Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Last week may well go down as the week of humiliation for us in the Asia Pacific. At the beginning of the week, Trump landed in Kuala Lumpur to attend the ASEAN Leaders’ Summit, where he got a special ceremony to mark his allegedly successful brokering of the peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia, the heavy lifting of which was actually done by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, who gracefully yielded center stage to the egomaniac. Trump did not even bother to wait for the summit to end but flew on to Japan, with Prime Minister Hun Manet’s sweet promise ringing his ears that Cambodia will nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Japan, Trump got a royal welcome from Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a disciple of the late Shinzo Abe, the reactionary ideologue who was also Trump’s golf buddy. Takaichi, Japan’s first female top leader, thought that a fitting gift for Trump was the club the assassinated Abe used to put the ball into the hole. Trump also notched another promise of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from her.

Takaichi was, however, upstaged by Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, who presented Trump with a replica of a golden crown from the Silla dynasty that was discovered in a royal tomb in Gyeongju. I don’t know if this was fake news, but I find entirely consistent with Trump’s personality the report that upon being presented with the crown, he said to Lee, “Thanks, but I prefer the original.”

And what did these leaders get for their brazen displays of vassalage to King Donald? None of the ASEAN governments got any reduction from the punitive tariffs of 19 percent imposed on their exports to the United States imposed by Trump. Nor did Korea and Japan get any relief from the 15 percent levied on their exports. Indeed, in addition to meekly accepting the tariffs, they also had to make commitments to make hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the United States.

What Trump is up to is the question that has kept the world at the edge of its seat since he began his second term ten months ago. Trump is the epitome of unpredictability, but if you impose the zigzag pattern of his moves on what statisticians call a scatterplot, you will see that there is a trend line that fits the hypothesis of the imposition of a new paradigm in the U.S. relationship to the world. There is a coherence to most of Trump’s ostensibly madcap moves.

Trump’s “Grand Strategy:” A Smoke and Mirrors Act

What are the main elements of Trump’s “grand strategy”?

Trump definitely represents a sharp break from the eight decades-long U.S. imperial strategy of liberal containment, where Washington met perceived challenges to U.S. hegemony wherever they appeared with a combination of military intervention, political alliances, and a multilateral regime that favored its interests. Trump represents that sector of the right that sees the United States as overextended economically, politically, and militarily, and believes that this is one of the key causes of its decline. This isolationism is the dominant one........

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