MAGA foreign policy: So much losing!

Here’s a conspiracy theory for you: Mainstream political parties of the center-right and center-left, across a wide range of self-described democratic nations, were in big trouble as we neared the midpoint of the 2020s. They were beset on all sides by anti-immigrant sentiment, worsening economic inequality and widespread mistrust in government. The proto-fascist (and actually fascist) far right was on the rise; to a lesser extent, so was the socialist left.

But they had a plan! Install a vicious, undisciplined sociopath as would-be dictator of the United States, unleashing a worldwide reaction of anti-American loathing. (Which, if we’re being honest, was not far under the surface anyway.) In effect, the world’s most powerful nation would abruptly subtract itself from the international equation, compelling an entirely new set of global alliances — and the struggling neoliberal centrist parties would look far more appetizing, as the proverbial adults in the room. 

No, that isn’t really what happened — or at least I don’t think so. (No rational person would or should discount the civilization-scale Russian roulette factor of the second Trump presidency.) But the global effects of neo-Trumpism, considered in total, have been so uniformly self-destructive that it might as well be true. Do your own research!

Within just the last week, this tendency only gained momentum: The Trump factor was clearly decisive in returning Canada’s Liberal Party to power, under new Prime Minister Mark Carney, in an election that a few months back it appeared certain to lose. As this column was being written, it became clear that Australia’s center-left Labor Party, under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, had won an even more decisive victory “in a remarkable turnaround driven partly by anger over President Donald Trump’s disruptive trade war,” to quote the Washington Post. 

If anything, you could argue that anti-Trump sentiment in those two countries was focused and personal: Voters specifically rejected candidates who reminded them of America’s oddly-hued leader. Canada’s opposition Conservative Party actually gained 23 seats in last week’s election, but its youthful hard-right leader, Pierre Poilievre, who has frequently been described as a Trump-style or Trump-curious populist, lost his own seat to a Liberal in Ontario. (Another right-wing lawmaker has resigned his seat in Alberta, presumably allowing Poilievre to worm his way back into Parliament via a special election.) 

In a striking coincidence on the other side of the world, the same fate befell Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton, an ex-cop with hard-line views on crime and immigration who was damaged “by his perceived ideological closeness” to Trump, in the judicious language of a Reuters report. Dutton lost his Queensland seat to a Labor candidate, which was a major upset but consistent with the Liberals’ sweeping defeat. (If you’re keeping score at home, the Liberal Party in Canada is the mainstream center-left, while the Liberal Party in Australia is staunchly conservative. Stick around for my three-hour TED talk on the contradictory history of partisan labels.) 

There is literally no positive spin available here for those who advocate the pseudo-Leninist MAGAphile vision of a far-right populist upsurge that will sweep away the failing remnants of liberal democracy and replace it with … well, something else, something more masculine but also more technocratic and that involves what we might generously call a contested notion of “freedom.” (There’s a reason these guys don’t talk about the future too much, beyond Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged promises that his tariff war will somehow lower the price of everything and eliminate income tax.) 

There can be no doubt that Trump’s threats or fantasies about annexing Canada as the 51st state fueled an unprecedented wave of Maple Leaf patriotism — not generally among the universe’s stronger forces — and rescued Carney and the Liberals from what seemed certain electoral doom. Trump is of course personally too ignorant to understand that Canadians have historical reasons to fear the ginormous superpower to the south, and too stupid to care. Australia is too far away to be the focus of MAGA territorial lust, but the verdict Down Under was still striking; the U.S. and Australia are broadly similar societies with related histories, and no country in the world (other than Canada, perhaps) has been a more reliable American ally.

Don’t get me wrong; we’ve had dumb guys in the Oval Office before. But in any previous presidential administration — including the first Trump term! — someone would have emerged from the bowels of the State Department with a briefing paper explaining why folks in the Great White North might be a little touchy about this 51st-state business. I hardly need to explain why that didn’t happen, and it isn’t just because no one in this administration is willing to challenge or contradict Trump’s cascading brain-farts. It’s worse than that: Like Stalin’s inner circle or a Bourbon king’s courtiers, Trump’s factotums seek to outdo each other in embracing absurd, impossible, offensive and dangerous ideas.

With the Canadian result still making headlines and Australian voters going to the polls, JD Vance and Marco Rubio — who seem to be competing to add “propaganda minister” to their existing titles, which in Rubio’s case are numerous — decided it was a good moment to go after Germany, the most reliable U.S. ally in mainland Europe. Last Friday, the German domestic intelligence service (roughly cognate to the FBI) designated the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” group that is “incompatible with the free democratic basic order” defined by the nation’s constitution. 

No one expects the fash-friendly cultists of MAGA-world to welcome that decision; you may recall that Elon Musk did his utmost to push the AfD to victory in Germany’s federal elections earlier this year (and failed). Even so, for the vice president and the secretary of state to directly attack a longtime ally over internal legal and political affairs is not merely a violation of diplomatic norms but also immensely stupid. Vance made the nonsensical claim that AfD is “the most popular party in Germany” (it’s not) while Rubio called the decision “tyranny in disguise” and concluded: “What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD — which took second in the recent election — but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”

Oh, snap? Except that Rubio’s troll drew vigorous return fire from the German foreign ministry, which was of course widely celebrated in more liberal quarters of the internet:

As Rubio and Vance must understand at some level, this stuff isn’t likely to shift German public opinion in their direction, and will be no help at all to the AfD (unless the sorta-neo-Nazis just needed a transatlantic hug). As I’ve observed here recently, MAGA-adjacent European leaders like Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen are discreetly backing away from the widening debris field of Trump chaos, not because they have experienced an ideological awakening but because they can see the writing on the wall. Incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz, an old-line conservative once described as that nation’s most pro-American politician, has become a born-again European, calling for “full independence from the U.S.,” which he says has become “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”  

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Honestly, Fred, “indifferent” is way too polite, which I guess is your job: They’re just messing with you, although we could substitute a different verb for “messing.” It’s difficult to interpret the impulsive, reckless and willfully self-sabotaging character of Team Trump’s foreign policy — except, that is, by referring it back to the damaged ego at the heart of the fortress. Global affairs are not supposed to be driven by individual personalities; we are trained to look beyond them to larger structural explanations. In this case, the structural explanation is that the governing party in the United States has fully and even gleefully subjugated itself to a pathological narcissist who does not believe the rest of the world is real or has any independent agency: He is free, he believes, to redraw it as he pleases with Sharpies and tariffs and social media threats and the most beautiful, amazing deals with so many countries, more than can be found on any map.  

Maybe all this can be read as an ironic coda to the last 80 years of U.S. global domination, the reductio ad absurdum of American exceptionalism. In any event, the world now seems prepared to assert its own existence, to the bafflement and displeasure of our president. Resolving this contradiction will not be any fun.