Not long after I first moved to Washington, D.C. more than 25 years ago, I was at a foreign policy event and my friend, who was the moderator, talked about “high trust” versus “high fear” international orders. The concept is simple: trust and fear each build on themselves and tend to create their own equilibria. A high-trust environment encourages trustworthy and predictable behavior. A high-fear environment makes trust foolish and dangerous. It makes rapid resorts to violence and force logical and common. What is most important about this observation is the way each environment is self-perpetuating, how each creates a logic which participants are foolish not to follow, even if they wish they were in a different international order altogether.
I’ve been watching the various debates about what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela, and may possibly do in Greenland, Cuba or other Latin American states. Most of them, as I’ve noted, seem wildly overdetermined. You have different factions pushing for various military adventures, often for different reasons. If they can pique Trump’s interest, there’s a good chance the adventure will happen. What the reason is depends on which faction you decide was most important. Whatever you find out from that analysis is probably an illusion. There’s a more general pattern that helps understand this current moment, one that has little to do with formal ideology and quite a lot to do with his business practices before he entered politics.
Not long after Trump got into the presidential race in 2015, I heard from a New York City real estate lawyer/executive. This wasn’t a member of one of the big city real estate families but someone who had worked for more than one of them at a very high level and had observed Trump for years up close. He described Trump’s practice of catching people off guard with behavior that was so unpredictable, wild and above all aggressive that he was often able to get his way. Knocked back on their heels by his outrageous and sharkish behavior, they wouldn’t know how to respond. They would be so stunned and flummoxed they’d just let him get away with things.
We see something very similar unfolding in Trump’s foreign policy, if you can call it that. He engages in a pretty basic process of taking things, daring the nominal referees to do something about it and then handing off assets to cronies and and oligarchs. One of my longtime correspondents noted today that all of these adventures come back to the same story: attempting to seize something, whether it’s Venezuela or Greenland, then handing out concessions for oil or mineral extraction or something else to oligarchs and favorites. Is Venezuela about oil? Well, the actual oil companies don’t seem to want it. And the world actually has lots of oil right now. That’s probably an indication that it’s not “about oil”, at least as we conventionally understand it. But it may be significantly about “stuff”, as in putting the President in a position where he can hand out stuff to would-be supporters — big volumes of Venezuelan oil, perhaps rights to de-nationalize the country’s oil infrastructure. Same thing with Greenland, which has vast reserves of critical minerals, especially once the ice sheet melts off.
Very little of this is ideological. It’s instinctual, core to Trump’s character and way of navigating the world. We can map it on to theories of international relations. But that’s not where it comes from. Trump is the same guy in business as in domestic policy as in foreign policy. This has been a rough week for the rubes who bought the idea that Trump was in some way anti-war. But we’re dealing with the same issue of the persistence of character. It is wild to imagine the same man who operates by surprise, uncertainty and exertions of raw force at home wouldn’t do just the same thing abroad. Which of course is precisely what he is doing.
This brings us back to “high-trust” and “high-fear” international orders. Trump’s intentionally chaotic and predatory actions are pulling the globe rapidly in the direction of a “high-fear” international order in which resorting to force and violence is logical and common. That builds up the power of those who can mobilize the most force, as in the president of the United States. That places attention on Trump personally. It builds up his personal power, power that has little to do with the U.S. Constitution or even the US as a construct. It also gives him power to dole out stuff to oligarchs and supporters who then become very invested, quite literally, in the continuation of his rule or at least the actions taken under his rule.
This doesn’t mean that all of this will work. But this is a system of willed uncertainty and corruption that he’s operating in. The precise details of each prey state aren’t the important thing. It’s the system of smash-and-grab military adventures which feed a system of contracts and resource extraction — oil, minerals, whatever — all aimed at increasing Trump’s personal power and secondarily, though significantly, the wealth of his family.