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https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/24/politics/trump-davos-us-global-order-analysis/index.html
In his first three days, Trump disrupted America. Then he turned to the world
On the fourth day, President Donald Trump set out to impose his will on the globe.
Rapt European elites watched Trump beam virtually into the Swiss alpine village of Davos Thursday, in a metaphor for a world that is taking in his testosterone-fueled return to power with fearful fascination.
The set-up was perfect for the president. On a giant screen, the ultimate outsider literally towered over his scolded audience of bankers, financiers, business titans, NGO leaders, political bigwigs and diplomats.
The appearance at the World Economic Forum was Trump’s latest hyper-confident move to reshape America’s destiny after a frenetic week of executive actions and stunning, freewheeling news conferences.
He issued his most explicit threat yet to tariff European exports, issued an all-but-unreachable target for countries’ NATO defense spending, again tried to goad Russian President Vladimir Putin into talks to end the Ukraine war and pressed home his carrot-and-stick approach to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
But the reason Thursday’s speech may go down in history is that Trump gave the Davos crowd his rawest vision yet for America’s new role in the world.
“He was elected as a disruptor,” David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour from Davos.
“He promised that he would disrupt the existing way of doing things, both within the United States and internationally,” said Miliband, now the CEO of the International Rescue Committee. “He has been consistent in that all the way through the campaign, during the transition period and now in the first three days.”
How Trump plans to dismantle the US-led global order
In its new “golden age,” Trump argued, the United States will pursue its singular national interests exclusively – several times referring to his country as a “sovereign” nation. This is MAGA code for the US acting alone and not through the international Bretton Woods organizations Washington set up to make the world safe for democracy and to promote prosperity for all after World War II. This approach is justified, Trump insisted, because “many things have been unfair for many years to the United States.”
From now on, he made clear, every US foreign policy act will come with a value calculation gauging how it benefits Americans. Other countries and multinationals don’t have to play ball, but if they choose not to – they will be punished, including with tariffs.
Furthermore, America is so powerful and resource rich, it doesn’t need any other nation. He said of Canada, for instance, “We don’t need them to make our cars. … We don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests, etc., etc. We don’t need their oil and gas. We have more than anybody.”
Trump reserved special ire for the European Union, bitterly complaining about regulatory practices he said crimped growth (and interfered with his personal business interests). He complained about taxes and curbs imposed on Google, Apple and Meta in Europe, and hinted he sees the firms, whose tech oligarch leaders he welcomed into his inner circle, as instruments of American power. “These are American companies, whether you like them or not. They’re American companies and they shouldn’t be doing that.”
Trump demands yet more from NATO members
Trump revealed his transactional nature in his latest salvo on NATO.
He formalized his demand for members to more than double their defense spending to 5% of GDP. This is a figure that would bankrupt many Western economies or require governments to desecrate their expensive welfare states endemic to the European social democratic ethos, which his Make America Great Again movement has long disdained.
When a reporter in the Oval Office later pointed out that the US spends only about 3.4% on defense, Trump responded: “We are protecting them, they are not protecting us.” In his belligerence, Trump ignored the fact that the only time the alliance’s Article 5 mutual defense clause has ever been invoked was by allies who sent their troops to die in America’s war on terror after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
In his first few days in power, Trump has also reinforced his warnings that he sees nations like Panama, Canada and the vast Danish autonomous territory of Greenland as part of America’s sphere of interest.
In a gesture that was extraordinary coming from a US president speaking to an international audience, Trump complained about the trade deficit with Canada then renewed his call for it to join the US. “I say you can always become a state, and if you’re a state, we won’t have a deficit.” There’s no chance of Canada — a nation that defines itself against the US – becoming the 51st state. But Trump’s threatening language is such a departure because it’s the antithesis of the principle that all nations are sovereign equals that the US enshrined in the United Nations charter.
Trump’s “America First” philosophy is often described as a return to the kind of isolationism that prevailed between the two world wars. But that’s not quite accurate. He wants to stride the global stage. But he’s advocating a foreign policy where America is dominant in its own hemisphere and engages elsewhere selectively.
This was explained by new Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week. “Our job is to ensure that we have a foreign policy that advances the national interest of the United States. I expect every nation on earth to advance their national interests. … I hope there will be many — in which our national interests and theirs align.”
In other words, the US is ready to work with other nations when it suits – not through international organizations that dilute American power but individually, which means the US will have the advantage of size, wealth and military might.
This, along with Trump’s belief in great powers acting with primacy in their spheres of influence and his growing obsession with US territorial expansion, is a rather 19th century concept. As is Trump’s determination to use tariffs to boost the American economy to fulfill his campaign promise to raise living standards and lower prices.
Trump sees tariffs as more than a short-term economic tool
The president warned business leaders in Davos that “if you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff.” He said that the duties would “direct hundreds of billions of dollars, and even trillions of dollars into our Treasury to strengthen our economy.”
His comment was an effective declaration of a trade war against the European Union because he’s not just seeking to make imports less competitive than American products, he’s trying to lure jobs and industry across the Atlantic.
Tariffs were used for much of the country’s first 150 years. They were a particular favorite of Trump’s new favorite president, William McKinley, a Republican who like him, fashioned a political realignment in industrial states and who was an imperialist who added the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii to the US property portfolio.
Trump has mentioned McKinley, who served from 1897 until his assassination in 1901, several times in recent days and signed an executive order to restore the original name of Denali, in Alaska, to Mount McKinley.
“President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent,” Trump said in his inaugural address on Monday.
The president’s repeated warnings of impending tariffs are challenging assumptions that he’s simply raising the threat as leverage to win concessions in the short term in trade talks with nations like Mexico, Canada and with the EU. His remarks on Thursday, however, suggested this is a more permanent tool. Still, he’s not yet acknowledged the concerns of many economic experts who believe that heavy US tariffs will raise prices for Americans and wreck the global economy.
One of the most eloquent arguments against high blanket tariffs was made by Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1932 presidential campaign. In a speech in Seattle, FDR explained that tariffs introduced by President Herbert Hoover under pressure from hardline Republicans had “the inevitable result of bringing about retaliations by the other nations of the world” and were leading the US on the “road to ruin.”
He explained that “our next-door neighbor, Canada, imposed retaliatory tariffs on your peaches, so that their tariff is now higher than the freight rates to Canada. And there is a retaliatory tariff on asparagus, and on other vegetables and other fruits, so high that practically none of your agricultural product can be sold to your logical customers, your neighbors across the border. The market for your surplus is destroyed and thereby fair prices for your whole crop are made impossible.”
FDR’s cautions offer guidance to Trump critics today. And this is apt, since many of the long-held American principles, from trade to international relations, that the 47th president is seeking to dismantle stem from the foundations of the modern, US-led global order laid down by the 32nd president.
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