The real mistake is making Yemen war plans, not leaking them. As so often happens, we’re all distracted by debates over how political figures could’ve been so careless as to tell the public what they’re thinking—whether by oral gaffe or in this case errant online communication—when we should be asking why they’re thinking it in the first place.
As I wrote last week, we were told Trump wouldn’t be a militarist president in the late-20th-century “national greatness” sense. Yet here we are, launching a war against the Houthis, a war of more interest to the Saudis and Israelis than it is to us. It’s a war to which the much-derided and, per a recent poll, unpopular Vance sounds opposed in the leaked communications, which is to his credit. That coopted and subordinated paleo streak on the right still has its uses.
But then, Trump proudly announced some time ago that he’d mount a more serious war on the Houthis than Biden did, not that he’d eschew all further conflict in the troubled region. And why be surprised? In the early months of his first term, even as he spoke of disentangling the U.S. from the world, Trump crowed about a planned decade-long deal for American arms manufacturers to sell Saudi Arabia nearly a half-trillion dollars worth of weapons. He’s a dealmaker, that Trump, not necessarily a peacemaker.
And the deal in the near future may well be simultaneous involvement in an attack on Iran, a renewed ground war with Hamas, sending Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador over judges’ orders, and sending the occasional radical professor back to Lebanon, also in defiance of a judge’s orders. That last part shouldn’t surprise us too much, coming from a president who, for good or ill, takes such a casual view of law that he declares his predecessor’s pardons “null and void” due to Biden’s likely use of an autopen and heavy-handed guidance from non-senile advisors.
Trump isn’t so much opposed to foreign entanglements or even domestic big government, then, as he is to things he regards as stupid hassles, which could be anything from foreign foes to domestic constitutional constraints on his power. Defund it, bomb it, shut it down, ridicule it into silence, leave it overseas to stew in its own juice—one way or another, make it not my problem anymore. There are worse ways to govern, such as being a nosy busybody or master technocrat, which can lead to endless trouble for those being socially engineered.
But in light of his shrug-it-all-off attitude to governance, how should we interpret his seemingly pleased reaction to King Charles and Prime Minister Starmer of the U.K. apparently inviting him to make the U.S. part of the British Commonwealth? Would Canada indeed now be a state, as Trump keeps prophesying? And if so, are Canadians angry at Charles and Starmer? Or would the U.S. become a Canadian province, or even a colony of England again? Is that the Brits’ mocking implication, retaliation for his arrogant assertion of eventual dominance over Canada?
If so, their humor may have met its match in the unfazed Trump, who’s been given plenty of honorary and meaningless plaques over the years and probably regards Commonwealth membership as little more than another nice gesture, like being invited to do the ribbon-cutting at a new shopping mall. If he doesn’t think it’s a big deal, maybe we shouldn’t either, for practical purposes.
Then again, big things sometimes start with small, stupid, symbolic gestures—and not just gestures devised by Trump or by the right, either. Overtures to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un began with little CIA junkets to that land well before Trump was elected the first time, and the reps on the junkets weren’t just engaged in highbrow diplomacy or espionage, either. One of the goals on such missions is essentially to scout locations for future shopping malls (a process presumably ended when that young American tourist went brain dead while in North Korean custody after vandalizing a regime banner). Again, malls weren’t such a bad goal in the grand scheme of things, given how beneficial commerce is and how many far more horrible political goals have been pursued in North Korea.
We cannot, though, expect people in a world of portentous little dual-purpose junkets to be dismissive of things like Second Lady Usha Vance’s trip to Greenland—or for that matter, First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary sojourn in the Amazon. My guess would be that the V.P.’s wife is trying to boost diplomatic ties in hopes of some de facto eventual U.S. takeover, whereas the President’s wife is just trying to stay the hell out of the quagmire that’s Washington.
But who knows. Maybe both women are a bit like the daughters of the Clintons and their investigative legal foe Ken Starr, daughters who both chose to go to Stanford even as their parents clashed back in D.C., with many observers drawing the conclusion that the daughters, though doomed to end up entangled in dynastic politics in the long run, were probably thrilled and relieved to get a few years away from it all, safely on the opposite side of the continent.
Maybe Melania and Usha also feel the need for some breathing space, regardless of whether they’re also functioning as advance scouts for the intelligence sector’s latest long-term scheme to foster what the conspiracy theorists have long warned will be a vast “North American Union.” And the left will continue to fear that what Trump wants is “elbow room” in the way the expansionist fascists did.
But I suspect Trump is neither a conventional expansionist nor an isolationist, neither a border-busting globalist in the current sense nor a true anti-imperialist as Vance’s paleo fans might still hope. As an old-fashioned real estate guy, one who never respected property rights enough to deny himself the use of eminent domain laws against those who got in his way, he probably just wants to collect some big, valuable, conflict-free tracts of land.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
