies. [...]
So the result of the Trump doctrine in action has been a war on America’s allies. But the second more important part is: Yes, you’ll gain a little bit here and there by getting slightly better tariff deals. [...] And what you will do, by squeezing each of these individual countries, humiliating them, forcing them to accept renegotiation of terms, is that you lose the relationships that you had built over eight decades, that created this extraordinary anchor of stability in the world, which was the Western alliance. And the gains are not that great.
There's much more at the link.
Trump says we wants peace, but he's moving toward a world in which war is more likely.
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