Pax Trumpicana II: Balance of Power and the Empire Squeeze
Trump on October 13 -- public domain image
By Gabriel Haythornthwaite, The DNA Report
With only 2 days until Alberta’s pre-annexation referendum, The DNA Report continues its analysis of Pax Trumpicana, following on part one which introduced the Trump 2.0 National Security Strategy (NSS) white-paper and the resurgence of American Manifest Destiny annexation designs in North America.
Part two continues with a look at the latest crass takeover threats and how this über-imperial boorishness credibly reinforces the transatlantic establishment’s view of a perfidious Trump. This article will also draw upon the NSS to review the Trump regime’s balance of power approach to Empire, a matter that has grave implications for Washington’s subordinate allies—particularly Canada.
New Annexation Threats
Herr Trump and his acolytes resumed their ‘51st state’ threats coincidentally days before the Smith MAGA ballot on October 19. This week, Trump has been using Canada as a mid-term campaign punching bag insisting, “[Canada will] end up being the 51st state, because that’s the only way it works.”
The Orange Oracle premised this pronouncement of imperial fate on allegations that Canada is an abusive partner in the longstanding economic and political relationship between the two countries, “Canada treats us very badly. They always have. Not anymore. It’s a whole different ball game now that Trump is in town.” What is the MAGA strongman on about? The nerve that Canada has had to provide a large annual surplus of goods and services for which the Americans unfairly have had to pay for through deficit financing.
In a case of classic fascist projection, the US ‘ambassador’ to Canada, Pete ‘Fuck You’ Hoekstra has also weighed in simultaneously to accuse the CEO Carney government of election interference in the November midterm charade. The pretext for this allegation is based on Canadian officials publicly discussing the mutual economic damage wrought by the Trump trade war.
Perhaps there is some truth here as this journal has to concede that no one is more expert on fixing elections in other countries than the USA. On the other hand, Ottawa has to know that interfering in America’s absurdly gerrymandered elections is the privileged purview of the Orange Ogre’s minions in Congress and state capitols.
Trump the Perfidious
The shameless propaganda of the MAGA clique reinforces the reputation of Herr Trump as a most perfidious leader in the eyes of America’s apparent allies. Europe may have nothing directly to say about the ‘51st state’ threats against Canada but they have decried and attempted to oppose American moves to annex Greenland.
Which continue, by the way, with a new assertion by Trump that his plunder buddies have leave to pursue “massive oil, gas and mineral exploration” in the territory. Danish and Greenland’s leaders contend that such plans are preliminary and not something sanctioned by the concessionary treaty they signed with the Trump regime last month.
Trump’s dealings with his ally-vassals is regularly bemoaned as combining a transactional MO (material interests as opposed to ‘liberal’ corporate freedom values) with a perfidious reluctance to escalate conflicts with Russia, in particular, and China as well.
The transatlantic characterization of Trump’s approach to allies being transactional to the point of treachery is not altogether wrong. The Trumpian Empire is dead set against the ‘multilateral’ imperialism headed up by the US since 1945 as evidenced in close to 30 bilateral trade deals pursued by Trump 2.0 on a extortion-driven transactional basis, i.e., concessionary deals for partial tariff relief as reached with the EU and Japan in the past year.
And there certainly is something between Herr Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in terms of mutual regard and a warm rapport. Trump’s penchant for Nixonian-style realpolitik diplomacy and admiration for fellow strongmen has clearly influenced the American Empire’s zigzagging on the war in Ukraine which professed peacenik Donald has repeatedly called to end.
However, the explanation for this conduct does not lie in ludicrous neocon contentions of Kremlin control over Trump. To understand this situation, we must now turn to the Empire’s new management model which is premised on the acceptance of a balance of power in imperial geopolitics today.
A New Balance of Power and Fairness for the Empire
Spoiler alert: This means bad news for all peoples in Canada.
The 2025 NSS characterizes the Trumpian approach to Empire on an explicit premise of a balance of power which refuses US global hegemonic control but reserves the Orwellian right to preempt regional rivals, “As the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself, we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others.” (emphasis in the document)
The NSS underscores Washington’s new implicit understanding of the shifting balance of geopolitical power towards China and Russia, on the one hand, and the growing power that America has over its subordinate allies in the global west.
Trump-USA continues, of course, to insist on being the globe’s top imperial dog. But the NSS wants this preeminence to be more favourable to the Empire as outlined in a highly ironic section on fairness, “the United States will insist on being treated fairly by other countries. We will no longer tolerate, and can no longer afford, free-riding, trade imbalances”.
Who is the Donald talking about, as if we did not know? As noted above and in past journal posts, Herr Trump has repeatedly whined about America accepting deficit financing arrangements for goods and services their businesses willingly purchase. Perhaps under Trump they are growing tired of paying for these items. ‘Fairness’ also demands that ally-vassals “spend far more” on war provision which all but one member of NATO is already dutifully attending to.
We can see how the Trump regime has already begun to dismantle its burdensome multilateral ruling commitments. These unilateral actions include the dumping of foreign aid, intensifying attacks on UN agencies and the impotent International Criminal Court as well as telling the World Trade Organization to effectively hit the road with the MAGA world trade war.
The Empire Squeeze and Trump Inc.
The NSS also describes the Empire’s new attitude towards both adversaries and allies by baldly stating' the transactional perfidy which haunts the latter. Citing ‘flexible realism’, the new Uncle Sam aims at “maintaining good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours even as we push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms, furthering our interests as we do so.” (emphasis added).
This orientation to “like-minded friends” is of particular interest to The DNA Report as this summarizes the intentions of an Empire squeeze upon America’s junior partners in the new world disorder. Critical in this cynical formulation is the fact that US allies are not, in fact, ‘like-minded’ enough for the MAGA cabal.
Trump’s emissaries, including VEEP JD Vance, have been openly promoting far-Right Quislings for national power in Western Europe where fascist and semi-fascist parties already poll an approximate average of 25%, with some leading or participating in governments (e.g., Italy and Finland) or are thought to be on the cusp of power like Marine Le Pen’s freak show in France.
What we have here is a new model of the American Empire—Trump Inc.—which rejects the previous autonomous ‘franchise’ design in favour of a ‘corporate chain’ system where tributaries directly report to the imperium headquarters in Washington. Under Trump Inc., country reports can be put into receivership mode—as in Venezuela—or face a direct hostile takeover if the client does not produce the plundering results demands by Empire HQ.
Those familiar with the history of American Empire crimes will correctly say that Trump’s balance of power shift and his ultra-aggression have ample precedent. The Nixon balance of power approach has already been alluded to. And contempt for the Washington-led multilateral order has been periodically on display from Nixon’s trashing of the gold standard in 1971 to the fully neocon regime of Bush the Younger who dispensed with the fig leaf of UN approval to launch the nation-destroying invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
In an abstract sense, Trump’s balance of power approach could be viewed as preferable to the ruthless American Empire approach of ‘full spectrum dominance’ enacted by neocon Bushies who came to power in the stolen 2000 election. But as the continuing US-Israeli war on Iran demonstrates, Trump has not dispensed with the neocon playbook but simply has made it his own without its shallow liberal pretensions.
All that said, that does not mean that the unilateral Trump 2.0 model championed by the NSS is simply a matter of old imperial wine in new far-Right bottles. There is indeed a qualitative shift in Empire management afoot that is applying an intense imperial squeeze not just to wring trade concessions and warfare largesse from ally-vassals but to politically transform them as well—either with far-Right governments in the image of Trump-USA…or outright annexation.
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Gabriel Haythornthwaite is a former labour-allied school board trustee in BC and currently advises First Nations around political and intergovernmental relations. He is also a leftwing writer and political organizer.
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