The Isolation

The way things are going, you'd think donald trump doesn't want any foreign policy at all. he's burning nearly every bridge the United States has to the world (via David E. Sanger at the New York Times (might be paywalled)):

In a span of only 50 days, President Trump has done more than any of his modern predecessors to hollow out the foundations of an international system that the United States painstakingly erected in the 80 years since it emerged victorious from World War II.

Without formally declaring a reversal of course or offering a strategic rationale, he has pushed the United States to switch sides in the Ukraine war, abandoning all talk about helping a nascent, flawed democracy defend its borders against a larger invader. He did not hesitate when he ordered the United States to vote with Russia and North Korea — and against virtually all of America’s traditional allies — to defeat a U.N. resolution that identified Moscow as the aggressor. His threats to take control of the Panama Canal, Greenland, Gaza and, most incredibly, Canada, sound predatory, including his claim Tuesday that the border with America’s northern ally is an “artificial line of separation...”

Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs on his allies after describing them as leeches on the American economy. And he has so damaged trust among the NATO allies that France is discussing extending its country’s small nuclear umbrella over Europe, and Poland is thinking of building its own atomic weapon. Both fear the United States can no longer be counted on to act as the alliance’s ultimate defender, a core role it created for itself when the NATO treaty was written...

trump is presenting a master class on how to alienate allies and punish innocent people. Not just with a trade war with his insane self-damaging tariffs - yes, trump's threatening 200 percent tariffs on European wines! - but with turning our visitation/visa policies into a straight path to prison as more people traveling to the U.S. are getting detained and harassed by our customs/border agents.

Balloon Juice collaborator Rose Judson - from what I can tell, she's watching all of this from the safety of the UK - is documenting these atrocities towards average Euro tourists:

Since the start of the new administration I’ve seen lots of UK- and EU-based folks wondering aloud on social media whether they should travel to the US. At first, this impulse was couched in a moral objection to Trump and Musk and everything they stand for. Now, this chatter has an edge of self-preservation, thanks to several recent news stories about tourists with minor visa irregularities vanishing into ICE custody for weeks at a time...

From the Guardian, “British tourist detained by US authorities for 10 days over visa issue”:

His daughter wants to leave the country and fly back to the UK, he said, but he feared the immigration crackdown in the US meant there could be a long delay before her case was dealt with.

“She’s in this orange prison outfit,” he said. “She just feels so isolated and desperate, you can imagine, she’s saying, ‘I want to come home’.”

She is safe, he said, but living “in horrendous conditions” and had not had access to legal representation. He was taking comfort from the fact that the other women at the facility, many of whom have been incarcerated for months or even years while fighting deportation, had “all been really nice to Becky,” Burke said.

But wait, there’s more!

Two German tourists were detained for more than 10 days each in separate incidents: a young man and a young woman. The young man, Lucas Sielaff, was traveling with his American fiancée from Mexico. He was held in detention for two weeks (his fiancée also alleges she was shackled and handcuffed and subjected to a body search)... 

Jessica Brösche, a 29-year-old tattoo artist from Berlin, will reportedly join Lucas Sielaff, 25, from Bad Bibra in Saxony-Anhalt, who is reported to have returned to Germany on 6 March, after being arrested at the Mexican border on 18 February before being detained for almost two weeks.

The families of the two tourists, who were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), had compared their ordeals to “a horror film”...

Judson's conclusion?

If you have family or friends planning to come from abroad, ensure they triple-check their entry requirements with the US consulate in their country and that they send scans of their documents (passports, visas, etc.) to you before they travel. Or, better yet, rearrange your plans. This isn’t getting better anytime soon.

As a Floridian - whose state relies a lot on international tourism - this royally sucks.

And there's been no need for ICE to go overboard detaining people especially for weeks at a time. Most of these issues tended to be minor glitches in the paperwork, or misunderstandings that a good translator would negotiate down to a stern lecture about not doing that again. Now? The cruelty and sadism of the trump regime requires handcuffs, incarceration, harassment, intimidation, and psychological (if not physical) harm. Nobody's going to want to visit a nation where the law enforcement can lock you up over the slightest quibble and subject you to hellish, soul-breaking conditions.

Throw into all this how trump and his lackeys have killed off - literally - the international health and financial aid we've been providing to third-world nations for decades, and you can see how trump is creating an environment where most of the globe is going to hate America for the cruelty and stupidity we allowed to happen by voting for this sadist/asshole.

And if you look far enough ahead, you can see what the end result trump wants: he wants us tied - financially and politically and emotionally - to Putin's Russia.

Think I'm joking? Look at the recent UN vote - which was mostly symbolic as the United Nations has no way to enforce it - where the U.S. were the only nations alongside Russia, North Korea, and Belarus to reject a motion declaring Russia the aggressor in their war against Ukraine. We are now siding with the dictatorial nations we declared over the decades as the bad guys.

With all the tariffs and trade wars our nation will enact, we'll be cutting our business ties with all the major economic powers - not just the European Union or the UK, not just Canada and Mexico, not just Central and South America, but pretty soon Japan and India as well - we could rely on... leaving only Russia as a "trading partner" - more like "raiders" as Putin and the oligarchs vacuum up every bit of wealth our nation has left - to give Putin fresh lease on rebuilding a Russia he's broken through corruption and war. 

Think I'm exaggerating? Putin's already preparing for trump to lift as many sanctions as possible: While the other G7 economic powers will likely keep their sanctions in place, rebuilding any trade with the U.S. - the largest economy on the planet - will quickly repair many of Russia's losses over the past decade.

What trump is doing is the standard practice of an abusive gaslighting narcissist - any cult leader - does in all relationships: he's enforcing his will on other people to make them reliant on himself and to any belief system he imposes. he's cutting us off from friends and families who are warning us of the dangers, who could provide sanctuary or rescue and end his control of us. he's going to isolate the whole nation from a western (liberal) culture we've been attuned to for centuries - a culture that we helped create - and force us to make friends with his fellow bullying authoritarians - and fellow uber-rich oligarchs like Elon Musk - so that we'll have nowhere to find relief.

There are a lot of Americans - even among the Republican voting base - who aren't fond of Putin or his spiteful world-view, and yet Putin's world-view - hating homosexuals and trans people, fighting border wars to build empires, letting only the rich and connected enjoy the fruits of everyone else's labor - is going to get shoved down our throats very quickly, very painfully.

Don't accept any of it, America. trump is pushing us over a cliff into inept, corrupt rule that tends to implode on itself every cycle of history. We're better than this. We should have been better last November, but that's in the past and we're fighting for our souls today.

Don't buy into the hate that Putin/trump/Musk sell us.

(P.S. This is the 2499th blog article at this site. We're coming up to 2500. I'll try to make it a special one)