The Trump administration's foreign policy, embodied in the National Security Strategy, is explicitly a call for total American impunity.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.
For the past year, the world has been in a state of chaos. The United States, in the grips of its mad pirate king, has installed tariffs, removed tariffs, made deals, overturned deals, made threats, backed off threats, and all with the randomness of an infant that has not quite achieved object permanence. Nonetheless, a logic is starting to emerge, a logic that explains America’s actions: the logic of the rapist.
The President has always said that men like him have a right to “grab ’em by the pussy.” The American people elected Donald Trump knowing that he had been found responsible for rape in the case of E. Jean Carroll. Since then, rape as a way of life, as an approach to the world, has extended to U.S. institutions generally. Some right-wing U.S. intellectuals are calling it “coercive diplomacy.” The plan to annex Greenland by military force, a plan which has apparently been shelved, for the moment, operates perfectly on the logic of rape. Before the threats, the U.S. could have had any Greenland security guarantees they liked from Denmark, simply because they are both a part of NATO. Mr. Trump and the American government want to take Greenland, not despite but because it is against their will. Denmark’s refusal, their sense of violation, is what gets Mr. Trump and his people off.
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According to one poll, less than ten per cent of Americans want to take Greenland by force. That’s also why Mr. Trump wants it. He wants to show the American people that he can make them do whatever he wants them to do, even if they hate it.
In my book The Next Civil War, I outlined America’s political order as a system in the middle of radical decay, overwhelmed by toxic levels of inequality, hyperpartisanship, the decline of trust in institutions and the rise of political violence. American leadership has taken the form of a rotten old man, mentally and physically collapsing on display for the whole world to see. The past year has been the definitive proof of the essential unreliability of the U.S. Constitutional order itself. The systems of American life are completely incapable of restraining or restricting their own decline. Anyone who relies on them as a source of security or even as a means of predicting the future behaviour of American institutions, including the behaviour of its military, is simply deluded.
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Absent any internal restraints, this administration has now taken the logic of rape as a primary modus operandi. It begins with the raw worship of force, with the premise that might entitles the holder to whatever he likes. “We live in a world, in the real world,” Stephen Miller told CNN, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Scott Bessent, an ashen old man, explicitly gave the rapist’s justification of the pointlessness of any response to the rape: “What I am urging everyone here to do is sit back, take a deep breath, and let things play out. The worst thing countries can do is escalate against the United States.” He also made the argument that America is just too attractive to rape anybody: “There will not be a conflict because the United States right now, we are the hottest country in the world. We are the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. U.S. projects strength.” It’s the athlete’s defence: I’m too good-looking to rape anybody. I’m so hot you must like it when I do it.
Mr. Trump’s response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos was a quiet recognition of this obvious reality. Canada can see it, and Europe increasingly is incapable of hiding from it anymore. The Greenland fiasco is instructing them that the stakes of the current collapse of the international order are vastly higher than the price of a wheel of Stilton or a bottle of Champagne in Beverly Hills. Certain political realities, like sovereignty, transcend markets. It is better to be poor and free than a rich slave. Their foreign policy, embodied in the National Security Strategy, is explicitly a call for total American impunity. What’s more, the flurry of American kinetic actions taken around the world has one goal: It exists to distract the world from the Epstein files.
The fact that Donald Trump has pulled back after Europe threatened to use their anti-coercion instrument shows the path forward. The only way to deal with rapists is to put a gun to their head. The United States is the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the world today. Preserving freedom and democracy is worth paying any price. It is not subject to deals.