As Inauguration Day nears, a strong suggestion: in the interests of common decency, doing unto others as you would hope they do unto you wouldn’t be a bad governing principle to keep close to heart.
Let’s play a game of mirroring:
How would the United States’s leadership feel if the Prime Minister of Canada and his billionaire sidekick launched a prolonged trolling game demanding that the US cease to exist as a separate country and instead was subsumed into a Greater Canada? How would the US President respond if said Prime Minister repeatedly engaged in a public humiliation ritual by referring to him as the Governor of the United States, and if his billionaire sidekick, the world’s richest person, took to X to mock him by calling him a “girl” with no power? How would the United States take it if Canada’s leaders promised to exert extreme economic coercion against their southern neighbor to force a union of the two countries? I suspect pretty strongly that the country’s leaders would not be amused and would, if the needling continued, eventually consider it almost a casus belli and, at the very least, a reason for a diplomatic rupture and a cessation of security cooperation.
Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky
How would the US respond if Denmark decided, that in the interests of gaining access to huge reserves of oil and rare minerals, it absolutely had to gain control of, say, Texas, and was willing to use its military and the EU’s collective economic clout against its erstwhile friend to get its way? Or if the US’s most important trading partners threatened to drum up a fake “national economic emergency”—at a time of strong economic growth and low unemployment—to upend the entire global trading system and impose punitive tariffs against the United States?
How would the US respond if Panama got into a tizzy about the US continuing to control the west coast ports and demanded, at gunpoint, that the United States cede control over Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland and Seattle? My guess is they’d launch a pre-emptive strike, to protect their assets, in a New York minute.
How would Trump respond if Mexican President, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced that Mexico had decided that the US southwest—California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas, all at one point controlled by the Spanish empire and then the Mexican republic—would, in the interests of giving history its due, be renamed “The Mexican Northwest?” Something tells me that Trump wouldn’t see this as all being just fun and games.
How would DC react if the closest adviser to the UK Prime Minister took to X to say that the President should be imprisoned, that extremist political agitators should be released from US prisons, and that California and other liberal states should invite the UK to foment a coup to “liberate” America from its own government, all statements that Elon Musk has made publicly about the UK in recent weeks? Again, I’m pretty doggone certain the foreign policy and military experts of Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon wouldn’t simply suck it up, grin and bear it.
How would America’s government react if one of the European Union’s top spokespeople took to social media to say that incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio should “fuck your own face,” as, astoundingly, Musk recently urged European commissioner Thierry Breton to do?
Similarly, how would the United States react if Europe’s wealthiest, and most politically influential, denizen were to use his vast social media following to urge the US to vote for a political party deemed by the state to fall afoul of its domestic extremism laws, as Musk recently has done in urging German voters to elect the neo-Nazi AfD Party in the upcoming elections?
And that’s not even getting onto the vast tragedy of the Los Angeles fires. Within hours of the deadly infernos breaking out, Trump had taken to social media to lambast California’s “Governor Newscum,” to berate LA mayor Karen Bass, and to denounce President Biden for hydrants having run dry.
There was nothing about putting politics aside and working to help the tens of thousands of victims; nothing about the importance of promptly getting federal assistance to California—or, for that matter, about thanking the (still-sovereign) Canadian and Mexican governments for sending firefighters to assist in the desperate fight to quell the firestorms. Again, let’s turn the tables and imagine that Mar-a-Lago and the surrounding area was on fire, and that Governor Newsom had spent hours mocking “Felon Trump” for his inadequate preparations for a Florida inferno. Again, it’s hard to imagine that the grudge-bearing Trump would simply turn the other cheek.
Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet, and already he and co-president Musk have managed to carve a swathe of insults, threats, and diplomatic outrages through the international order. I don’t care what political tune one dances to, this just isn’t how a great country ought to operate on the global stage. For the sake of all of our futures, we must do better than this.nline.
