lamented<\/a> his departure: \u201cDOGE made a great favor to the entire world liquidating USAID, Health department and Department of education.\u201d<\/p>\nTrump is strong in a relative sense; after he destroys institutions, what remains is his presence. But he is weak because, having destroyed the government departments overseeing money, weapons, and intelligence, the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world. He plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But his strength consists solely in his audience\u2019s submissiveness. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it.<\/p>\n
To be sure, Trump\u2019s charisma is a kind of strength. But it cannot be brought to bear on any problem, and it is irrelevant outside the US. Trump\u2019s supporters might think that America needs no friends because it can intimidate its enemies without help. But we already know that Trump cannot make Canada or Mexico \u2013 much less China, Iran, or Russia \u2013 do his bidding.<\/p>\n
That only works at home. For years, Trump has used rallies and social media to inspire random violence against his domestic opponents. This has led to a self-purge of the Republican Party and forged a docile cohort of congressional cadres. The people who submit to Trump perceive him as a strongman, but what they are experiencing is their own weakness. And their weakness cannot magically become strength in the wider world.<\/p>\n
The capital letters and exclamation points in social-media posts that Trump has directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent months, demanding that he stop the war in Ukraine, have had no effect on Putin\u2019s emotional state, let alone on Russian policy. And inciting stochastic violence won\u2019t work on foreign leaders. No one in Irkutsk is going to threaten or harm Putin because Trump posted something on the internet.<\/p>\n
One could be generous and interpret a Trump post threatening sanctions as an act of policy. But words matter only when there is actually a policy, or at least the possibility that one might be formulated. But for there to be a policy, there must be institutions staffed with competent people. And Trump\u2019s first policy was to fire those who would be competent to design and implement a policy. Many of the people who knew anything about Ukraine and Russia, for example, are simply gone from the ranks of his administration.<\/p>\n
In their place came Trump\u2019s flailing efforts to make concessions to Russia regarding Ukrainian sovereignty on his own \u2013 without Ukraine and without any allies. It didn\u2019t work. His position was so weak that Putin naturally assumed he could get more and duly escalated Russian aggression in Ukraine. Trump is a sheep in wolf\u2019s clothing, and the wolves can tell the difference.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an obvious point, but it must be made clearly: no one in Moscow thinks that Trump is strong. Even if he wanted to, Trump cannot credibly threaten Russia without functioning institutions and competent civil servants. To make sanctions work, for example, he would need more people on the job, not fewer. Moreover, foreign powers would need to believe that the Department of the Treasury is more than an American billionaire\u2019s plaything. Unfortunately, their intelligence agencies read the newspapers.<\/p>\n
Americans can choose to ignore that the state capacity needed to deal with adversaries has been gutted and\/or entrusted to people whose only qualification is absolute fealty to Trump. But the destruction of the institutions of US power creates a very simple incentive structure for America\u2019s enemies. The Russians hoped that Trump would return to the White House precisely because they believe he weakens the US. Now, as they watch him dismantle the CIA and FBI, putting the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi in charge of intelligence and federal law enforcement, they can only think that time is on their side.<\/p>\n
That is why Putin has ignored Trump\u2019s demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine, and why Russia will use any ceasefire that may occur to prepare for the next invasion. Putin is justifiably confident that a US neutered by Trump will be unable to respond, that the Europeans will be distracted, and that the Ukrainians, after years of war, will find it harder to mobilize again.<\/p>\n
What is true for Russia also holds for China. The weak strongman helps the People\u2019s Republic. Time was not really on China\u2019s side before Trump. While a generation of Americans had feared that China would surpass the US economically and militarily, the trend lines in recent years were no longer so clear, or indeed had reversed. But now that Trump has set a course to destroy America\u2019s state capacity, China can simply take what it once would have had to struggle to gain.<\/p>\n
Wall Street might profit from the TACO trade in the short term, but a weak strongman brings only losses. While Trump\u2019s supporters might be tempted to believe that he has made America a titan among nations, the opposite is true. As a strongman, Trump destroys the norms, laws, and alliances that held back war. As a weakling, he invites it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Timothy Snyder, the author or editor of 20 books, holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nCopyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.<\/strong>
\n<\/strong>www.project-syndicate.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO \u2013 Over the past two months, financial investors have hit upon a new trading strategy, based on a simple rule: TACO \u2013 Trump Always Chickens Out. America\u2019s president threatens to slap massive import tariffs on friends and foes alike, or to remove the Federal Reserve chair, only to back down when the whip of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4573,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":41,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4582"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4623,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4582\/revisions\/4623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}