00:00:00.160Hello, and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad, and today, since this is the 47th episode of RealPolitik, I thought we would do a bit of an overview on how the 47th President of the United States has been performing geopolitically.
00:00:21.380And I thought that we would discuss some of the objectives that were set out by the Trump
00:00:26.720administration in the National Security Strategy of 2025. If you remember, we did a bit of a long
00:00:34.860episode about that a couple of months ago, I think, when it first came out, and try to see,
00:00:41.700well, where are we now? And the key points of the National Security Strategy were to have the United
00:00:48.640States consolidate over the Western Hemisphere to reduce the American presence in Europe and to
00:00:56.660reduce the role of the U.S. in Europe and transfer responsibility for the Ukraine war to the
00:01:03.240Europeans, but also to find a way towards peace in Europe by ending the Ukraine war completely.
00:01:11.500So these were the objectives for Europe. There was obviously, again, continuing from Barack Obama,
00:01:17.740a kind of pivot to Asia and focusing on the confrontation with China and how to manage that.
00:01:24.640And there was the idea that the U.S. would reduce its presence in the Middle East and basically
00:01:30.500no longer be dragged into endless wars in the Middle East. And so I thought we would discuss
00:01:39.600each of these objectives and also mention things like the plan to take Greenland and the idea of
00:01:46.580pushing the left out of power in Europe and so on and so forth. And to see, really, has Trump in any
00:01:56.900way gotten closer to achieving these objectives and to fulfilling the aims that he had? And I
00:02:06.420thought we would start first with Latin America and discuss a couple of countries there. I'm not
00:02:11.520a Latin America expert, so please, you know, be tolerant, be patient with me. And then we'll do a
00:02:17.460bit of a round-robin around the world, talk a little bit about Asia, talk a little bit about
00:02:22.440Europe, and talk about Canada and Greenland, and talk about the Middle East, and see what has been
00:02:29.340achieved, really. Now, when it comes to Latin America, obviously the most important country
00:02:35.640for the United States is going to be Mexico. Or when it comes to the Western Hemisphere in general,
00:02:41.520the most important countries are Canada and Mexico.
00:02:45.620And with Canada, Trump's plans to annex that country backfired spectacularly,
00:02:52.480and he didn't do it in any way that would have achieved results.
00:02:58.380So if you're thinking about annexing Canada, there are a couple of things that you can do.0.74
00:03:02.600You could just invade the Great White North and send your troops in
00:03:08.720and remember that, you know, 80% of the Canadian population lives in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver,
00:03:19.360and that very tiny strip along the American border. This isn't going to happen. The American
00:03:27.700military doesn't have the stomach for this kind of stuff anymore. It looks bad. It's not happening.
00:03:33.420so you could try to convince them and be nice to them and say these are the goodies that you're
00:03:40.280going to get if you join the united states this also didn't really happen because the main thing
00:03:46.860you could promise canadians is i'm going to absolutely decimate the left and i'm going to
00:03:52.160deport a lot of people neither of these things are things where trump has shown a lot of credibility
00:04:00.340in the last year. So there isn't much to look for. And the third way you could do it is you could try
00:04:08.000to work with the very resource-rich provinces, specifically Alberta and Saskatchewan, where in
00:04:15.320Alberta you have a massive amount of oil and Saskatchewan you have a lot of minerals, and say,
00:04:21.240I'll let you join as two conservative states. You won't have to subsidize the rest of Canada
00:04:29.980and its immigrants. I'll offer you a referendum and I'll make the Canadian government accept the
00:04:36.120results of that referendum. And you can join the United States as a single state or as two separate
00:04:42.100states. And you're not seeing any movement on that. Instead, what you're seeing is that the
00:04:48.640Canadian conservatives are tanking in the polls. They're not doing very well. And Mark Carney is
00:04:53.840doing quite well. And not only that, Carney is reaching out to China and he's reaching out to
00:04:59.000Britain and to Europe. And basically, he called Trump's bluff and stopped him in his tracks.
00:05:06.780So nothing happened with Canada. It just seems to have badly backfired and left a sour taste
00:05:14.840in everybody's mouth and really poisoned American relations with Canada. Does Trump still have a
00:05:22.860chance of working with these two states and trying to cleave them off? There are some of Canada's
00:05:28.880most important taxpayers. So separating them kind of breaks the entire Canadian social model and it
00:05:34.980breaks the welfare system in Canada. So in theory, he could still pursue this strategy. We haven't
00:05:42.360seen any of that. We really haven't seen any of that. And so that's an F. There's been no movement
00:05:50.160in that direction. The second top priority country in the Americas is Mexico.
00:05:57.140And there's really no evidence that Trump can sort of, I don't know, push Scheinbaum out of office.0.92
00:06:05.740Claudia Scheinbaum, she is a creature of the cartels, essentially. When she was mayor of0.98
00:06:14.640Mexico City, which is her position before she became president, the cartels decided to disappear1.00
00:06:22.520bodies rather than leave them out in order to help her drop the murder rate. So she's a genuinely
00:06:30.220cynical character. And Trump made all kinds of threats about the kind of pressure that he would
00:06:36.040apply to Mexico and so on and so forth. But really not much is coming out of it. The Mexicans are
00:06:42.620saying that they've reduced flows of fentanyl and they've dismantled drug laboratories and things
00:06:50.140like that. And to be fair, a couple of very high profile cartel bosses were captured or killed,
00:06:58.020mainly from the Jalisco cartel, from Jalisco Nuevo Generación group. So they did achieve
00:07:05.900some things, but these guys, when you kill them, it doesn't change things. The only thing that0.98
00:07:13.440really reverses the stranglehold of organized crime over a country like Mexico is going to be
00:07:22.400things like Bukele, locking up thousands and tens of thousands of members of these gangs and just
00:07:33.420absolutely crushing them and dismantling their financial empires. These are the only things
00:07:39.960that actually have a long-term effect in fighting crime. Either lock up all of the criminals and or
00:07:47.060take away their money. And Scheinbaum has done none of that. Instead, what we're seeing are a
00:07:54.800couple of very high-profile operations that make for very good headlines and some reporting about
00:08:01.120them dismantling labs, but a lab could mean anything. A lab could mean a guy with a couple
00:08:06.260of flasks. It doesn't mean very much. But in terms of concrete progress, nothing. And in terms of
00:08:14.620being able to push out the left from Mexico, improve the relationship between the United
00:08:22.660States and Mexico, make the Mexican state more compliant, they're throwing them a bone,
00:08:28.720But officially, and clearly there is something going on under the table because we saw this incident where basically a couple of American officials got killed in a car crash while they were fighting against the drug lords.
00:08:46.980that's impressive and it means that the americans are being given some access
00:08:53.380but we've been down this route a bunch of times before with in in the war on drugs
00:09:00.440and we've seen a bunch of times how these latin american countries can play the united states for
00:09:07.600an extended period of time say that yes we're going to let you get involved yes we're going
00:09:11.920to receive help from you, but it doesn't actually change things because there's no political will
00:09:17.940to change things. And so long as Scheinbaum is in power, this is going to continue. There was a big
00:09:24.800success for the United States in Venezuela. That shouldn't be dismissed. That is actually pretty
00:09:30.160impressive. And it looks like there is going to be a success in Cuba. And that really matters
00:09:37.760because of the Venezuelan oil and the ability to get that oil to American refineries.
00:09:46.820And because Cuba, if it has access to Russian or Chinese weapons,
00:09:51.760becomes a threat to American shipping in the Caribbean.
00:19:22.300So if you're South Korea, what do you end up believing? You end up believing exactly what the current president of Korea believes, which is that they need to coordinate with Beijing, and they need a good relationship with China, and they need to avoid a direct confrontation with either China or North Korea, etc., etc.
00:19:45.360All of these things mean that they need to put distance between themselves and the United States
00:19:52.520and draw closer to the Chinese to avoid a direct confrontation.0.95