The Trump administration’s deployment to Latin America in recent days offered a nugget of insight into the president’s unusual worldview.
In Panama City, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sternly told President José Raúl Mulino that the United States would take “measures” if Panama did not reduce Chinese influence over the Panama Canal — an ominous warning, given President Donald Trump’s avowed interest in taking over the canal.
Eight hundred miles to the east, in Caracas, meanwhile, a meeting between Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was congenial. The United States got something from it: Maduro released six Americans held in Venezuelan prisons and agreed to take back Venezuelans deported from the United States. In exchange, Maduro got some priceless pics in Miraflores Palace smiling alongside the American diplomat. Granting an image of legitimate respectability, they offered the Venezuelan autocrat a future of promise.
The contrast here is alarming. Panama is a close ally of Washington. It has offered its help to stop migrants on their way to the United States. And Mulino is a self-avowed friend. Maduro, on the other hand, has a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head.
What’s more troubling is that this asymmetry in treatment of friend and foe seems to be Washington’s new norm. From his desire to take Greenland from Denmark and make Canada the 51st state, to his warning to Panama and his (postponed) tariffs against Mexico and Canada, Trump has dished out his bullying worst to America’s allies. Next in line for the tariff treatment is the European Union.
China — a geopolitical rival and Trump’s personal bête noire — was hit with tariffs for real, though lower than those threatened against Canada and Mexico. Russia, like Venezuela, is benefiting from Trump’s softer side. Although the president has raised the prospect of unspecified new sanctions against Moscow if it doesn’t negotiate a settlement with Kyiv, he has also taken positions that Russian President Vladimir Putin tends to agree with, including his opposition to Ukraine’s joining NATO. “We will be speaking,” Trump said of Putin, “and I think will perhaps do something that’ll be significant” toward ending the war.
Treating allies worse than adversaries is not in the standard diplomatic playbook, but it fits Trump’s transactional approach. His diplomacy has no place for alliances based on shared values and bound by international conventions and legal frameworks. The deals he pursues are meant to achieve narrow goals. Trump will happily threaten to breach the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that he himself reached with those countries during his first term, in the interest of any short-term win.
This way of operating tends to suit the autocratic governments of America’s foes. Rulers such as Putin, Maduro and Xi Jinping of China prefer to govern in the same way — unimpeded by human rights treaties, laws of war or other obstacles. They speak Trump’s language. But they will never become trustworthy allies of the United States.
In contrast, America’s erstwhile friends, the co-signers of the old liberal democratic order that Washington once took pride in leading — are recoiling from Trump’s strategy. And this bodes ill for the world’s stability and security. As the Trump administration transforms the nature of diplomacy, it risks isolating the United States.
A poll taken for the European Council on Foreign Relations after the November election found that only 22 percent of people in a sampling of nine E.U. countries consider America to be an ally “that shares our interests and values.” This is down from 31 percent two years ago.
President Joe Biden might have been as keen as Trump to antagonize China and to withdraw from the world economy into a protectionist crouch, but he also understood that taking on rivals as powerful and resourceful as China requires strengthening the country’s most significant friendships, not dismantling them. Driven by disdain for the alliances, norms and institutions that shaped the West after World War II, Trump seems to believe that America is strong enough to bully its partners. Every ally he casts aside, however, is a win for Moscow and Beijing.
— The Washington Post
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Publish date : 2025-02-17 18:34:00
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