How Trump blew apart America’s failing status quo

Political science uses anemic jargon. The “Overton Window” frames all topics that at any given moment are deemed to be politically respectable. It moves. However, since Trump’s inauguration on January 20 we need more robust imagery. POTUS — Mr. Trump — is the captain of an ice-bound ship and he has been dynamiting the pack ice to get it free. Sequenced, linked charges have been exploded to create open water leads. The shock waves have global importance.

Tariff threats were one stick of dynamite that detonated, particularly those levied on China to push back its gaming of the era of globalization since the PRC was admitted to the WTO in 2001. There is no categorical case which shows that tariffs are unnatural and always bad and that free trade is, as Richard Cobden argued at the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, natural as “nature and nature’s God intended it to be.” The judgement is always time and context specific. Both change.

In 1815, the Corn Laws were brought into these islands by the landed interest to protect a depressed farming sector after the Napoleonic Wars during which domestic food production acreage had greatly — and prudently — increased against the threat of blockade. Timing was bad because a “global cooling” volcano intervened. Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, erupted titanically on April 5, 1815. Vast quantities of dust and ash obscured the sun, causing the “Year without a Summer” in 1816 with disastrous harvests, floods, mass starvation of people and animals and, holed up shivering in July in a villa near Geneva, Mary Shelley’s victory in the ghost story competition with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron and his paramour Claire Clairmont. Enter Frankenstein, who is very much a creature of those apocalyptic times.

A century later and following the 1870s agricultural depression caused in large part by the opening of North American and Antipodean virgin lands, now accessible by steam railways and ships (as too the black soils of Ukraine when railways superseded the chumaki drivers and their oxcarts), Joe Chamberlain and Halford Mackinder argued for tariff protection principally as an adhesive for Imperial Federation. It would give the Canadian wheat-farmer as much as the British industrial worker community of belonging and tangible benefits from the shared global protection of the Royal Navy. Chamberlain and Mackinder misjudged; and in the 1906 election Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals swept the Tories out with a 400-seat majority. But in the long run they were simply premature.

Free trade is wonderful until someone cheats, which is always; and as the British Empire discovered in the 1930s, Imperial (later Commonwealth) Preference was a rather wise policy to the active advantage of the English-speaking nations within it, which endured until the Bretton Woods System and specifically GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) scaffolded an American-dominated free trade world. Since January 20 the wheel has turned once more. With China cheating and needing to be put back in its box, “tariff” has become Trump’s favorite word.

Today we see Trump using the threat of tariffs in two quite different ways. It worked instrumentally in the very short term as a brutal big stick — shown and removed — to secure specific actions from Mexico and Canada. In the longer term, systemic tariffs, especially 25 percent on steel and aluminum, are intended to shield the blue-collar jobs of MAGA-voters in the Rust Belt which he promises to turn once more into something gleaming, starting with the auto-industry. On this we watch and wait.

Another icefloe was blown apart on February 4. Trump’s Gaza plan explodes the fiction of there ever being a negotiated settlement between Israel and those Arabs whose motives are no less genocidal than those of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who refused the first “land for peace” offer from Ben Gurion in 1948.

A fanatical supporter of the Nazis, the mufti spent the war in Berlin on stipend. In the “lemonade summit” of November 28, 1941 in the Reich Chancellery (Hitler disliked the smell of coffee, so served lemonade) he simultaneously thanked the Führer for the excellent slaughter of Jews by the einsatzgruppen following the German armies into Russia, agreed to provide a Muslim Waffen SS Division (the 13th Handschar Mountain Division) and asked for a reversal of the 1917 Balfour Declaration (which he didn’t get until later).

Since then, events have confirmed the truth of Golda Meir’s view after the Yom Kippur war in October 1973: “They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.” The Apocalyptic hadith — the one where the stone cries out to the Muslim that there is Jew hiding behind him, come and kill him (Sahih Bukhari 4:52) — is inscribed into the Hamas Charter as Article 7. Trump also knows that no-one — not even the Irish — wants to receive a manipulated population that requires correction of three generations pathological indoctrination. Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud! Jaish Muhammad soufa yaʿoud (Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Mohammed will return) — the antisemitic war-cry — was what October 7 was all about as the depravity of the torture, rape and killing showed. Now Potus47 has the power as global market-maker and margin-producer in oil and gas to wield another big stick: he can simultaneously induce and compel compliance. 

Trump’s action takes us back to first principles. In three ways Israel is a country from the River to the Sea: as First Nation by historic patrimony, by mandate through the law of nations (not “international law,” which is no law) and by right of victory of arms three times existentially and now once again, and continually in armed vigilance.

Trump has forced everyone to face squarely the consequences of the failure to implement as instructed the July 24, 1922 British Mandate for Palestine. Seventy-seven percent was to be Arab Palestine east of the Jordan for the Arabs. Twenty-three percent, as Article 25 of the Mandate prescribed, was Jewish Palestine from the River to the Sea for the Jews. That is the direction towards which the region is now turning again

Potus47 did not waste a minute in preparing to blast the ship of state out of the frozen grip of the status quo

Most immediately, what happens at 12:01 p.m. EST on Saturday February 15, 2025? Trump says that if all the hostages are not released by Hamas “all hell will break loose.” What does that mean? Obviously, the ceasefire and associated diplomacy ends. The IDF is already raising its readiness level. However, all the military signs on the ground indicate that Israel unleashed will not necessarily begin in Gaza, nor will it end there.

A detailed analysis of the Israeli Air Force attack of October 25/26, 2024 is illuminating. It was the most sophisticated use of intelligence-led airpower to date in the history of air warfare. The IAF is consistently operating at a level far above any other free world air Force. With the loss of one drone and no aircraft or people, over 100 aircraft, plus drones, successfully attacked and destroyed missile fuel-mixing and warhead assembly facilities at Parchin in Iran. Sead (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) operations knocked out radars and anti-aircraft missile batteries (including the previously much vaunted Russian S-300) from Iraq to the target areas, and also those surrounding oil production and export facilities and at known sites in the Iranian nuclear weapons complex which were not attacked that night. In a psychological signaling use of force, bombs were dropped near the grave of Ayatollah Khomeini. 

In short, this operation looks like preparation for part two, by making the skies safe not least for USAF B-52’s which arrived in Qatar from Minot Air Force base shortly afterwards. Part one prepared the way for the kinetic portion of the “full-spectrum” destruction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the entire bomb program (for hints on possible tactics, study the equally spectacularly successful September 8, 2024 IAF Shaldag (Israeli SAS) raid that destroyed the Iranian missile production facility under a mountain at Masyaf in Syria). 

The removal of the Shi’a theocracy knocks out the keystone and collapses the current grip of Shi’a and Sunni (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamists. It also opens the door for the Persians of the 2009 “Green Wave of Iran” who the West betrayed, to recover their country, and, by an indirect approach, then to complete the destruction of the Iranian proxies, rendered headless in Gaza and Lebanon. With Persia returned to the Persians, a complete geopolitical realignment of the region becomes possible, and the Abraham Accords can be enlarged. The descendants of the Arabs who the British were mandated to move to Arab Palestine in the 1920s, may then do so.

A final word. President Trump’s team did not waste a minute in preparing to blast the ship of state out of the frozen grip of the status quo pack ice as they manifestly are now doing. Therefore, we should reverse the usual assumption about democratic politics which is that muddle normally prevails. When an icefloe is blown apart, assume that it was planned until you are sure that it wasn’t.