President Donald Trump ran for office promising to put America First. He has governed with an eye toward getting America paid.
In Trump’s transactional view of the world, the US is more like an interested party in a business deal than a beacon of capitalism and democracy. Efforts to extract tolls, impose tariffs or take ownership of resources in foreign countries, both allies and opponents, have been a notable focus of foreign policy in Trump 2.0. in which the president has also cast his expansionist vision to Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal.
These things don’t usually work out according to plan, as the world learned during Trump’s first term when Mexico did not pay for a border wall like he repeatedly vowed it would. But the military might and economic heft of the United States are as ever, in Trump’s view, assets to be exploited. In recent months:
► He suggested — and then abandoned — a 20% toll for US protection of cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
► He took over the sale of Venezuela’s oil by propping up what remains of the antidemocratic regime he decapitated and icing out the democratic opposition.
