Weapons of the Week: Prattle and Hum

The sound of US global primacy: old men yelling. Plus: Biden vs Zelensky,GOP factions, Roger Wicker's 5% Solution, tariff conflict, and more!

Just over a month ago, Jake Sullivan sat down with the Financial Times for a glass of Valpolicella Ripasso (“‘Day drinking,’ he laughs”) and a few bites of food (“‘I’m a light eater,’ he says.”) The former National Security Advisor was “proud to have helped create a situation where the ‘core engines of American power are humming.’” Elections come and go. What mattered was the “‘generational project’ that [Sullivan] hopes the Trump administration will adopt and build on.” Passing the proverbial baton, Sullivan felt remarkably chill. “As President Trump comes into office,” Sullivan told another journalist, “we have teed up for him, in my view, opportunities—because the United States is in a position of considerable strength.” Using another metaphor, Sullivan said he had left Trump “a very strong American hand.”

Orange is new black? Or vice versa?

As it happens, Trump used the same poker metaphor in his meeting last Friday with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky. The meeting gave us a better sense of what those engines sound like when they hum. They sound like an old man yelling at someone. This is not the sound of hegemony, which ought to be a combination of sweet persuasion, silent/unspoken compulsion—and the occasional threat, delivered calmly, discreetly, on watermarked paper. It’s also not altogether clear that this is the sound of power-political dominance—if the Trump can simply dictate the terms of the settlement in Eastern Europe, why not just do it? The existence of the staged, or at least televised, summit-fracas, suggests something other than decisive control. We’ll find out soon enough.