Extortion: The Vito Corleone School Of Foreign Policy
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/opinion/trump-executive-orders.html
When I wrote this, President Trump had placed 25% tariffs on goods coming from Mexico and Canada. Within 24 hours of announcing these tariffs, they were suspended from going into effect for thirty days. Putatively, this was because President Trump got concessions out of the Mexicans and Canadians. In other words, he made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. But is this what truly happened?
Or were the so-called concessions already going into place and Trump used the tariffs as a demonstration of his international muscle, but the whole thing was for show? We will probably not know for thirty days, but my guess is that those tariffs never go into effect given they would hurt everyone involved and are a downright stupid way to deal with problems like illegal drugs and immigration. I am also very unclear that either of these are major problems on the northern border.
This brings me to the attached column from David Brooks from The New York Times on February 2. The column is entitled “The Six Principles of Stupidity” and Brooks thinks a lot of that has been on display in recent days. I want to focus in on two quotes:
“Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals. When you create an organization in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his preconceptions, then stupidity will surely result.”
And:
“People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. Evil people at least have some accurate sense of their own self-interest, which might restrain them. Stupidity dares greatly! Stupidity already has all the answers!”
These two quotes encapsulate the fear that many of us have with regard to the new administration. It is not that some of the goals of Mr. Trump are not admirable. They are.
The border must be real and non-porous. The Fentanyl flow must be stopped. The government has overgrown and there is plenty of fat that can be cut. The policies of the Biden Administration around antisemitism, forgiveness of student debt, and indecision in foreign affairs needs revision.
America does need to project strength once again, but not by being a bully to our NATO allies.
It is the seeming one-man rule of the new federal government (okay, maybe two if you include the unelected Elon Musk), the ugly subjugation of Congress to the will of Trump (although, again, Trump may have wanted Tulsi Gabbard and RFK, Jr to fail so that he could have nominated competent people), and the inherent danger in leaders who make stupid choices have many of us worried. I have always said that one should never attribute to malevolence that which can be explained by incompetence. I am not really sure where on the scale between these two Trump falls. He certainly can be mean and he certainly has said stupid things (Ukraine started the war?).
I will say that his recent decisions have been stupid ones, UNLESS, this was all planned as a way to show how tough he is in the realm of foreign policy and the leaders of Mexico and Canada were in on the joke.
Either way, Trump is using Corleone muscle and, in doing so, pleasing those who voted for him and after all Trump likes nothing better than to be popular. I will wait to see if any of this is effective, but if he tries to take the Panama Canal as a way to put pressure on China by either limiting Chinese access to the Canal or charging them increased fees, he may find that he has started a war in this hemisphere or precipitated one in another.
Finally, I cannot help but see the parallels between the federal government under Trump and MD Anderson under Pisters. MD Anderson too is a one-man rule operation. The number of bad decisions made and bad appointees installed is almost too numerous to count. Like Trump weaponizing the Justice Department, Pisters has weaponized professionalism and armed the lawyers to go after faculty members he wants gone.
I believe it is safe to say that MD Anderson’s standing in true academia (not patient care) has slipped over the past twenty years and its current leadership has done nothing to decrease the rate of its downward trajectory.
The only real question at the state level is whether Greg Abbott or Dan Patrick will be the last men standing. Talk about malevolent!
Back in Washington the question remains. How long is Congress going to sit on its hands and allow Trump to be our newly elected Godfather? Time will tell.
