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Thanks to the Felon, the World Is Cutting Ties With America

As the war in Ukraine continues to grind on with Ukraine increasingly taking the war to the Russian home front, in one area Vladimir Putin continues to have great success: the weakening of America through the actions of the Felon and his band of sycophants.  Long time allies of America have been threatened, insulted and delivered a resounding message that America is not a trustworthy ally and that  the safest course of action is to reduce dependence on America. One immediate outcome has been America's isolation in its failing war with Iran which is continuing to deplete America's munitions supplies and again cause oil prices to rise. But the damage extends far beyond the Iranian front as nation's rethink who they purchase armaments from to who they sign trade deals with, including Canada, our former strong ally to the north. It's hard to see any goal of the Felon's actions - when not focused on shocking self-enrichment - other than degrading American power around the globe.  As a piece in the New York Times lays out, some of this damage may never be fully undone even after the Felon has left office and/or this world (another Times column also looks at this ongoing damage to America's best interests):

In March 2023, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, laid out a strategy for managing the coercive policies of China. Europe, she argued, should “de-risk” from its dependence on the economic juggernaut by joining forces and building homegrown alternatives.

Three years later, de-risking from predatory superpowers remains the fundamental challenge facing European leaders, but China is no longer the main country of concern: The United States is. As they publicly seek to mollify a vindictive American president, policymakers across Europe are quietly working to reduce their decades-long dependence on the United States by increasing their own defense, energy and technology industries and diversifying their relationships with other nations. That dynamic was on display last week at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, where President Trump renewed his threats against the U.S. allies Denmark and Spain.

It’s not just Europe backing away from the United States. Leaders of America’s partners in Asia and the Middle East are quietly doing the same. The second Trump administration’s ostentatious corruption, trade conflicts, military adventurism and mercurial artificial intelligence regulation have produced a new moment in international affairs: a nearly global grand strategy of countries distancing themselves from the world’s most powerful nation. . . . For the United States, which has called itself the “indispensable nation” for decades, this represents a sea change.

Now, amid intense competition from China, the erosion of key partnerships is undermining our military edge and world-leading technologies and limiting our ability to respond to China’s industrial advantages.

The Trump administration tends to view weaker foreign ties as positive, on the logic that countries’ doing more for themselves frees America to focus more on its interests. But . . . . .the global de-risking is already hurting Americans at home.

One doesn’t have to look far to see the costs. The lost war against Iran, the first in which we didn’t have diplomatic or military alignment with our closest allies in Europe and Asia, caused a spike in gas and fertilizer prices that contributed to a $132 billion hit to American consumers, according to Moody’s. Even as Europe increased its military spending by 14 percent, to $864 billion, in 2025, its military purchases from American companies actually fell by almost half.

[The Felon's] Mr. Trump’s immigration policies are also driving countries away. Four million fewer visitors came to the United States in 2025 than in 2024, at an estimated cost of more than $8 billion. America is hemorrhaging future skilled labor as enrollment by international university students dropped 17 percent last fall from the prior year, already costing universities at least an estimated $1 billion, and potentially costing the country hundreds of billions in future revenue.

The chilling effect is spreading. As [the Felon's] Mr. Trump muses about making Canada a 51st state, it has embarked on a “new strategic partnership” with China, opened its market for the first time to 50,000 Chinese electric vehicles and joined a more than $150 billion European defense fund aimed at breaking the dependency on the American defense industry.

In East Asia, where Mr. Trump has paused the sale of arms to Taiwan in deference to President Xi Jinping of China, Taipei and allied capitals are recalibrating their relationships. Japan is overhauling its concept of national defense to develop greater offensive strike capabilities. South Korean contractors are displacing American arms sellers around the world.

India is deepening commercial ties with Europe, the Middle East and even, grudgingly, China. India is one of a growing number of countries sufficiently worried about reliable access to American frontier A.I. models that it is reconsidering Chinese or domestic alternatives.

But nowhere is the push to de-risk from the United States more costly to both sides — and disadvantageously timed — than on the continent that coined the phrase. Once-unthinkable conversations are underway in European capitals. European officials tell me they are quietly developing plans for responding in the event of a full-blown trade war with America that would include choking off our technology companies’ access to the continent’s vast market or limiting key inputs like semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

[S]ome de-risking can have some benefits for the United States. Expanded European defense capacity could eventually free up American resources. . . . But the divisions Mr. Trump is causing are different. . . . Some costs of the world’s de-risking from America are already hitting home. Others won’t be evident overnight. Allies were right not to join Mr. Trump’s unnecessary Iran fiasco, but our ability to deter future conflicts is weakened by our greater isolation.

As our partners enhance their own resiliency to us, future American administrations must prepare plans for avoiding a more fundamental rupture. Whoever succeeds [the Felon] Mr. Trump will be the first to take office with countries around the world asking not what America can do for them, but rather seeking to do as much as possible without us. The first step to coping with the fallout is realizing just how much — and how permanently — the world has changed.

Then there is this from the second column:

It’s not just NATO. Bureaucracies once defined by their lethargy are moving at surprising speed to limit their exposure to both the U.S. government and the companies that serve as outposts of American power. Since taking office a little over a year ago, Mr. Carney’s government has made just over 100 international trade deals. The European Union has expanded its defense procurement deliberately to avoid integration with American military forces. Disentanglement from American technology will be the thorniest knot to undo, but the work is already underway on this, too: The European Union has switched from Google to the French Qwant as a default search engine in its official systems, while Belgium and Finland have both moved away from Amazon Web Services. . . . . An increasingly isolationist America is no longer the leader of the free world. How can it be, when it’s no longer the leader of itself?

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MAGA’s Birthright Meltdown Is in Full Effect

Despite what they may say, one of the underlying motivation for the MAGA base - and the Felon and his minions - is racism.   When the Felon came down the escalator in 2015 and attacked Hispanics and depicted them as murderers and rapists, that set the blueprint for attacking and maligning non-whites and appealing to aggrieved whites who believe the advancement and achievement of others can only come through taking from these whites who are unable to see the common humanity in others who may look different from them or hold different beliefs.  This dovetails with the "Christian" nationalists who believe only white Christians should govern the nation.  Hence the strident attacks on immigrants who in their sick and small minds are all racial minorities who come to America to steal it from "real Americans." Hence the obsession with ending birthright citizenship even though most of these folks somewhere in their own ancestry likely gained citizenship through birthright citizenship.  Currently, the State Department's shift of interviewers of prospective immigrants from numerous nations in order to solely focus on white South Africans reveals the racism at the core of much of the MAGA movement and the Felon's contempt for non-whites.  It's only black, brown and other non-white immigrants who are not welcomed.  (My own father is the beneficiary of birthright citizenship following his Austrian parents arrival in America around 1913 while much of my mother's English and French ancestry traces back to Massachusetts in the 1600's, and the early days of New Orleans and Charleston.)  A column in the New York Times looks at this MAGA obsession:

On July 4, the world’s richest man made an ominous declaration. To follow Elon Musk’s X feed is to peer into a dystopian reality where immigrants are murderous brutes, Black-on-white crime is endemic and the “makers” in America are under siege from the “takers,” the people who live merely as parasites off the productivity of others.

But on the 250th birthday of his adopted country, he did something that might seem surprising but is entirely consistent with his hateful, paranoid trajectory: He turned on the American founding. A science fiction author and X personality named Devon Eriksen wrote, “Elon, this is the moment where you’re supposed to wise up and abandon classical liberalism. If you let takers vote, they will not only take more and more, they will make it more and more rewarding to be a taker, and they will convert more and more makers into takers, forever.” “Universal suffrage leads to universal suffering,” he concluded.

“Classical liberalism,” for those not up on political terms of art, refers to the philosophy of the American founding, the creation of a rights-based republic of democratic rule restrained by constitutionally protected liberties. And what was Musk’s response to this direct assault on democracy and American liberty? “I have wised up,” he said.

I thought almost immediately of Peter Thiel, another wealthy right-wing mogul. . . . . all the way back in 2009, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

That’s why the founders created a government of limited powers restrained by, among other things, the Bill of Rights. But they also believed in the social contract theory of government, in the idea that governments gain their legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

Freedom and democracy aren’t incompatible; they’re inseparable.

Musk’s and Thiel’s views would be notable enough, especially given their extraordinary political influence on the right, but their views aren’t coming from nowhere. They’re rooted in a profound sense of pessimism and despair that is spreading throughout the right.

From the inception of the MAGA movement, it has attracted a cohort of explicitly postliberal academics and intellectuals. These are often people who believe that liberalism itself — the belief in a rights-based approach to democracy — is deeply and profoundly flawed.

America, they believe, is dying — if it’s not dead already — and they hate the nation it’s becoming. How many times, for example, have we heard President Trump say that “you won’t have a country anymore” if he loses or if his plans are thwarted? In his mind (and in the minds of millions of his supporters), the fate of the country always hangs in the balance.

When the Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship decision last week, Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s most powerful adviser, said that the court read the Constitution to require “national self-obliteration” and added for good measure that the ruling was a “deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic.”

Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, a right-wing web magazine, responded to the ruling by suggesting a series of possible measures, including, incredibly enough, the “dissolution of the union” and the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

And, of course, no summary of the right-wing reaction to the ruling would be complete without overt racism. A MAGA X user writing as I Am Leah wrote that “18 years from now, my kid’s votes will be canceled out by a third-world cockroach whose cockroach mom arrived here three minutes ago.”

Don’t think for a moment that the birthright citizenship ruling was any kind of tipping point. In fact, it was more or less business as usual. Darkness covers the right. On June 28 a podcaster and columnist for The Blaze, another right-wing outlet, wrote that the assassination of Charlie Kirk “should have started a literal civil war between red and blue America.”

Kirk’s assassination was an evil act, but the idea that it should have triggered civil war in this country is deranged.

The people above — who range from a sometime trillionaire to billionaires to government officials to journalists and pundits — aren’t exceptional on the populist right. They’re emblematic of a movement that, like Trump, is constantly arguing that this country is minutes away from midnight and that only the most extreme measures can yank America back from the brink of destruction.

Part of the rage seems to be rooted in a sense that MAGA came oh so close to winning. Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “The fact that it was 5-4 — so agonizingly close — just underscored that the legal community on the right and left has been so wrong for so many years, saying this was going to be a 9-0 ruling against President Trump.”

But that’s not quite right. Yes, there were only five unqualified votes for the constitutional status quo, but there were six total votes for birthright citizenship (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that birthright citizenship was required by statute, not the Constitution), and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent indicated that he was mainly concerned with citizenship for the children of temporary visitors.

The conservatism of my youth positioned itself in direct opposition to Communism in both its Soviet and its Chinese forms. Fascism (and everything like it) was dead, and no one wanted to revive it.

How wrong I was. Parts of the right still posture as patriots, but they have imagined a different kind of patriotism, one that loves the country but scorns its creed. They — like Musk on July 4 — reject the classical liberal founding or at least de-emphasize its importance compared with the ancestral lineage of its citizens.

Vance is making a version of the argument that a certain subset of Americans — sometimes called heritage Americans — enjoys a superior claim to American citizenship. At its most extreme ends, proponents of the idea have even assigned letter grades to your citizenship based on the length of your American family roots.

As my friend and former Dispatch colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote, this is a form of identity politics: “It literally grades individuals on a metric they have zero control over. It’s no different than assigning grades based on skin color, sex or height.”

And if America isn’t rooted in its creed — and if certain classes of citizens have a superior claim to their American identity than other citizens — then it is a short trip to believing that the American government exists to serve only the favored class, the “real Americans” who make up, say, the MAGA base.

In this formulation, true patriotism isn’t the preservation of the creed; it’s the preservation of the people. And once you see this distinction, MAGA’s entire governing philosophy makes infinitely more sense.

Why crack down so aggressively on immigration? Immigrants — especially those from the global south — are not and can never be part of the people. They’re the “invaders” whom progressives want to use to replace the “real” American electorate.

[B]irthright citizenship is especially noxious to the populist right. They scorn it as relying on magic dirt — the idea that there is something inherent in American soil that makes a person an American citizen.

Yet the same populists seem to believe in something like magic blood — that one’s lineage can make one superior. You can see it in the constant anger against immigrants. You can see it in the racism of constantly highlighting crimes committed by Black and brown people, citizens and immigrants alike.

I don’t want to denigrate the idea of respecting one’s ancestors. . . . . . I can be proud of where I came from without believing there’s anything magic about my blood. While I want to live up to the best parts of my ancestors’ example, they don’t make me any better as an American than my friend Leo, a Mexican immigrant, who served side by side with me in Iraq. The worth of my citizenship is judged by the value of my choices, not by the identity of my parents, much less that of my great-grandparents.

America doesn’t have magic dirt, and it certainly doesn’t have magic blood. But it does have a magic idea — the creed that declares “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address — these are the proclamations that define who we are. They are the core of the American creed, and without that creed, America might retain its name, but it will not retain its nature.

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Iran, Not the Felon, Is in Control of This War

Iran and the USA are again exchanging drones and missiles in the Felon's war of choice, oil and gas prices are spiking again, and the Felon again insulted and threatened NATO allies at the summit in Turkey.  America is largely isolated on the world stage largely due to the Felon's own actions and behavior by his own actions and the Iranians must be smiling with glee as they now largely control the war, having learned what a powerful weapon they have in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and being willing to take American strikes as a cost of further defeating the USA and the Felon in particular.  Oh, and reports are out that the Pentagon is running out of money. All of what is happening with the Strait was foretold and the Felon ignored all warnings, believing himself smarter than all others and clinging to the warmongering of Pete Hegseth and Benjamin Netanyahu.  All of this leaves the Felon with few options - a ground invasion seems to be beyond what the Felon wants to risk before the mid-term elections - as laid out in a piece at The Atlantic.  I'm sure the Iranians plan to persist and create even more dissatisfaction on the American home front over a war that should never have been launched:

If [the Felon] Donald Trump ever had any control over the war he started with Iran, he’s lost it. The Iranians are now setting the terms of this conflict and are routinely humiliating the American president. The “cease-fire” Trump declared last month—a move probably meant to both soothe international markets and avert legislative action from the United States Congress—never really existed, because neither side ever ceased firing. The situation is now back to a kind of slow-motion punch-up: In the past few days, the Iranians struck three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the Americans attacked some 80 targets in Iran, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now claims it hit some 85 U.S.-affiliated targets in Bahrain and Kuwait.

This morning, Trump was asked whether the memorandum of understanding with Iran, the document that was supposed to provide the foundation for negotiations, was dead. Trump hesitated a bit and said: “That’s a very interesting question. To me, I think it’s over. I don’t wanna deal with them anymore. They’re scum, you know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people.”

Last month, of course, Trump had nothing but nice things to say about the Iranian leaders. “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.” . . . . The MOU was practically an instrument of American capitulation that the Iranians could have drafted themselves, but Trump wanted to get out of the war, and so he signed it—appropriately enough, at Versailles.

The Iranians have made clear that they don’t care about the MOU or, for that matter, what Trump thinks or wants. They are willing to inflict more damage on the Gulf states, and they’re willing to accept damage in return. These are signs of a state directing a war rather than reacting to one. Iran is measuring costs and risks. It is pursuing the achievable goals of regime survival, control of the Strait, and preservation of its nuclear program.

The Trump administration, for its part, bumbled into this war without a strategy. Instead, it relied on bad assumptions, outdated information, and the president’s gut feelings. It assumed—because the president wished very hard—that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who encouraged Trump to go to war) ignored years of analysis and war-gaming from the military and the intelligence community, and then were caught flat-footed when the Iranians closed the strait and choked the international economy, the one thing everyone else in the world knew they would do. . . . . the United States is now merely depleting its stocks of expensive ordnance to little strategic effect.

Even by his usual standards, Trump has been incoherent in Ankara, Turkey, where he’s attending a NATO summit. Over the course of 24 hours, he has renewed his demands for the United States to own Greenland; confused Iran with Japan; and confused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Little wonder, then, that he seems unable to give sensible answers to questions about the renewed hostilities. When asked today about more attacks on Iran, Trump said: “You know, normally I wouldn’t tell you. I wouldn’t tell you, but you know what, there’s not a thing they can do about it. So, the answer is probably.” Not exactly an answer full of fire and fury.

In other words: I don’t know what else to do, so we’ll do some more strikes and then see what Iran does.

This is not the approach of a president who’s running a war; this is the flailing of a man who’s in over his head and is reacting to events, rather than guiding them. Lest this kind of equivocation lead the Iranians to doubt Trump’s resolve, the president has added that he’s still considering two other terrible ideas: an invasion of Iranian territory, and a campaign of probable war crimes.

First, he has returned to talking about seizing Kharg Island, an operation that would require a considerable commitment of ground forces and inevitably lead to U.S. casualties. Second, he has again raised the possibility of striking Iran’s infrastructure, including bridges and desalination plants. Such installations, if they are significantly contributing to Iran’s military effort, might be considered legitimate targets. Trump, however, seems to have in mind immiserating the civilian population as a means of driving the regime to the table—which would be a serious violation of the laws of war.

Fortunately, Trump is unlikely to do any of this. Hours after his various responses, he was asked if the war was back on in full force. His answer was revealing about his limited ability to control the circumstances of the conflict, and a clear signal to the Iranians not to worry about anything he says, because he’ll always change his mind.

At any rate, Trump capped these remarks by assuring his audience, and perhaps even those listening in Tehran: “We’re not looking for long term.”

I taught strategy at the Naval War College to military officers and senior civilians for a long time. The subject does not have a lot of hard-and-fast rules; wars share common characteristics but each conflict has its own peculiarities and exigent circumstances. One good guideline, however, is to avoid threatening your enemy and then immediately announcing that you really have no stomach for a fight. Strong leaders keep their own counsel and let their actions speak for them; weak leaders make threats and then broadcast how much they don’t want to carry them out.

Trump is now going through something like the stages of wartime grief: Denial that America failed; anger, which has led to renewed attacks; and then bargaining, as if the Iranians could somehow be bought off like a gang of recalcitrant construction workers in New York. None of it has worked. Depression and acceptance await.

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