So, Is Trump Trolling Canada?

President Trump: Canada can keep their national anthem when they become the 51st state pic.twitter.com/85aVHsRQ9v

— Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) March 13, 2025

I tend to stay away from Victor Davis Hanson; I find his views just a little too pre-digested and several days behind what's actually going on, but the YouTube post below gives me a basis on which to make a different point:

At 4:29. he says,

We don't want Canada as a 51st state, and Trump knows that, and The Art of the Deal, trolling style, he knows that. Canada is a very left-wing country, socialized medicine, state-run industries. Its GDP is not as great as similar-size California, which also has 40 million people, but its per capita income average is about like Mississippi. I don't think it's as large as Mississippi's per capita income. But more importantly, if it was a state, if the whole country was a state, it would get two left-wing Senators and probably 50 left-wing House of Representatives.

But the headline of the same post is "THERE IS NO QUESTION CANADA IS DONE". Is this hyperbole? Do we really want a failed state on our northern border? Prof Hanson does offer a solution, assuming Canada is in fact a basket case, which is basically to rebuild its shipbuilding industry and reduce its tariffs on US goods. But will that really turn the country around? I haven't had the chance to ask him directly, but my experience of professors is that he won't have a good answer if I do.

Let's start with the professor's reading of Trump. His view of whether Trump actually wants Canada is a definite no. But the business-school analysis of Trump's style that I've been quoting for much of the past week points out that Trump relies heavily on ambiguity and uncertainty, delivered with bravado. Yesterday I linked a Politico piece that suggested the White House's position on the continuing resolution smacked of "over-confidence bordering on arrogance", but so far, it looks as though the White House's take has been absolutely spot on.

And let's recognize that in the week or so leading up to tonight's CR deadline, it looks as though the Democrats worked from the assumption that Johnson wouldn't be able to get enough Republicans in line to form a majority for the CR, the whole project would die in the House, and Schumer wouldn't have the dilemma he now faces. In this case, Trump's bravado helped to set up a situation where his opposition didn't take him seriously enough to work out a Plan B, and all of a sudden Trump's success came as a big surprise.

So I think it's dangerous to discount statements on how Canada can keep its national anthem when it becomes a state as just trolling. They're a recognized, and in fact highly successful, part of Trump's negotiating style.

But let's move to Prof Hanson's list of the specific disadvantages to Trump and the US if Canada should become a single state. It's a very liberal, even heavily socialized, country, and it would bring in two left-wing senators and maybe 50 left-wing House members. Canadians would be expecting their single-payer health plan to continue, and likely many other programs that would be unique to Canada, highly expensive, and a sudden new burden to the US federal budget.

On top of that, with only a few exceptions, the states that have entered the US after the 13 colonies have come in as basically unorganized frontier areas without pre-existing constitutions or legal systems, and their populations effectively grew de novo. The biggest exception up to now is Hawaii, which, however, became a US territory in 1900 as a result of US and European businessmen overthrowing the monarchy with the intent of fostering a US-style business environment -- and Hawaii only became a state after 60 years of US territorial administration.

It's worth noting that two US territories, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, became part of the US, but not states, at the same time as Hawaii and had existing constitutional and legal systems under Spain. The Philippines elected to become entirely independent, while Puerto Rico so far has not chosen to become a state. Again, the circumstances for Canada would have to be completely different.

How Canada would become a state would be via some procedure, and under specific circumstances, that nobody can easily predict right now, but would be completely unique. It would certainly be an obstacle that a certain amount of anti-Americanism has been part of the Canadian character, and as Prof Hanson suggests, Liberal politicians are using Trump's current bravado, taken as trolling, to inflame such passions in the runup to the coming election.

But if Trump is Trump -- or, if the necessary circumstances arise after he leaves office, but his successors continue with a Trumpian strategy -- the circumstances that would lead to Canada's admission to the Union would be those under which Canada would have few or no other options, just like the circumstances facing Sen Schumer over the CR. Such circumstances might involve collapse of the Canadian economy over tariff-related issues, which Prime Minister Trudeau has recently predicted.

They might involve a territorial incursion over some Arctic-related dispute, giving Canada no option but to allow the US military full rein to conduct its national defense under NATO Article 5. They might involve national bankruptcy over some issue other than tariffs, with the US electing to guarantee the Canadian national debt in return for statehood. In any such case, with a Trumpian conducting negotiations, Canada would simply have to have no other reasonable option.

But that would be the point -- it would be a situation where the US held the cards, and the US would be in a position to walk away if Canada didn't take the deal. On one hand, there are in fact plenty of conservative Canadians -- the various protests by truckers, religious people, and others during the COVID lockdowns give an indication of what an actual Canadian electorate working under US rules might look like. And if Canada had no other options, negotiations for entry into the Union could certainly include modifications or discontinuance of socialist policies and programs.

But then there's Hanson's other point -- why is Canada's per capita income little different from Mississippi's? Wouldn't policies oriented toward greater middle-class prosperity work to Canada's benefit? I wouldn't rule out the strength of this argument, either.

Given what we've been learning about Trump, I don't think he's trolling at all.

Schumer Shutdown?

For much of the past week, I've been looking at a business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style as it's manifested in both his business and political careers, looking mainly at the issue of Canadian tariffs. But all of a sudden, we're getting a new case study, the House's passage of a continuing resolution, which needed only a simple majority, but now it's moved to the Senate, which needs a 60-vote supermajority to pass a procedural vote.

Trump had a bare majority of Republicans in the House, which he was able to control for the vote. But while he has 53 Republicans in the Senate, he doesn't have the 60-vote supermajority he needs.

Following Tuesday night’s vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced the lower chamber of Congress would recess until March 24, leaving Schumer with the option of accepting the House bill and keeping the federal lights on over the objection of progressive activists, or rejecting it and putting the nation’s capital on course for the 11th partial government shutdown since 1980.

In a statement after the lower chamber passed the funding bill, Johnson said it was “decision time for Senate Democrats: Cast a vote to keep the government open or be responsible for shutting it down.”

While Trump has so far left almost all the public statements on the negotiation to Speaker Johnson, the circumstances as they've developed have Trump's fingerprints all over them. First, as we've seen, Trump's preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options. The House passed the continuing resolution and then promptly adjourned, with the members going home. Per The Hill,

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) sent the House home after the chamber passed the GOP six-month CR mostly along party lines on Tuesday. The House isn’t slated to be back until March 24, leaving Senate Democrats few options beyond eating the GOP’s stopgap measure or allowing the government to shut down.

Neither is palatable to them.

With the shutdown deadline Friday midnight, there's no practical opportunity to call the House back to try to modify the continuing resolution, so the Democrats have only two choices, keep the government open under its terms or shut it down. At the New York Post link above,

Before the Senate convened for Wednesday business, Democrats huddled during a caucus lunch to plot the next steps forward.

. . . “I’ve gone back and forth on this thing three times because it is two horrible choices,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) admitted to reporters before the lunch.

“If you shut down the government, the president is the person who decides what is essential,” Hickenlooper explained. “He decides what part of the government stays open, so you are actually giving him even more power.”

As the business-school analysis points out, "the importance of knowing one’s alternatives has received significant attention in the negotiation literature (e.g., Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991), and Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign, likewise advocated having a viable 'walk‐away' option (Trump 2016c)." In this case, as the Democrats acknowledge, Trump wins with either outcome, but he also has another benefit that he's known for exercising:

If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).

According to The Hill at the link,

What also spooks members is the unknown of what comes after a shutdown starts. Trump is well known for being unpredictable, and how he handles a shutdown is giving Democrats heartburn.

A shutdown would put the Office of Management and Budget in charge of determining what personnel are considered essential and nonessential during its course. Senate Republicans could also hypothetically force vote after vote to reopen the government, giving them further headaches in the process.

“It’s the devil that we know against the devil that we don’t know,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said.

According to Politico,

Senate Democrats haven’t even surrendered yet on a government shutdown — but already White House officials are gloating about making them eat crow, almost taunting them to vote “no.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threw down the gauntlet Wednesday, proclaiming that Republicans don’t have the 60 votes needed to keep the government open past Friday. But President Donald Trump and senior White House officials are increasingly confident Schumer will release enough centrists to put up the votes for passage, according to multiple White House officials I spoke to over the past 24 hours.

. . . In some ways, the White House’s posture smacks of over-confidence bordering on arrogance. During most face-offs like this — when an administration needs the votes of the opposition party for must-pass legislation — there’s typically some sort of outreach, even by the president himself.

Not so with Trump. Instead of extending an olive branch this week, the president used his Oval Office bilateral meeting with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin to attack Schumer in vicious personal terms, saying he’s “no longer Jewish” and calling him a Palestinian.

And despite the fact that they need eight Senate Democrats to back this measure for passage, the White House hasn’t bothered to contact any so far.

Politico here seems to think this is something new or unusual, but the business-school analysis suggests that Trump is being consistent with strategies he's developed over his multiple careers. What's changed is that Trump now has Republican leadership in the House and Senate that he can work with. As Ed Kilgore put it in The Intelligencer,

Like most observers, I vacillate regularly as to whether House Speaker Mike Johnson is an unexpectedly shrewd legislative tactician or is instead Mr. Magoo, a bumbling backwoods pol who survives strictly by blind luck and subservience to Donald Trump. But as Congress moves this week toward a possible government shutdown, there are fresh signs that Johnson knows what he’s doing — or at least is listening to advisers or executive-branch paymasters who know what they are doing. He’s devising a trap for congressional Democrats that is leaving them irresolute and possibly more powerless than ever.

A big difference between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 is that he no longer has to deal with Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, or Mitch McConnell. We still know very little about ju;st what Trump accomplished even when he was out of office.

Trump The Disrupter

I want to look at a secondary example of Trump's role as a disrupter, which he clearly relishes. Most of the attention in recent news cycles has gone to Ukraine and DOGE, but it's important to remember what is almost a side project, Canada. As of late November last year, a few weeks after the election and almost two months before his inauguration, he singlehandedly caused a crisis in the Canadian government, not just the US:

The US president-elect said he would sign an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada, after being inaugurated on 20 January 2025.

. . . Last year, more than 80% of Mexico's exports went to the US, while around 75% of Canada's went to its southern neighbour.

By early January, the threat alone, with Prime Minister Trudeau's flaccid response, forced Trudeau to announce his resignation:

Trudeau, 53, had faced growing calls to quit from inside his Liberal Party, which ramped up in December when deputy prime minister and long-time ally Chrystia Freeland abruptly resigned.

In a public resignation letter, Freeland cited US President-elect Donald Trump's threats of tariffs on Canadian goods, and accused Trudeau of not doing enough to address the "grave challenge" posed by Trump's proposals.

This brings me back to the business-school paper analyzing Trump's negotiating technique that I've been referring to all week. It says that as a negotiator, Trump assumes four roles, observer, performer, controller, and disrupter:

An analysis of Trump’s negotiation behavior reveals how he embodies each of these four roles. His first preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options, giving him both immediate maximum leverage (controller) as well as the opportunity to draw a sharp contrast between the other party’s eagerness to negotiate and his magnanimity in doing so given his many purportedly superior options (performer). If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).

His strategy with Canada is a perfect illustration of the point. He knows -- I have a feeling he's understood this for many years -- that Canada has no option vis-a-vis the US. Its economy, never strong, depends almost entirely on tariff disparities with the US, and if Trump threatens to disrupt these, it brings down the Canadian government. At the same time, Trump preemptively disparages any other option by characterizing Trudeau as the governor of the 51st state.

All of this is immensely entertaining -- The crisis forced Trudeau to travel to Mar-a-Lago to beg for mercy within days of the initial threat in November, which gave Trump an opportunity to seem magnanimous.

Speaking to reporters outside his hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday morning, Trudeau said his conversation with Trump was "excellent" but did not respond to any additional questions.

Trudeau also took to X on Saturday to thank Trump for dinner at Mar-a-Lago and added, "I look forward to the work we can do together, again."

But the subtext of the whole episode was inescapable: Canada in fact has no options other than to try to satisfy Trump in whatever face-saving way it can. This is a truth that most Canadians are deeply unwilling to face, and the various grandiose counterthreats Canadian politicians made in subsequent weeks reflect this. Chrystia Freeland, who had hoped to succeed Trudeau, just a week ago

warned that Trump poses a direct "threat" to Canada's sovereignty by saying that the country could potentially become the 51st U.S. state.

Trump has said that Canada is "not viable as a country" without U.S. trade.

Freeland proposed forming stronger defense ties with France and Britain, as their nuclear arsenals could aid Canada "at a time when the United States can pose a threat."

Freeland nevertheless lost badly to Mark Carney in the internal Liberal party vote to succeed Trudeau, I suspect because it was understood that this was in fact not a serious option. Trudeau himself used similar apocalyptically grandiose language:

Trudeau accused the US president of planning "a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us".

"That is never going to happen. We will never be the 51st state," he told reporters on Tuesday.

"This is a time to hit back hard and to demonstrate that a fight with Canada will have no winners."

The response from Trump the Performer was

[Y]our brilliant anthem, 'O Canada,' will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!

Ontario Premiuer Doug Ford resorted to similar ineffectual threats:

Trump has a message for Canada after Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatens to 'shut off electricity completely' to the US... pic.twitter.com/W1JtjqCogf

— Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) March 11, 2025

But Ford almost immediately backed down, while Trump was predictably "magnanimous":

Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced on Tuesday that he would suspend a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to Americans states and would meet with American officials to resolve a trade dispute that has roiled markets in recent days.

"Today, United States Secretary of Commerce [Howard Lutnick] and Premier of Ontario Doug Ford had a productive conversation about the economic relationship between the United States and Canada," the pair said in a joint statement.

UPDATE: It got worse for Ford:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is apologizing to the American people for the fallout from the ongoing trade negotiations between Canada and the United States — and calling for an end to the “chaos” to save “millions of jobs.”

Ford made assurances that a trade deal would be settled between the two North American nations prior to the April 2 deadline during an interview on WABC’s “Cats & Cosby” — and added a very Canadian “Sorry, eh,” directed toward US citizens.

“I want to apologize to the American people. I spent 20 years of my life in the US, in New Jersey, in Chicago. I love the American people. I absolutely love them,” Ford told hosts John Catsimitides and Rita Cosby.

This goes to another aspect of Trump's negotiating style discussed in the business-school link:

Most importantly, Trump the disrupter manages ambiguity – seeking to minimize it for himself and maximize it for others. He doesn’t like surprises: “Anticipating and preparing for problems will save you time and resources and stop surprises that could cost you a ton,” he advised in Trump 101 (Trump 2006: 19; also see Cook and Dawsey 2017).

But ambiguity has been an enduring part of Trump’s negotiation toolkit from his early days as a businessman to the present day as occupant of the Oval Office. Before running for president he wrote, “never let anyone know exactly where you’re coming from. Knowledge is power, so keep as much of it to yourself as possible” (Trump and Kiyosaki 2011: 148). “I want to be unpredictable,” Trump told the audience at one of his presidential campaign rallies (Trump 2016a). Indeed, he stressed in a campaign foreign policy speech that “we must as a nation be more unpredictable” (Trump 2016c, emphasis added).

Is Trump serious about making Canada the 51st state? Who knows? Certainly all the Canadian politicians across the spectrum are fanning national indignation over the prospect -- Canada is not for sale! We will never be the 51st state! This is a time to hit back hard! But is Trump really serious, or is he trolling? If he's just trolling, doesn't this make the feckless rage and threats north of the border all the more ridiculous? But if he's serious, down deep, doesn't he have a point?

It used to sound like a joke when President Donald Trump talked about making Canada the 51st US state, but to Canadian leaders it sounds like an increasingly serious threat and part of a plan.

“President Trump wants to put us into a state where we are much more weakened economically in order eventually to annex us,” Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last week.

. . . At the same time, he continues to bring up the prospect of the US absorbing Canada.

“The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear,” Trump said, mangling history during a standoff with Ontario’s premier that threatened to open a new front in the trade war Tuesday.

. . . That was the “good cop” post. Trump also issued threats in the period before Ford backed down from a threatened surcharge on electricity sold across the border to Americans in Minnesota, Michigan and New York.

Well, this is Trump, and the most we can say is that there are people who recognize this as a consistent -- and often successful -- strategy. It's also, in the meantime, immensely entertaining. "Canadians are reasonable and we are polite, but we will not back down from a fight, not when our country and the well being of everyone in it is at stake," says Trudeau.

There are few things as amusing as an enraged Canadian politely claiming he won't back down from a fight. Trump the performer's inner Groucho Marx instinctively recognizes this.

Is This The Best Case Against Trump's Ukraine Strategy?

Yesterday I linked to a comment by Michael McFaul, a Stanford Political Science professor, Obama advisor, and US Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014. Wikipedia calls him "the architect of the so-called 'Russian reset policy'". He has been both a prestigious supporter and an architect of the Biden Ukraine policy. At Wikipedia,

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, McFaul and Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andrii Yermak headed an expert group called the Yermak-McFaul Expert Group on Russian Sanctions, which developed an individual sanctions roadmap with plans to tighten sanctions against Russia.

McFaul debated the Russian invasion with John Mearsheimer in May 2022. McFaul has taken a position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine identifying Putin as a culprit in conducting the invasion of Ukraine against the position of Mearsheimer that Putin is pursuing a realist geopolitical plan to secure Russian national interests in the presence of perceived threats from an expanding NATO.

While this post isn't about Mearsheimer, it's worth pointing out that Mearsheimer's views, which seemed even somewhat bizarre against the initial optimism over the war, have aged very well over the past few years. McFaul, on tne other hand, has continued to make the case for the foreign policy establishment, most recently at The Atlantic:

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

. . . Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort.

I'm frankly puzzled that he claims NATO expansion was "announced in 2002 and completed in 2004". NATO expansion began with the reunification of Germany in 1990, with the former DDR gaining NATO membership via the existing BRD membership, an expansion that was recognized and negotiated at the time. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004, which is apparently the "NATO expansion" McFaul feels was announced and completed -- but then Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, while Montenegro joined in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.

For fairness, we'll leave out the accessions of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, after the start of the Ukraine war. But It's hard to avoid the impression that McFaul is somehow trying to minimize the fact of NATO expansion over more than three decades. I've already noted here that NATO apparently ceased to become a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991 and had effectively stopped exporting world revolution well before then. So why was NATO expanding? Prof Mearsheimer made this point in 2022:

Given the sad state of Russian military power, Moscow was in no position to pursue revanchist policies in Eastern Europe. Tellingly, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul notes that Putin’s seizure of Crimea was not planned before the crisis broke out in 2014. It was an impulsive move in response to the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader. In short, NATO enlargement was not intended to contain a Russian threat but was instead as part of a broader policy to spread the liberal international order into Eastern Europe and make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

So as far as I can read McFaul's argument in The Atlantic, he's trying to give the impression that NATO expansion has been minimal, it just took place over a two-year period, but Putin isn't concerned about that anyhow, he's just an enemy of democracy or something. Frankly, I think Mearsheimer has the stronger argument. McFaul stresses throughout that Putin's opposition to democracy is at the root of his own expansionism:

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule.

. . . In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

. . . Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world.

. . . After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world.

. . . Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

. . . After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe.

. . . The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

I think it's just as possible to argue that the "liberal West" is hardly a bastion of traditional democratic ideals -- in Canada, an unpopular prime minister "resigned" in a lengthy process by which he was replaced with a doctrinaire Eurocrat who never won an actual election. In NATO member Romania, following annulment of a 2024 wlection, the most popular candidate, a conservative, was banned from participating in the May rerun. In the US 2024 presidential election, the Democrat incumbent candidate was forced to withdraw via an extraconstitutional process and replaced with the vice president, who was never nominated as a candidate by any existing procedure.

Ukraine itself, of course, has indefinitely delayed its own elections. It's hardly a model for liberal democracy; in the very best case, it's simply a mirror image of a corrupt Russian oligarchy.

McFaul wants to repeat the losing 2016 and 2024 Democrat strategies by somehow claiming Trump is "undemocratic" and is doing Putin's bidding. But in the process, he seems to feel he can bypass any strategic reason for continuing the Ukraine stalemate. In effect, he's falling back on the idea that we should continue the war because Trump wants to end it, which is absurd.

But apparently this is the strongest case a member of the foreign policy establishment can make for continuing the war -- not doing it is a "threat to our democracy".

"They Have All The Cards"

Trump talked about who has the cards again on Friday:

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump urged Ukraine to "get on the ball and get a job done" as he expressed frustration over Kyiv's position over peace talks, saying he found it "more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine."

. . . "As you know, we're meeting in Saudi Arabia on, sometime next week, early, and we're talking - what I find that in terms of getting a final settlement, it may be easier dealing with Russia, which is surprising because they have all the cards," Trump said.

When asked whether he believes Putin when the Russian leader says he wants peace, Trump responded, "Yeah... I believe him."

"I think he wants to get it stopped and settled and I think he's hitting them harder than he's been hitting them and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now," Trump said.

He referred again to Ukraine, saying "They don’t have the cards", the same thing he said to Zelensky a week earlier, while he also said in February

he believes Russia has "the cards" in any peace talks to end the war in Ukraine because Russia has "taken a lot of territory".

On the other hand,

U.S. President Donald Trump is "giving away his cards" to Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

McFaul was an Obama advisor from 2008 to 2011 and Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 20l4. He has been generally aligned with Democrat establishment policy on Ukraine, and it isn't entirely clear what cards he thinks Trump holds. (Nor is it clear why McFaul resigned as ambassador in February 2014, concurrent with the Maidan revolution in Ukraine.)

But this brings me back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style, part of which I linked yesterday:

Speaking on a television talk show in 2009, he emphatically told the audience that one key to a successful negotiation is “to be able to size up your opponent” (Trump 2009b).

This advice reflects Trump’s belief that he is a keen interpersonal observer, unusually effective in assessing the power resources of his counterparts (Ferguson 2018). He prepares for a negotiation by learning as much as possible about the other side’s strengths and vulnerabilities. “Know thy adversary” may be a well‐accepted bargaining principle (e.g., Raiffa 1982), but Trump’s emphasis on this aspect of negotiation preparation is notable: “You’ve got to know what the other side wants and where they’re coming from,” he wrote in Why We Want You to Be Rich (Trump and Kiyosaki 2011: 148). And, Trump advised his earlier television audience regarding potential negotiation interlocutors, “when they’re on the other side of the table, that’s what they are – they are an opponent” (Trump 2009b, emphasis added). Competition is central to Trump’s conception of the negotiation process.

. . . Understanding one’s counterpart’s fundamental “interests” as opposed to their publicly stated “positions” in order to negotiate a deal based on achievement of mutual gains (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991; Mnookin, Peppet, and Tulumello 2000) is critical to cooperative negotiation approaches (e.g., integrative, interest‐based, principled, mutual‐gains). But Trump’s orientation is distinctly more coercive: “Learn your adversary’s strengths and weaknesses: Find out who your adversaries are, what resources they have, who is backing them, how much they want, why they want it, how much they will settle for, and how much they will pay or insist on receiving” (Trump 2006: 62). Trump does not empathize with his opponents; he sizes them up.

I think we can speculate on what Trump must see in Putin's position: he continues to occupy the parts of Ukraine that he seized in 2014, especially Crimea. He now occupies additional parts of eastern Ukraine, and the battle lines there are in stalemate. Ukraine has no prospect of regaining this territory, which the failed counteroffensives of 2023 demonstrated. These are several key cards.

Ukraine's best prospects are in continuing the stalemated war of attrition in eastern Ukraine, with compensatory incursions into neighboring Russia-aligned areas like Kursk, hoping this may somehow eventually force Putin to change his mind. However, the US is now unwilling to provide indefinite continuing support for the meat grinder or additional incursions and drone attacks into Russia, withdrawing targeting intellgence and curtailing weapons aid.

This is because Putin holds an additional card: he himself appears to be capable of feeding the meat grinder indefinitely, or at least for longer than the US is willing. However, there are some constraints: his initial objective in 2022 was to seize Kyiv quickly and take over the whole country, something he's unlikely to accomplish now under nearly any circumstance. Thus the cost-benefit of the meat grinder is marginal if all it will do is continue the current standoff.

What, in Trump's view, does he think Putin will settle for? Trump seems to think Putin is sending messages that if he can get a recognition that the territory Russia currently holds in Ukraine is effectively Russian, plus maybe more to sweeten the deal, the US will force Ukraine to stop the meat grinder and the incursions and drone attacks. Both countries then get to return to other business without the meat grinder.

Nevertheless, Putin's cards still include the territory he has, plus the ability to continue the meat grinder. Trump fully recognizes those are powerful cards -- as he put it, "I think probably anybody in that position would be [hitting them harder] right now". So he's teasing other possibilities:

President Trump suggested that Ukraine might not be able to survive against Russia even if the US forged ahead with full-blown support for its fight.

Trump’s remarks came while defending his decision to draw down support to Ukraine in the face of Polish President Andrzej Duda’s and others’ concerns that Europe lacks the might to prop up Kyiv without the US.

“Well, it may not survive anyway,” Trump told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview that aired Sunday.

“We have some weaknesses with Russia,” Trump added. “It takes two. Look, it was not going to happen — that war and it happened. So now we’re stuck with this mess.”

As Trump currently sees it, Zelensky's wish, supported by the EU, to continue the meat grinder indefinitely in the hope that maybe Ukraine can outlast Putin is unrealistic, and Trump is now trying to convince them that there's a bigger downside: the meat grinder won't go on indefinitely, but Putin will last it out longer even if the US continues to support it -- and the outcome down the road could well be worse.

But, as former Ambassador McFaul put it, what cards does Trump have to give away so unwisely? As far as I can see, it's little more than maintaining an appearance that he's willing to support the meat grinder a little longer. But that's just another way of saying do the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. Those aren't cards, that's insanity.

Trump Teases Leaving NATO

Via NBC News:

Trump has discussed with aides the possibility of calibrating America’s NATO engagement in a way that favors members of the alliance that spend a set percentage of their gross domestic product on defense, the officials said.

As part of the potential policy shift, the U.S. might not defend a fellow NATO member that is attacked if the country doesn’t meet the defense spending threshold, the officials said. If Trump does make that change, it would mark a significant shift from a core tenet of the alliance known as Article 5, which says that an attack on any NATO country is an attack on all of them.

This comes as the administration increasingly distances itself from involvement in any Ukraine peacekeeping force, especially any attempt by NATO countries to draw the US into a wider Ukraine role:

Stating that the U.S. does not believe NATO membership for Ukraine would be a "realistic" outcome of any negotiated peace settlement with Russia, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, today, called on NATO allied countries to increase their defense spending and take the lead in providing for Ukraine and Europe's security.

. . . As an alternative to granting Ukraine NATO membership, Hegseth said that any security guarantees for Ukraine "must be backed by capable European and non-European troops."

"If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article 5 [of the NATO treaty]," Hegseth said, adding that there must also be robust oversight of the line of contact from the international community.

"To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine," he said.

Most recently, over the weekend,

The United States has told its allies that it does not plan to participate in military exercises in Europe, according to reports.

The move, the latest in Donald Trump’s pivot away from the bloc, would see America pull out of exercises beyond those already scheduled for this year.

The withdrawal concerns exercises that are on the “drawing board”, according to Swedish newspaper Expressen.

It means that Nato countries will be forced to plan exercises without the participation of the US military, the largest in the alliance.

It seems pretty clear that the ongoing trend of expanding NATO has led to some actors, including the US intelligence community, into reckless schemes like staging a coup in Ukraine with the ultimate goal of bringing it into NATO. This has been a major departure from the original idea of NATO as a defensive alliance against Soviet expansionism:

[W]hen the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, East Germany was reunified with West Germany and Secretary of State James Baker made a promise to Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for German reunification, we would, quote, maintain a presence in Germany that is part of NATO.

But there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east. Did that happen? Well, let's fast forward and take a look at what's happened with NATO over the last several years.

. . . The operative part of NATO begins after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1999, NATO did begin its expansion under Bill Clinton to the east.

It welcomed the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. But importantly, in 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO, many of those sharing direct borders with Russia. In 2009, Albania and Croatia joined in 17 Montenegro.

In 2020, North Macedonia. In 2023, again sharing a border with Russia, Finland joined NATO. And last year, NATO welcomed in Sweden.

It's been argued that no matter the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin or anyone else, they would see this expansion of NATO to the east as a threat to their security in Russia. So who is the one instigating this war? Who contains or maintains the moral high ground?

In other words, NATO has been pursuing expansionist policies that Russia views as provocative while insisting that the US maintain its posture as the guarantor of an anti-Soviet defensive alliance. But times have changed; there is no longer a Soviet Union trying to foster world revolution. At the same time, major NATO members want the benefits of having the US as the guarantor of their defense without paying the cost, especially when they favor the continued provocation in Ukraine:

President Trump suggested Thursday that members of the U.S.-led NATO transatlantic military alliance would not come to the aid of the U.S., should America come under attack. NATO members are bound to back each other militarily in the face of any aggression under the collective defense clause in the alliance's founding treaty.

"Do you think they're going to come and protect us? Hmm. They're supposed to. I'm not so sure," Mr. Trump said as he addressed reporters at the Oval Office.

. . . President Trump was speaking in response to a question about whether the U.S. would defend NATO partners if they were not paying what he deems to be their fair share toward their own defense.

The president has long argued that the U.S. carries an undue burden, spending more to help ensure Europe's defense than the NATO members on the continent, and he's pushing now for those members to boost their domestic defense spending to at least 5% of their respective GDPs.

Trump here is displaying a negotiating strategy that's been recognized in business literature:

Trump has exaggerated commonly used negotiation approaches to maximize his dominance over his counterparts. For example, the importance of knowing one’s alternatives has received significant attention in the negotiation literature (e.g., Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991), and Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign, likewise advocated having a viable “walk‐away” option (Trump 2016c). But Trump the performer has taken it a few steps further, advising negotiators to feign disinterest to determine just how desperate the other party is to strike a deal. “To speed up negotiations, be indifferent. That way you’ll find out if the other side is eager to proceed,” he wrote (Trump 2008: 168).

In The Art of the Deal he described how he employed this tactic when making the case to the New Jersey licensing commission that he should be granted a casino license. He wrote: “Much as I wanted to build a great casino on the great site I’d assembled, I said, I had a very successful real estate business in New York and I was more than willing to walk away from Atlantic City if the regulatory process proved to be too difficult or too time‐consuming” (Trump 1987: 207).

In addition to flaunting his ability and willingness to “walk away,” Trump the performer also anchors high – i.e., makes the first move and asks for a maximum possible value to get the most out of the negotiation. “My style of deal‐making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want” (Trump 1987: 45). For example, “I went in and asked for the world – for an unprecedented tax abatement – on the assumption that even if I got cut back, the break might still be sufficient,” Trump wrote, describing one of his negotiations with the New York City government (Trump 1987: 131).

With NATO, he's identifying the members' vulnerability -- they need the US umbrella -- and stressing his willingness to walk away. Then he aims high -- 5% of GDP for defense. He may not get precisely that, but he'll get something. This is all classic Trump.

There's A Great Deal We Aren't Being Told About Ukraine

There've beern several stories over the past week about Hunter Biden being broke, for instance:

According to court filings in California, Hunter's attorneys claim he "has suffered a significant downturn in his income and has significant debt in the millions of dollars range." Imagine that; when daddy's no longer pulling the strings from the Oval Office, the money well runs dry faster than Hunter can say "Where's my crack pipe?"

Like most of these stories, this one misses a much bigger point:

Remember Hunter's illustrious "art career"? You know, the one where anonymous buyers totally weren't paying for access to the White House? Those sales have crashed harder than Hunter after a bender. From selling 27 pieces at an average of $54,481.48 each, he's now managed to sell just one piece for a measly $36,000.

The art career comes very late in the saga. Hunter's connections with his then-senator father almost certainly got him into Yale Law, and after graduating, jobs with the MBNA bank, for which his dad had done a great deal to facilitate its move to Delaware. His subsequent career was based entirely on his connections with Joe, but there wasn't much of an overall direction -- he had a job in the Clinton Commerce Department, then he founded a lobbying firm, then Joe put him on the Amtrak board.

In 2006, he and Uncle Jim struggled to take over the international hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors, but that didn't turn out well. It wasn't until Joe was elected vice president in 2008 that things began to turn around; in 2008-2009, he began his dealings through Seneca Global Advisors and Rosemont Seneca Partners. However, it appears that his addictions always stood in the way of success; by 2013, Joe had to get him a job in the US Naval Reserve, but he failed a drug test on his first day of work.

Here's where Ukraine enters the picture, and things start to get puzzling. I've brought up the 2014 Maidan Revolution here, in the context of allegations that it was a coup sponsored by the US intelligence community:

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible US mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”

I've never seen a good explanation for how quickly the Bidens got involved after these events:

Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma in May 2014, less than three months after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was pushed from power and fled to Russia in the culmination of the massive, monthslong Euromaidan protests over official corruption and his decision to scrap plans for a trade agreement with the European Union and pursue closer ties with Moscow.

Hunter Biden's business partner, Devon Archer, had joined a month earlier, when the U.K. froze a Burisma bank account holding $23 million amid suspicion of money laundering.

At the time, Joe Biden was the U.S. vice president and President Barack Obama's point man for Ukraine, which was battling Russian and Russian-backed forces in a war fomented by Moscow in the eastern Donbas region following Yanukovych's departure. Russia had also seized control of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

According to NPR, European governments and international institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were concerned about the country's endemic corruption:

Obama made then-Vice President Biden the point man, and he became a frequent visitor to Ukraine. By his own count, Biden says he went there about a dozen times from early 2014 through early 2016.

. . . In the spring of 2014, as Joe Biden began his trips to Ukraine, Hunter Biden took a position on the board of the country's largest private gas company, Burisma. He was reportedly paid up to $50,000 a month.

The question of a possible conflict of interest — with Hunter Biden profiting in a country where his father was actively working with the government — was raised publicly at the time.

Joe Biden said that he followed government ethics regulations and that his son was a private citizen who made his own decisions.

This brings up the question, another one that hasn't been much pursued, of what Obama actually thought of Joe. It looks as if Ukraine was a front-burner issue for the intelligence community, and eliminating the appearance of corruption was at least theoretically high on the priority list in order to maintain the prestige of the new regime. And it looks as though Joe's dozen trips to Ukraine as "point man" over the two years between the revolution and his departure as vice president reflect that apparent urgency.

But what did he actually accomplish? And what was he actually doing on all those trips? We've never had a good account. All we know is that Hunter and his partner were on the Burisma board and making big bucks, at least until Joe left office as vice president and Ukraine point man:

The Ukrainian energy company that was paying President Biden’s son Hunter $1 million a year cut his monthly compensation in half two months after his father ceased to be vice president.

From May 2014, Burisma Holdings Ltd. was paying Hunter $83,333 a month to sit on its board, invoices on his abandoned laptop show.

But in an email on March 19, 2017, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter to sign a new director’s agreement and informed him “the only thing that was amended is the compensation rate.”

The only reasonable conclusion is that Hunter was paid by Burisma as a kickback to Joe, who was there to control the corruption, or something like that. But then we have the whole issue of Trump's call to Zelensky:

The scandal came to light when a whistleblower report revealed that President Trump had asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July 2019 to investigate Joe Biden, Trump's political opponent in the 2020 presidential election, his son Hunter Biden, and company CrowdStrike, to discuss these matters with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr. . . Trump acknowledged he had told Zelenskyy "we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son [contributing] to the corruption already in the Ukraine." According to the whistleblower, the call was part of a wider campaign by Trump, his administration, and Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens, which may have included Trump's cancelling a scheduled trip to Ukraine by Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump withholding $400 million in military aid from Ukraine.

It's hard for me to avoid thinking Trump was aware of the degree of the Bidens' involvement in Ukraine corruption, and in fact I suspect that as president, he knew much more than has ever been publicly revealed. In fact, I would go so far as to wonder if what Trump knew then has been behind Trump's current Ukraine policy -- among other things, curing the corruption will involve getting rid of the whole post-Maidan regime. There's a reason Joe pardoned Hunter for any “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

But what got me started on this train of thught was the story that Hunter is broke. Let's get real, Hunter has always been broke. Only months before he got the Burisma deal, Joe had tried to get him a job with the Navy, but he failed the drug test. We're talking desperate straits; given his addictions, Hunter was useless to anyone, and I've been saying all along that none of the Biden family's get-rich-quick schemes ever seem to have paid off.

Except Ukraine. That had at least a chance. But two things killed even that: Joe was apparently told not to run for president in 2016 in favor of Hillary -- but when Hillary lost, that cut off any sort of gravy train. By 2020, Joe was too out of it to try to cash in, Hunter was too much of a basket case to help out, and then Putin invaded. It isn't just Hunter who's broke, it's the whole family at this point.

I'm convinced that what's been revealed so far is just the tip of the iceberg.