My Politico Magazine "Big Idea" essay
"An Expert in Grand Strategy Thinks Trump Is on to Something" by Thomas P.M. Barnett
POLITICO: An Expert in Grand Strategy Thinks Trump Is on to Something (THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, 1/16/2025
NOTE THE RE-TITLING POST-POSTING
I was contacted last week by Charlie Mahtesian, Senior Politics Editor at Politico, a fabulous online source I regularly leverage/cite here, so I was thrilled to receive his invite to pen a piece regarding Trump and all the recent hubbub about Canada, Greenland, Panama, etc. His request came after my Substack of Tuesday-before-last:
Still working it out in my head, I devoted the next-day’s piece to the same subject:
So, clearly, I was locked-and-loaded on the subject, and thus easily put together 1,500 words the next day (1/9/2025) and sent it off to Charlie.
The editing went back and forth until just this morning! Some writers hate such “meddling,” but I really enjoy being edited and always have (how else do you get better?). You always end up with a much improved product even when the changes are small and scattered (although I always put in a bit I know will get cut just to make sure they cut weaker material and, yeah, that bit this time was lopped off in the first edit). It’s just key to make sure the reader can follow the logic (editors know best) and there’s almost no way for an author to ensure that outcome all on their own; you need other eyes.
So, yeah, the editing was driving me a bit nuts (anxiously adding 300 or so words, which, when I think of it, really matters not for an online mag — unlike my decade at Esquire when length was EVERYTHING in print), but really what got to me was reading all the other pieces coming out in the meantime and fearing my particular thunder might be stolen (unwarranted, in the end, because, in the end, making your editor happy is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL and working with Charlie was very enjoyable).
To me, this is the best sort of collaboration with places like Politico:
I write something on Substack
They read and like
The invite ensues
I produce
They edit multiple times to ensure wide reader understanding, and
Then they post and promote the heck out of it!
Really, it does not get much better or easier than that.
So, my thanks to Charlie and everyone at Politico who worked this piece. Very professional and solid unit and effort, and — believe me — I know when that’s not the case.
So, hopefully, we’ll do it again sometime.
Past times I appeared in Politico, include:
POLITICO: In search of the ‘Obama doctrine’ (GLENN THRUSH, 03/23/2011)
“We’re going to go after dictators who are vulnerable, not countries with nuclear weapons or Iran with a population of 70 million,” says Thomas P.M. Barnett, a former Defense Department official who is now an analyst with WikiStrat, an international consulting firm.
“But,” pointing to Libya, “a country with 5, 6, 7 million people, all clustered on the coast in a few cities? Sure. Why not?”
POLITICO: Obama faces House showdown over Libya ... Zawahiri named new Al Qaeda leader ... Is Pakistan’s army chief in trouble for being too pro-U.S.? ...More pressure for Afghan pullout (CHARLES HOSKINSON, 06/16/2011)
ANALYST THOMAS P.M. BARNETT says it’s the United States, not Pakistan, that’s destabilizing Afghanistan. “The longer we stay, the more we’ll infantilize the system. Ten years in and virtually everything we’ve set about to create is still described as ‘fragile’ - meaning it collapses and disappears the minute we pull out,” he writes in TIME’s Battleland blog. http://bit.ly/kU0p6u
POLITICO: Brennan: ‘There have been some devastating leaks’ ... Inside the Israel-Iran shadow war ... BRAC: Dead -- or undead? (AUSTIN WRIGHT, 08/09/2012)
OH, NO -- AIR-SEA BATTLE! Yes, that. WaPo’s Greg Jaffe dropped a water balloon right into the beehive with his Aug. 1 story about the concept that isn’t a doctrine that isn’t a strategy. The piece is still resonating throughout the defense world, both with people who rejected it because they thought it was off base and with people who embraced it as having finally put a name to the emperor’s new wardrobe.
The latest counterattack came yesterday from Thomas P.M. Barnett,who took the baton and ran with it. Barnett wrote on Time’s Battleland blog that the “big war” crowd inside the Building is “seeking to lower the threshold of great power war,” and that viewed in a normal context, the reality of the Pentagon anticipating World War III is “Strangelovian.” The war scenarios assume a conventional engagement but ignore the danger of nuclear escalation and discount the larger dynamic of China as the top U.S. foreign creditor, Barnett says. Moreover, he is alarmed with what he called the reemergence of China hawks inside the defense establishment, trying to scare up a bad guy to justify big budgets:
“This is what I meant when I said that 9/11 saved us from ourselves,” Barnett writes. “The Bush neocons were all wound up about China prior to 9/11, and now that that strategic narrative has been consummated -- in our minds, at least -- by Osama Bin Laden’s assassination, the China hawks are once again ascendant. Why? There is simply more of the right kind of defense dollars in this vision (meaning uber-expensive high tech stuff -- not those pesky troops). This vision fits the country’s mood: what’s wrong with America is China -- not what’s actually wrong with America. Since fixing America would be hard, it’s better to blame China and feel better about our failings by gearing up for high-tech war with the Chinese.” Here’s the full post: http://ti.me/MudcDX
So, nice to end that 13-year-gap with an actual authored piece!
Perhaps this is a waste of time, but as a Canadian, I felt the need to answer this one in some way. I found there were many misconceptions and a lack of Canadian perspective.
I'll start first with two points I feel you are simply objectively mistaken but first I want to give a bit of a disclaimer:
I don't take offense at America offering. We are both great countries and I can see how the USA would both love to have us and believe we'd be happy to join. However, at some point no must be taken as an answer.
I. If the USA doesn't act Canada will join the EU.
It's actually the opposite: nobody in Canada was seriously thinking about it until the tariff threat and the musings of trying to starve us economically into accepting negotiation. Despite concerns about recent developments in America and strong negative feelings toward your elected leader, we remained committed to working with Washington as our main partner for the foreseeable future.
There was a sense that diversifying our economy would be good but the amount of lost profits we were willing to bite to do that was fairly small as it was widely believed that Brian Mulroney was right during the 1988 Canadian Federal Election, run on NAFTA, when he stated that the USA would never take advantage of the trust we put when we agreed on such a close integration of our economies as it wasn't a banana republic and that those said otherwise were just indulging in Americanophobia.
The one reason membership in the EU is even discussed is because Trump betrayed that trust, forcing us to look for an alternative for some of our trade and preferably one where one person couldn't do the same thing he is trying to do to us. Just walking back the annexation/absorption comments, committing to working any issue between the country through normal diplomacy and passing a bill saying that any tariff on Canada or removal from NAFTA would need congressional approval would probably be enough to get EU membership out of the picture for the time being.
II. Being absorbed by the USA is just like joining the EU.
That's patently untrue. The EU is a pan-national organization where each state keeps its sovereignty and where even the biggest their strongest country only makes up a portion of their population. Even if it becomes a federation the last part of the last sentence would remain true and its likely to be one with a lot of autonomy for its member countries, with a separate cultural and sporting persona as well as some serious ability to conduct individual diplomacy still retained.
The USA, on the other, is a federation where Canadians would be a fairly small minority, whose current political and economic social are even farther than Canada's from the EU and whose system doesn't leave space for any kind of special autonomy and guarantees Canada would retain even in a federated Europe.
This should, with respect, be rather obvious to anyone taking the time to try to look at this from a Canadian pov. To not see it one need to be one of either two things: a) an imperialist at heart who thinks it's ok for the USA to absorb a loyal neighbor, their needs being damned, which I don't accuse you of being, or b) someone showing a rather stunning lack of empathy while asking a country to turn themselves into a small minority, abandon a history over a century and a half old and be plunged into an alien economic and political system, while also presenting yourself as the ''sensible'' one for advocating for it when you aren't the one who would pay the cost for that change. It is failing to see how much would be lost to the World with Canada ceasing to be its own thing. The latter is very much the vibe I got from your article.
In addition to all of that, the ''Nixon going to China'' reference might be accurate in terms of internal politics to the USA, as someone would need to make the GOP swallow the political balance being massively altered against them (even Alberta would have voted for Harris with higher numbers then anyone in the USA save DC according to hypothetical poll) but it couldn't be more wrong in term of convincing Canadians. Trump is just about the most unpopular POTUS in Canadian history. He is despised both personally as well as politically by the overwhelming majority of Canadians (some mention Poilievre as close to him in outlook but since he became leader he did his level best to say at every turn he isn't the Canadian Trump and his policies are very different from Trump's in many regards) and the amount of trust we'd have for any promise he might try to make to convince us would be abysmally low. We respect that he is your democratically elected leader and we are perfectly ok to work with him as such but that's about it. He is singularly badly equipped to sell something that even POTUS who were very popular in Canada would have immense trouble selling to Canadians.
The silliest aspect of it all is that there is one very solution to all of this: Washington working with Copenhagen/Nuuk and Ottawa on a country-to-country basis to deal with whatever challenges which will come down the line (1), just like the USA has done with them for decades. I can already hear the MAGA objections to this, complaining about trade balance and defense costs but that is actually my point: no, the way this would not be the perfect deal for the USA, but some aspects of this continued are likely to be pretty imperfect from Canadian and Greenlander perspectives as well, as any good and mutually beneficial relationship between countries usually involve how things work not being perfect for either side.
America, in perhaps the greatest diplomatic achievement in human history, has managed to muster a phalanx of willing junior allies made of the world's most successful countries by embracing exactly that: deals that might not be perfect of an American but that take the needs of all parties into account and bring about mutually beneficial relationships. Unfortunately, the incoming administration seems intent on giving up that approach and going for a maximalist, zero-sum game approach to diplomacy where only the outcome that is perfect from an American point of view seems worth pursuing. People should not be surprised if this leads some countries to instead make choices that go against American interests as a result, which for Canada would mean to, at the very least, pursuing closer ties with the EU to balance those with DC and, for the time being at least, maybe pursuing more trade with China that we'd like ourselves.
I take no joy in this. I would much rather the past and more collaborative way of managing the Western alliance I grew up with remained the way to go and it truly saddens me we seem to move away from that. But if you are less willing to accommodate other countries' positions, needs and interest its probably unavoidable that they will also be less aligned with the USA's positions, needs and interest.
Hopefully this is just another crappy moment to go through, just like his first term, and we can once more go back
(1) While the artic becoming a bigger deal geopolitically is real its also further down the line then some people seem to believe. Russia's artic capable ground forces have bleed in Ukraine big time and economically and demographically its in truly horrendous shape with no easy solution in mid to long run. As for China sheer geography does severely limit how much they can do in the area for quite some time, as they'd need a while to build the network of foreign bases and the like needed for them to truly assert themselves in the Polar circle.
This piece is as monumentally stupid and misinformed as your support for the Iraq War. How did that work out?
You are talking about annexing an ally that is a sovereign state and a democracy, because you want to emulate some of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
This is an absolutely morally bankrupt piece. Why would Canada want to be ruled by a country that no longer has the slightest respect for the rule of law or democracy?