Emma Ashford: Hey, Matt, did you have a good weekend? I assume you’ve been glued to the TV following all the drama to see who will replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canadian politics? Funny—I thought once U.S. President Donald Trump made them the 51st state, they wouldn’t need elections anymore.
Matt Kroenig: Well, the 51st state still needs a governor, right? Speaking of Trump, did you watch his looooong speech last week?
EA: I watched some of it; it definitely went past my bedtime. Did you hear it broke the record for longest State of the Union address? Over an hour and a half!
MK: Yes, longer than former President Bill Clinton, and he covered a lot of ground. Most of it was on domestic policy priorities, but he did get to several foreign-policy issues, including Ukraine, Greenland, the Panama Canal, trade and tariffs, and several other issues.
Did you like the parts of the speech for which you managed to stay awake?
EA: It was a strange speech, honestly. More a victory lap for his first month in office than anything else. And a number of the things he cited as foreign-policy successes early in the speech—withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, withdrawing from the World Health Organization, renaming the Gulf of Mexico—are not things your average administration might consider successes. As always with Trump, there were some things I quite agree on—Ukraine, for instance, or critical minerals—and some things that are just totally nuts.
Any big takeaways on your end?
MK: Well, one big takeaway from the past several days is that Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) is definitely back. Take the Oval Office fiasco with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for example. Democrats, the media, and Europeans all freaked out that Trump and Zelensky would never be able to work together again, that Trump was siding with Russia over traditional allies, and on and on.
And then in his big speech only a few days later, Trump announced that Zelensky was ready for peace and had agreed to sign the critical minerals deal.
I think everyone needs to take a breath and stop overreacting to the rhetorical and symbolic outrages (some real, but many invented) of the day and focus on real-world outcomes.
If, in the next six to 18 months, NATO allies are spending more and there is peace in Ukraine—which seems like a plausible outcome—that will be a significant foreign-policy success and a meaningful improvement for European security.
EA: Putting aside the inflammatory TDS term, there was a lot of this overreaction in the first Trump term, particularly from the media. What happened in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 was shocking and undiplomatic, but having watched the whole thing, I can’t say it was unreasonable. One reason world leaders typically don’t have their in-depth conversations in front of the cameras is because they do disagree. Zelensky kept pushing back on Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s policy preferences, and they eventually pushed back as well; the language barrier didn’t help, either.
But the whole reason for the blowup is that there is a real divergence in the policy preferences of the United States, European allies, and Ukraine itself. That was the case under former President Joe Biden, and it’s the case now. Pretending that this is some spat Trump or Vance caused is disingenuous. The only new bit was that it played out live on TV like an episode of The Apprentice.
In the speech to Congress, Trump reiterated his policy pretty clearly: He wants to end the war, which has been costly in lives and materiel. And he’s willing to cut a deal to do it. None of that should be a surprise to anyone. It was also notable that he needled Democrats over this, calling out Sen. Elizabeth Warren for saying that aid to Ukraine should continue for another five years. Trump’s approach is actually fairly popular among the American public; I’m not sure Democrats want to become the face of opposition to it.
MK: We are in danger of agreeing on this one, but just to continue. The mainstream media narrative that his actions over the past weeks—that he is siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Western allies—is ridiculous. You are right that he has been absolutely crystal clear that his objective is to end the war. His assumption (right or wrong) is that to do so, America must play the role of neutral arbiter. He does not believe that he can demonize Putin and then call him up the next day and say, “Hey, Vladimir, how about that deal?”
To be sure, a conventional politician would do it differently, but Trump is unconventional and these methods have worked for him.
It is almost as if many people would prefer feel-good rhetoric praising the West and demonizing Putin, even if it means the indefinite continuation of a bloody and stalemated war.
EA: Let’s turn to the rest of the speech, then. A couple of more niche areas are worth pulling out: First, he returned to his promise to build an iron dome missile shield over the United States, which he called a “golden” shield. (He also wants a super green card for investors, which he called a “gold card,” and I think I’m starting to see a pattern!)
And second, he promised to authorize and boost the production of critical minerals here in the United States. I’m on board with the second, which is easily the quickest way to reduce reliance on other states for critical minerals. But the first still doesn’t make any sense to me: Americans already have some missile defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and it is not particularly effective, while short-range missiles are not something the United States has to worry about thanks to geography! Any thoughts?
MK: All right, good. Let’s fight over this one. America needs a homeland missile defense system, as I argued in FP last month. The missile threats to the United States are growing and include not only ICBMs, but also hypersonic and cruise missiles, which can be fired from enemy naval vessels or aircraft. Second, unlike former President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan in the 1980s, the technology now works.
The current system has a 50 percent success rate in tests, and America can shoot multiple interceptors at each incoming missile, bringing the chance of a successful intercept closer to 100 percent. To be sure, a perfect system capable of stopping a massive Chinese or Russian barrage is impossible, but there is no reason to leave the homeland vulnerable to more limited coercive strikes in the event of a crisis or war over Taiwan, for example. Moreover, Russia and China are building missile defenses against the United States, so Washington’s unilateral restraint brings no benefit.
EA: If our readers will forgive me a wonky point, that’s not how probability works. You can only fire more missiles to get a better intercept rate if the failures are uncorrelated. That is to say, if you assume that an interceptor misses an incoming missile for some reason, the next interceptor can’t fail for the same reason. So if the errors are correlated—if the system keeps failing in similar ways—then it won’t increase anything. It’s also hugely expensive to keep enough interceptors on hand to fire enough of them for that plan.
MK: I’m a mere political scientist, not a physicist or statistician, but the experts say that shooting multiple interceptors increases the chance of success.
EA: My second question is: What kind of missile barrage are you anticipating? As far as I’m aware, neither Russia nor China is engaged in substantial buildup of missiles with conventional payloads. And if we’re talking about nuclear payloads, then we are back in the Cold War realm of mutually assured destruction and deterrence, which is the only thing that can prevent a significant nuclear exchange between the great powers. That’s why the justification for missile defense in the Bush administration and after was always “rogue states”—a missile defense system might be able to stop one or two incoming bombs, but it can’t stop thousands.
MK: Imagine this scenario: China invades Taiwan. The United States begins mobilizing forces to come to the island’s defense. Then China launches two dozen conventionally armed missiles at U.S. bases in Guam, Hawaii, California, and Texas. Does the U.S. president launch a suicidal nuclear war? Do they continue with the conventional war but with a badly degraded force? Or does he or she back down to avoid further carnage to the U.S. homeland? This would be a bad set of options for any leader. It would be much better to deploy a limited system that can shoot down that kind of attack. Even better, if China knows the attack is unlikely to work, it may be deterred from trying in the first place.
EA: As I understand it, we wouldn’t be able to determine whether the missiles are loaded with conventional or nuclear payloads until they land, so it seems like that would be a significant risk on the part of Beijing!
MK: Are you getting at the “use them or lose them” fallacy? What, Washington would think it might (or might not) suffer a small nuclear attack and then decide to commit suicide by launching a full-scale nuclear war before it finds out? That has never made sense to me.
EA: I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole, since we have more speech to cover. The president also reiterated to Congress his desire to control Greenland and the Panama Canal. His language was vague—and he talked about self-determination in Greenland—but it’s still an interesting return to some of his earlier rhetoric. He clearly sees territorial expansion—or at least control—as back on the table.
MK: The Panama Canal case is the easier one, and a good example of an early Trump administration success. As I testified before Congress last month, Chinese control of the Panama Canal poses a number of serious security threats to the United States and Panama. Moreover, Trump has already succeeded in “taking it back.” Just last week, it was announced that the Chinese company controlling the port sold its shares to American investment firm BlackRock, which will effectively resolve this issue. Many people assumed that when Trump talked about taking it back, he meant sending in the Marines, but they lacked imagination.
EA: I suspect the Greenland thing is similar. Folks in Europe are freaking out that this was a military threat against Greenland, but if you actually look at what Trump said, he was pretty clear that it’s access he’s looking for. Still, it’s an odd set of things to highlight in a State of the Union address; most Americans couldn’t care less about Greenland.
The elephant in the room, of course, was Trump’s insistence on spending lots of time talking about something Americans do care about: the economy and his plans for significant tariffs. I was rather astounded that the president would spend so long talking about how good tariffs are, how other countries need to be punished, and all the rest. His approval rating for “fixing the economy” is underwater with Americans, his tariffs are massively unpopular, and the S&P 500 has fallen approximately 5 percent in the last 5 days—at the time of publication—as tariffs went into effect on our closest trading partners, Canada and Mexico.
I still find the tariffs on these neighbors in particular to be incomprehensible as part of a rational strategy. This isn’t China flooding the market with goods or manipulating its currency. These are states that are an integral part of the North American trading bloc. And now, apparently, he’s saying that these tariffs won’t apply to goods negotiated as part of the existing U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) until at least April—which is pretty much everything we trade with these states! Can you make sense of it?
MK: I think I can. We have seen that the threat of U.S. tariffs has been a significant motivator for other countries in these first several weeks. For example, as we discussed in a previous column, Mexico agreed to move troops to the border in response to a previous Trump threat. Trump understands the tariff threat provides a significant source of leverage.
In his speech before Congress last week, he said he would use them for two reasons. First, to pressure Mexico, Canada, and China to do more to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. And second, he announced plans for reciprocal tariffs and nontariff barriers against trading partners using those tools against the United States to level the playing field.
You are right that this is already having negative consequences for the U.S. economy, but it seems that Trump is betting that the benefits will outweigh the short-term disruptions.
Do you see it differently?
EA: Yes. It’s completely daft. There are states where the trade relationship is out of balance in the way you describe, particularly China. There are justified fights in specific cases, such as the long-running U.S. complaint about European subsidies to Airbus, Boeing’s main competitor. I’d even be prepared to say that tariffs can occasionally be useful, though I’m mostly a free trader by inclination. But trade with Canada and Mexico is literally governed by the USMCA, the deal that Trump negotiated the last time he was in office!
We’re highly integrated with these economies in ways that benefit all three countries and have been ever since NAFTA passed in the 1990s. The distortions created by that decision—weakening the auto industry in Michigan, for example—happened decades ago, and now our domestic auto production is heavily interconnected with Canada and Mexico. Tariffs threaten to wreck all of that and alienate our closest trading partners for what seems like a vanishingly small gain. There are a lot of other policy levers one could use on fentanyl, for example.
But unless we want this column to be a record just like Trump’s speech, we really should wrap things up. Unlike the speech, though, at least no one got thrown out by the sergeant-at-arms while we were debating!
MK: Who knows? Maybe our readers are shaking their canes and throwing guacamole at their screens as they read this article—although the latter is becoming an expensive proposition. But I’d better go, too—I want to buy some avocados before they go over $10 a piece.
See you next time!