Trump's Power Play

By Rich Lowry on Jan 27, 2025

Judging from the first week or so, the Trump doctrine is going to be, We can do it the easy way or the hard way.

Those are the words the president used in a post on Truth Social last week threatening tariffs on Russia if it didn't cut a peace deal with Ukraine.

Trump is a president who understands, and has no hesitation in using, the leverage the U.S. has abroad as the world's preeminent economic and military power, and the leverage he has at home as a newly elected president with a mandate and the strong backing of a fervent political movement.

He's going to talk loudly and swing whatever stick he has at hand.

His brief diplomatic tussle with the president of Colombia was instructive. It started with an exchange of words, and ended with Trump putting his counterpart in what in the WWE they call a Scorpion Death Lock.

President Gustavo Petro didn't want to accept U.S. flights returning Colombian nationals who had come here illegally. Trump threatened punishing tariffs on Colombian goods, to which Petro responded with his own threat before realizing that he'd be deploying a peashooter against a mechanized infantry division.

Colombia sends a quarter of its exports to the United States, so Trump's threat of 25% tariffs escalating to 50% within a week was an intolerable risk.

This is likely to be a model for Trump getting other countries to accept our deportation flights, and getting Latin American nations to restore the immigration arrangements that worked so well at the end of Trump's first term.

Everyone knows the United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. Whereas the conventional thinking has been that this overwhelming might imposes on us an obligation to treat allies with a certain respect, Trump's belief is that it lends us a crushing disparity in negotiating power that we should use to our advantage.

Traditionally in diplomacy there's a tendency to want to let the other side save face; Trump's reflex, apparent in the Colombia episode, is to embarrass the other side to create a cautionary example.

Trump is practicing realpolitik if Otto von Bismarck had an active social-media account and the flair of a former reality TV star.

His hope is clearly that enforcing a small red line at the beginning will make it easier to enforce bigger red lines later on.

We hear a lot in international affairs of deterrence, or making a threat to keep foreign actors from doing something you oppose. Trump is now practicing compellence, or making a threat to coerce foreign actors into doing things we want.

That Trump is a strong believer in tariffs gives him a tool in pursuit of this approach not available to free-trade-oriented presidents.

At home, Trump has always been willing to target dissenters within his party more harshly and personally than any of his predecessors. His record of ending political careers ensures that those Republicans who don't genuinely love him have to fear him, increasing his political power.

In his second term, he also seems determined to use every lever at his disposal to advance his agenda, including things he might have been talked out of, or not considered, the first time around. If there is an authority hiding somewhere in the federal code that might be of use, his team is surely ferreting it out.

All this adds up to a forceful presidency abroad and at home, bumptious and assertive in a way we haven't seen perhaps since Teddy Roosevelt.

This is not to suggest that Trump has found the magic key to guaranteed success. Bogota is obviously easier to manhandle into submission than, say, Moscow, while presidencies always look best in the first couple of weeks before unanticipated events take a hand.

Whatever happens, though, it's almost certain that Trump is going to squeeze every ounce of power and influence out of his presidency.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)