The transactional world Donald Trump seeks would harm not help America
Ukraine, Gaza and China will all test his self-interested approach to diplomacy
It MAY BE a holdover from his failure as a casino mogul or a reflection of a might-is-right worldview. Or perhaps America’s president is simply feeling lucky. Whatever the reason, Donald Trump loves to describe geopolitics as a card game. Russian forces, he said of the war in Ukraine recently, have “taken a lot of territory, so they have the cards”. Soon afterwards Mr Trump suggested that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was refusing to accept the inevitable: “He has no cards.”
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This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Gangster’s paradise”
From the March 1st 2025 edition
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Why can’t stinking rich Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?
Their huge endowments are not easy to cash in
Donald Trump is battling America’s elite universities—and winning
The Ivy League sees little point in fighting the federal government in court
An unrestrained Israel is reshaping the Middle East
Its quest for hegemony will strain domestic cohesion and foreign alliances
Dreams of improving the human race are no longer science fiction
But the “enhancement” industry is still hobbled by out-of-date regulation
If it comes to a stand-off, Europe has leverage over America
But pulling some of those levers would be so damaging as to make them unusable