Defying the Laws of Diplomatic Gravity

Can't Last Long: Salvos Against Canada, Mexico, Panama, Denmark and Other Friends and Partners Are Acutely Counterproductive and Even Dangerous

Photo by Claudia Raya on Unsplash

One gets the sense that President Trump, having defied the laws of political gravity at home and been returned to the presidency against all odds, now believes he can pull off a similar feat of stupefying black magic globally. As a carnival master with a supreme command of the kayfabe¹ pageantry of American politics, where fictionalized entertainment and political reality have fused, he believes he can deploy similar powers of bluster, bullying, and spin in reforging global order. He appears to have been emboldened by his domestic electoral victory and inflated to an almost cartoonish caricature of hubris on a global scale, which is not exactly promising.

Meanwhile, the risks of real world facts crashing through the barrier of make-believe rise exponentially by the day. If he–and we–got lucky during the first round of faux wrestling roulette, the betting odds have plummeted for round two.

*****

Let’s assume for the purposes of this post that the global laws of diplomatic gravity remain in operation. These laws state that it is impossible for any country (including the United States) to accomplish anything of foreign policy consequence alone. It follows that the more support and the less opposition we have from other countries, the better, the easier it will be to achieve our objectives—and vice versa. With these laws in mind, Diplomacy 101 would suggest that we first reach out to neighbors, partners, and close friends, to reassert our common ground and shared interests, and to seek ways to expand them. With our core base of support secured and the momentum moving in the right direction, we approach the fence-sitters, the potential partners who are wavering, and try to persuade them to come to our side. If that proves impossible, we do our best to convince them to stay out of the fray, or at a minimum not to move in the other direction. Finally, we isolate those (hopefully few) whose core interests clash with our own, particularly if we know the differences are irreconcilable. At the same time we continue to seek whatever common ground we can and to keep the lines of communication—and therefore our options—open.

These steps are typically taken in low key fashion, behind the scenes. The quiet building of consensus is even more critical for the success of any plan involving a dramatic departure from the status quo. (There is a saying in diplomacy about there being no limit to what one can accomplish so long as one doesn’t care who gets the credit.) The public roll-out of the plan should come only after we have our ducks in a row, when it is primed and prepared for implementation. Not before. We have to know where we stand, and with whom, before we set off with confidence in a new direction.

In short, make common cause with as many friends as possible, expand the base of your support, try to avoid making enemies, and keep those who you know oppose you from meddling or trying to trip you up. Pretty simple, at least in concept. And the United States, for all our strategic missteps along the way, has done a decent job of it over the past 75 plus years.

*****

But our new neo-imperialist bluffer or bully-in-chief has flipped this script on its head. He has assailed friendly neighbors, threatened allies and partners, done nothing to reassure fence-sitters (quite the opposite), while remaining mum about our rivals and enemies. (What happened to ending Russia’s war on Ukraine in the first 24 hours?...) And he’s conducted it all as part of a predictably bumptious and bombastic public show, without even a nod to the intensive, behind-the-scenes spadework required to produce diplomatic results in the real world. Yes, it’s back to “Manifest Destiny”, with the United States apparently poised to launch into a new phase of imperial expansion, if only pretend. Or is it? And by what means?

Two broadly opposed consequences could flow from Trump’s disregard of diplomatic laws and disdain for diplomatic norms. The first—premised on his being a strategic genius deploying the bare-knuckled tactics of the New York real estate mogul and the carnival barker’s gift for emotional manipulation (which mere mortals like me can’t understand)—is that the president will get what he wants, successfully asserting American dominance in a fraying global order. If so, a hearty congratulations are in order! (After that and at what cost, who knows?) A secondary possibility within this first category is that he will achieve little or nothing concrete, but this doesn’t matter because it was never the point. The point was the bluster and show, the smoke and mirrors, the endless kayfabe distraction. (Does anyone doubt the real purpose behind wanting to rename the Gulf of Mexico?) To achieve this, he will count on the fact that, with the fire hose of bullshit flooding the zone nonstop, nobody will remember two weeks from now, much less two months or two years. Who cares about yesterday’s news?

The second possible consequence is less pretty. Premised on the idea that the president may not know what he’s doing, may not even care, and may be grossly misreading the global strategic context, these efforts will backfire. They will alienate friends, push away fence-sitters, and strengthen rivals while incentivizing everyone everywhere to break the existing rules of the fraying international system in the same way we would be doing. Even if the United States remains the richest and most powerful country in the world, we don’t have the luxury of command (if we ever did), only the leverage of persuasion. Meantime, that leverage is declining in relative terms. In case the commander in chief has forgotten, we’re not the only power player in town, and our most important strategic competitor, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), has what many countries around the world (including in the western hemisphere) see as a pretty good offer.² Moreover, until now, our soft power—our democracy, openness, and cooperation based on broadly shared values and gains—represented a core component of our comparative advantage, a big part of our draw. What happens to our leverage when that soft power edge, too, gets eroded or destroyed?

In these treacherous cross-currents, why single out neighbors and friends for naming and shaming? Why target them first? This defies easy (I want to say rational) explanation. It seems absurd to have to remind anyone that Canada is about as good a neighbor as a country could wish to have, and that our diplomatic cooperation is as close to seamless as one might imagine between two sovereign nations. For its part, Mexico, particularly since NAFTA, has been transformed from a “distant neighbor” into a close strategic partner: The challenges we face—drug-fueled violence and illegal immigration chief among them—are challenges we face together. Investment, trade, and extensive family and people ties bind us closer still. The first Trump administration itself updated NAFTA into the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA). How would new tariffs fit into the scheme of this binding agreement? Or does that, too, simply not matter?

Pulling back the camera a bit, Panama’s current (conservative) government is otherwise disposed to take our side in the broader strategic competition. Panamanian president Jose Raul Mulino is what diplomats call “like-minded”. Why the pointless provocation? We negotiated to turn over control of the Canal to the Panamanian government decades ago because it hung around our neck like an albatross of remnant colonialism and counterproductive strategic tension, with no prospect of future improvement. On the contrary, the costs of continuing U.S. control clearly outweighed the benefits, and the balance looked to skew ever further in the wrong direction. Do we now want those costs back too?³ As for Greenland, I can only return to Diplomacy 101. Assuming the intentions are serious (not necessarily prima facie absurd), we would need first to have worked quietly behind the scenes to build the needed consensus with the Greenlanders themselves, the Danish government, and for that matter the EU (of which Denmark is a longstanding member). Such a dramatic geopolitical change has to make sense for all concerned.

To continue with these examples, if our president really intended to convert Canada into the 51st American state, retake control over the Panama Canal, acquire the vast resource-rich island of Greenland, or achieve whatever other seemingly outlandish neo-imperialist diplomatic fantasy, he would need real buy-in and active support from the parties involved. Our Canadian, Panamanian, and Danish friends—not to mention other allies and partners in the Western Hemisphere, the European Union and NATO—would have to perceive it as being in their interests, too. They would need not only to agree with the plan, they would also have to be prepared to pitch in, preferably with enthusiasm.

But at the risk of stating the obvious, none of these things currently hold, and none appear likely to hold anytime soon. Instead, the president’s public declarations have produced a predictably dampening effect. They have triggered opposition rather than support. They have caused our partners to pull back and dig in, irritating, annoying, and rattling them. If sowing doubt among friends wasn’t enough, they have also undermined—probably even destroyed—the possibility of the things actually happening. Was this rabbit-back-in-the-hat move done by design too? In the absence of broad agreement, assuming the intention to pursue (any element of) the plan remains in place, and assuming the price (now more than before) will never be right, we would be faced with the unimaginable. Naked coercion would be required. Will the big stick be the go-to “diplomatic” tool in our new president’s neo-imperialist toolkit? What happened to speaking softly? Might he be willing to threaten war on those who had been our closest partners and friends, including (in the case of Canada and Denmark) NATO allies?

Why does it suddenly feel foolish to say that this is unimaginable?

*****

Many foreign policy observers have lamented the potential destruction of the post WWII rules-based international system, thanks (in part) to the brash actions of its principal founding partner. Many have warned of a re-emerging international order where might makes right, where the strong do what they will and the weak endure what they must, without even the pretense of mediation enabled by established institutional mechanisms. Many have foreshadowed the risks to the interests of the United States itself in such a neo-realpolitik, balance of power, dog eat dog world—frighteningly similar to the fraught global order that held in the run-up to the great world wars of the 20th century. We may remain the world’s dominant power, as these observers suggest, but we would be giving up more than we know in abandoning time-battered (and tested) international institutions. We may have invested a great deal in them, more than any other single nation by far, but we have received at least as much in return. Meanwhile, if we can grab the Panama Canal because it was “ours” and take Greenland because, well, because we want to, what might the PRC do about Taiwan and other places in “its” self-defined geopolitical orbit? What might Russia do not just in Ukraine but with the other states of the former Soviet Union? And that’s just for starters.

Must we really relearn the old lessons of history in this way?

*****

Meantime, I find myself equally troubled by a more niggling but not necesssarily less consequential concern. As a former humble practitioner of the diplomatic trade on the equivalent of the Off, Off Broadway stage, I wonder what happens when reality breaks through the make-believe barrier, when the palpable world of people, nations and interests intrudes on the staged, when the nakedly real collides with the extravagant kayfabe? Politics and statecraft have always turned, to some degree, on stagecraft. Optics can play as important a role as substance, including in large scale shock and awe-type operations. Perception may trump content in certain cases, maybe even often. But there is always a presumed connection, however tenuous or tendentious, between the representation and the thing represented. What happens when that connection is severed? What happens when every gesture is meant to be empty? What happens when every act really is only symbolic, solely for show?

A troubling scene in the excellent Netflix documentary about Vince McMahon of World Wrestling Federation (WWF) fame recurs in my mind like a nightmare of trepidation in this connection. Due to an equipment malfunction, Canadian wrestler Owen Hart (nom de guerre Blue Blazer) plunges to his death while being lowered into the arena Deus-Ex-Machina style. Unsure whether it is real or part of the show, the crowd of tens of thousands in the stadium (and millions of paying TV viewers, too, presumably) goes wild. But the seeming faked death fall turns out to be real. It turns out even staged violence can produce concrete injury, even grisly death.

What happens when the principles of faux wrestling are applied to the grinding gears of international affairs? What happens when the diplomatic equipment—unmaintained, derided, and even discarded—malfunctions on the grand stage of the real world? What happens when the violence unleashed, whether by accident or by deliberate provocation, was always meant to be real? What happens when it occurs at unimaginable scale?

The perfect fusion of politics with entertainment may be a done deal domestically, but I have a sneaking feeling that in the larger arena of the big wide world, it ain’t done with us yet.

1. Kayfabe is a word that originates from the world of professional wrestling, and refers to the “fact or convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic.” Since I encountered that word, the Trump phenom in U.S. politics began to make more sense.

2. In a recent posting in his Substack newsletter Leading Thoughts, Christopher Smart shows clearly the diversifying nature of global economic leverage and the relative decline in the U.S. share of global trade flows:

As The World Turns

3. A thorough and sober assessment of the Panama Canal question appears in the current version of America’s Quarterly, making clear that any move to retake control would produce an outcome decidedly different than the one presumably intended. https://americasquarterly.org/article/why-the-u-s-should-not-take-back-the-panama-canal/