How Is Trump's Geopolitical Agenda Coming Along?

Obviously we’re still in early days, but Trump himself set the crash agenda, and he did it for a reason. Much of the thinking behind Trump’s geopolitics revolves around America’s unsustainable debt. DOGE was set up to deal with the domestic side of our fiscal problems. However, domestic “austerity”—I use quotes because we all know nothing approaching real austerity is likely to happen—is unlikely to solve the debt problem. Thus the emphasis on tariffs to get the rest of the world to pay down our debt, or turning the screws on our Euro vassals to steal their productive industrial base. The idea of MAGA isn’t really to accept a role for America as one of maybe three geopolitical poles of power—it’s to maintain American hegemony. That’s the vision of Bessent at Treasury and Stephen Miran, and you can bet that Trump shares that vision. That requires major progress before the 2026 midterms, and that explains why Trump is maintaining his geopolitical fast pace.

So, how’s it going?

North American Integration. This is key to maintaining American Greatness—ending the era of Euro empires in North America and mustering North American resources for a common goal—make our continent great! The first big step—resizing the Overton Window—has been taken. How this works out remains to be seen, but it makes too much sense to expect the status quo ante to remain in place going forward.

Russia, of course, is the Big Enchilada in terms of resources.

The war of the international banking interests to subjugate and then loot Russia has been ongoing since the turn of the century—by which I mean the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. Yes, the House of Rothschild’s war on Russia goes back that far and continues to this day. It’s currently not going too well, especially because Putin had the foresight to cultivate strong ties with China and the other BRICS nations as a backstop for the day when the Anglo-Zionists would attempt to break Russia with sanctions. In the wake of the failure of proxy war Trump is attempting to win the war through an artful deal, but is making little headway with the—rightly—distrustful Russians. Trump has attempted all sorts of deal making ploys, but Putin hasn’t bitten at any of them. Nevertheless, Trump will persevere because his backers insist. A clear sign of this is that, in the wake of the couple of weeks of ‘we’ll just walk away’, Trump has once again insisted that he’s the only guy that can get a settlement—hinting that Putin is pining to just talk directly to The Donald:

Trump: “Look, nothing’s going to happen until Putin and I get together, okay? And obviously, he wasn’t going to go. He was going to go, but he thought I was going to go. He wasn’t going if I wasn’t there. And I don’t believe anything’s going to happen, whether you like it or not,… pic.twitter.com/o89DdI2Qua

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 15, 2025

Right. Just the other day, when Trump thought Putin would be suckered into meeting with the Kiev Clown Zelensky, it was Trump who said he might invite himself to the talks. The real point here is that the previous game—that Trump was simply a humanitarian mediator who might just walk away—was exactly that: a game. The reality remains that Trump is continuing to try to rope Putin into a bad deal that could somehow peel Russia away from China and Iran. Look for this to continue, but in the meantime talk is hot and heavy that the Russians are gearing up for major military moves soon. This will contribute to the increasing political and economic disarray in Europe. Whether the American public will care is debatable.

China.

I’ve been considering this post for several days, but I was having difficulty coming up with a take on the recent tariff stand down with China that I could understand. There were the tariff hawks on the one hand, who wanted Trump to maintain the high tariffs, and then there was the pro-China crowd who were crowing—as Bloomberg maintained—that Xi had basically everything he wanted. The tariff hawks, as it seemed to me, were laboring under the illusion that Trump’s tariffs were designed primarily to reshore America’s manufacturing basis. That might, in the long term, be a positive side effect, but I believe the primary reason for Trump’s Tariff Shock and Awe approach had to do with paying down US debt ASAP—and thereby shoring up the basis for continued Anglo-Zionist world hegemony. On the other hand, it also seemed that the pro-China partisans were under estimating the effects of the tariffs on China.

Yesterday MoA ran what appeared to me to be a very reasonable piece on the mutual tariff climbdown, which relied heavily upon the WSJ—somewhat surprisingly, coming from a lefty like Bernard.

Uncertainty Of Future Tariffs Continues To Hamstring Economy

The nub of MoA’s argument is that, in international trade and business generally, uncertainty is as bad or worse than simple bad policy. Matters between Trump and Xi had reached an impasse—both China and America were finding it difficult to maintain their hard lines, with Trump forced to make major exceptions to his tariffs. But Trump’s bullying rhetoric was making a climbdown close to impossible for the Chinese. The solution was a 90 day cooling off period—which conveniently allowed Chinese manufacturers to restock US retail inventories for the coming holidays. However, it remains that Trump is finding China to be an extremely hard nut to crack:

… for markets of real goods uncertainty is a venom that blocks all activities. It soon became obvious that the tariffs would cause huge problems for the U.S. economy.

Trump tried to press China to concede to U.S. terms in some new trade deal. But China rejected all talks until tariffs were reestablished at the previous levels.

That concession was made. Talks over the weekend in Geneva saw the U.S., again, pulling back.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal don't hold back in their comment:

Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs—and by Mr. Trump’s own hand. Witness the agreement Monday morning to scale back his punitive tariffs on China—his second major retreat in less than a week. This is a win for economic reality, and for American prosperity.

Make that a partial win for reality. The Administration agreed to scrap most of the 145% tariff Mr. Trump imposed on Chinese goods on April 2 and later. What remains is his new 10% global base-line tariff, plus the separate 20% levy putatively tied to China’s role in the fentanyl trade, for a total rate of 30%. In exchange, Beijing will reduce its retaliatory tariff to 10% from 125%. The deal is good for 90 days to start, as negotiations continue.

And therein, I believe, still lies the big problem.

The editors conclude:

The 30% tariff is still exceptionally high for a major trading partner, but the 90-day rollback spares both sides from what looked like an impending economic crackup. U.S. consumers were facing widespread shortages, while China feared growing unemployment.

For now, nothing will change with those symptoms.

It is not only the very high 30% tariff (for mostly products with very low profit margins) that will prevent Chinese factories from resuming production and U.S. retailers from restocking their shelves.

The poison that still paralyses everything is the uncertainty and insecurity that comes with the 90 days limit of the deal and with no perspective of what might follow.

So the fundamental problem remains. Trump talks about ‘peace’ and fair trade, but that’s largely to maintain his support at home. In fact, the tariffs are simply war by other means. The main focus is to maintain the US as the world’s “dominant superpower” (Project 2025’s words), and that focus will remain when the 90 days run out. The Chinese know this, too, so the impasse will likely remain. A stalemate like this looks like a loss for Trump.

The Middle East

Well, it’s a mess—despite the optics of Trump’s continuing Grand Tour of the Gulf Arab parts of the region.

Throughout his 2024 campaign Trump urged Netanyahu repeatedly to complete his Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing. The most charitable explanation for this is that Trump wanted to get the killing over with so that he could move on to something like the Abraham Accords 2.0. That didn’t happen. The Gaza horror continued.

Once in office, Trump’s Neocon advisers convinced him that Biden had failed to be “tough enough”—the type of rhetoric that always seems to appeal to Trump—and that Trump could make the problem go away by giving Israel more bombs and a free hand. That didn’t work either, and instead led to the war on Yemen—again, stoked by people persuading Trump that he could win a quick and brutal victory. That turned into a shambolic fiasco that revealed the limits of US power projection for all to see—a result that could have far reaching effects for US foreign policy going forward.

A possible salutary effect of this shambles has been increased distrust of the most warlike advice from Jewish Nationalists—especially with regard to Iran. If that could lead to a reasonable deal with Iran—as rumored—that would be a major win for Trump, but it would also strengthen the growth of the new multi-polar world order, and that runs counter to Trump’s plans for continued US hegemony. In the meantime, we have been treated to the spectacle of Trump meeting with an unreformed terrorist—”an attractive young man”, in Trump’s view—whose regime in Syria is currently butchering Alawites and Christians. The announced deals—in which Arab states sought to buy off Trump’s regime by shoring up a handful of struggling US major corporations without benefiting most ordinary Americans—are unlikely to change these dynamics.

All of this sounds rather depressing. On the one hand—and in fairness to Trump—the debt load is something that Trump inherited. It has been building for decades and, while some presidents have been more or less responsible or irresponsible, the reality is that Congress runs the spending and has been uniformly irresponsible over the decades. From that standpoint, the SCOTUS’ Line Item Veto decision stand as one of a handful of the most irresponsible decisions in American history. Ordinary Americans have had little say in all this. The alternative America now faces is to renounce empire and risk economic crisis, perhaps leading to debt renunciation, or to try to patch things up by doubling down on empire through tariffs and strong arming erstwhile allies. Trump appears to have chosen the second alternative.