If You're Going to Nuke Vienna, Nuke Vienna

My best guess as to the method in the administration's apparent madness

My friend and colleague, Damon Linker, put an excellent and depressing post up yesterday titled “Mr. Hyde Murders Dr. Jekyll” that puts its finger on what, in my opinion, the escalating insanity of this administration is all about, not only in foreign policy but in domestic policy. To whit: the objective is to make a return to the pre-Trump reality impossible.

Whether the bizarre scene with Zelenskyy was planned or improvised, in its wake no one in Europe can believe that America can be counted on to support Ukraine militarily, financially or diplomatically. Whether European states respond by initiating a serious military buildup or by accommodating themselves to greater Russian influence on the continent remains to be seen (and these are not mutually exclusive options), just as it remains to be seen whether Ukraine continues to fight or sues for peace on terms that submit to Russian domination. Whatever plans they make, though, they will rationally have to be made on the assumption that America will not be helpful.

The same is true of the destruction of USAID. Could the organization be built back better in some future Democratic administration? In theory, yes, but in practice organizations that previously relied on it will rationally be wary of making significant investments without knowing whether the rug will be pulled out from under them. Ditto for academia as the funding formulae for grants are radically changed and their endowments come to be taxed. Harvard and Stanford aren’t going to go away as institutions, but they’re going to have to make plans going forward on the assumption that federal funds cannot be relied upon.

Tariffs levied today on Canada and Mexico could well have the same effect on businesses that have invested for decades on the basis of North America being a free-trade region. Even if they are quickly lifted, businesses large and small can no longer be sure that they won’t be imposed again, or on what pretext they would be imposed. The next administration, Democrat or Republican, could promise to turn a new leaf and rebuild trust, but since the administration after that could turn around once more and break that trust, businesses will have to hedge any bets they make, or not make them at all.

To be clear, the issue here is not President Trump’s trustworthiness (as opposed to America’s). By and large, the kinds of things he is doing are in line with what he campaigned on. He campaigned on peace in Ukraine and a better relationship with Russia, and it was clear to anyone paying attention that he would happily achieve those goals by sacrificing Ukraine’s interests. He campaigned on raising tariffs across the board, including on Mexico and Canada. Project 2025 was a publicly-available document that presented itself as a manual for the next Trump administration, and while Trump claimed never to have read it he was surrounded during the campaign by people who had. Trump may never deliver on things he said he would achieve, like lower prices and international respect, but he is delivering on what he said he would do.

Nor is my point that all of these changes will be catastrophic or even necessarily negative. I can make that case another time if and when I choose to, but if you want to argue that the only way to make Europe rearm was to ostentatiously abandon them, or that Ukraine was always doomed if it came to a shooting war so that the only real question was how much both sides paid for a Russian victory, well, you may be wrong but you may be right; we’ll never really know since we can’t run the counterfactual. Ditto if you want to claim that breaking the back of “woke” required smashing basic science research, or that a steep recession is a price worth paying to reset the terms of world trade, or that the only way to actually make fiscally necessary cuts to entitlements is to discredit the state entirely, or whatever your theory is to justify this administration’s right-wing radicalism.

No, my point is that there’s a fundamental asymmetry between the faction that aims to defend and/or reform the system and the faction that wants to break it. Once you’ve broken something, you can’t ever put it back just the way it was, so afterwards the only relevant debate to have is about what new thing to build. We saw this in a smaller way after the George W. Bush administration. President Obama couldn’t un-invade Iraq. We broke it, and now we owned it. He had to deal with the world President Bush had bequeathed him, and navigate it as best he could. Trump is busy breaking a whole lot of things. Just by doing that, he is resetting the terms of debate for the next administration, whatever its ideological orientation. A restoration will be impossible. Some old stakeholders will have been swept away, and those that survive will have perforce already begun to adapt themselves to a world where the old rules don’t apply. We may or may not be able to build back better, but we will definitely build back differently.

And that, I presume, is a big part of the point of moving so fast to break so much. Even if much of what you do is negative-sum, even if it causes you to become unpopular and lose the next election—even if it discredits you entirely—you’ve still made a return impossible, still set the terms for the next debate. And who knows? Two years after being repudiated, a new version of your faction might be back in some measure of power, enough to at least partially set the terms of what comes next.

If I wanted to describe the optimistic case for the consequences, I’d say something like: Trump could wind up being the “moral equivalent” of losing World War II—relatively moral, anyway. One of the key assets West Germany had after losing the war is that, with everything both physically and institutionally destroyed, they could build new and better institutions and new and better infrastructure. In record time, Germany was modern, wealthy and the industrial heartland of Europe. Japan experienced a similarly rapid post-war rise and for similar reasons. Of course both countries benefitted from American reconstruction funds, from American advice, and from the protection of America’s nuclear umbrella. But being able to start with a clean slate was arguably even more valuable in setting the stage for subsequent success. So maybe Trump and Vance and Musk and Vought and the rest of the wrecking crew will leave the slate similarly clean with inevitably some harm done to weak claimants with strong moral claims, but without leaving tens of millions dead and cities reduced to rubble.

In my view, the far more likely scenario is that they won’t leave the slate clean at all. Instead, they’ll leave us with a set of institutions that work less well and that are more corrupt, and with a welter of international commitments that are less mutually rewarding but still constraining, such that the next administration will—if we’re being optimistic—have to spend much of its energy cleaning house and restoring some semblance of order before even thinking about what to build and where. If we’re being more pessimistic, a corrupt and inefficient new order proves more durable than we would wish—as it has proved be in Turkey, in India, in Hungary, in Russia.

And if we’re being really pessimistic, we don’t get the moral equivalent of losing a big war. We get the real thing.

But of course, the smartest MAGA supporters think we were sleepwalking toward that outcome before they came along. And we’ll never know if they were right or wrong, because we can’t run that counterfactual either.