The Wages of Autarky
Or, the irrationality is the point
It’s patently absurd to pretend there’s anything remotely resembling a method to President Trump’s madness; the man’s addled mind is, to quote Bruce Banner in The Avengers, “a bag full of cats.” Any attempt to explain—or even just describe—Trump’s irritable mental gestures and everyday lunacy risks sanewashing the fundamental irrationality and preposterousness at the rotten core of his own rhetoric and his administration’s policies.
Nonetheless, it’s possible to detect one particular strain of sub-rational thought in the cacophony of Trump’s deluded ramblings and unthinking impulses: a drive to extreme, paranoid autarky that resembles nothing so much as the bizarre North Korean ideology of Juche—as well as some defining elements of classical fascism. Trump’s apparent obsession with autarky reverberates throughout the rhetoric, goals, and ambitions he and members of his administration have articulated since taking office a little over two months ago, especially when it comes to his international economic and foreign policy agendas. It's a sort of strategic solipsism, the juvenile notion that the United States can somehow make the outside world cease to exist if only it tries hard enough.
Trump’s lifelong tariff fetish offers the clearest example of his ingrained autarkic compulsions. He has promised to impose punitive, blunderbuss levies against all American trading partners (now set for April 2) and cannot seem to conceive of the possibility of mutually beneficial relationships with traditional American friends and allies; it’s zero-sum thinking all the way down, with other democracies like Canada and continental blocs like the European Union “taking advantage of” the United States in some vague, unsubstantiated, and ill-defined way. For whatever reason, moreover, Trump refuses to apply this myopic logic to relations with dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, promising the former “enormous economic deals” and declaring he “fell in love” with the latter.
A laughable and absurd overestimation of America’s economic power appears to rest at the heart of Trump’s tariff mania. Take his risible if deadly serious campaign to annex Canada, presumably through coercive tariffs: Trump has claimed the United States doesn’t need anything from Canada, ignoring the reality that the American and Canadian auto industries depend on one another as well as the facts that over half of America’s aluminum and nearly a quarter of steel imports came from its northern neighbor, along with nearly half of its imported lumber and over half of its imported oil. As with the rest of his foreign and trade policy, Trump’s primordial urge to annex Canada appears untethered from any sort of empirical reality or, indeed, basic logic. He really does seem to believe, in direct opposition to easily ascertained and provable facts, that Canada offers nothing to the United States to the point that America can cut all ties with the Great White North without suffering any ill effects—all while holding fast to the notion that the United States must annex Canada because… it’s hard to say, really.
Trump’s cabinet officials have likewise called on Americans to accept higher prices for consumer goods and the inevitable lower standard of living that would ensue so the country can move down the manufacturing value chain as a result of the administration’s trade policies. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent proclaimed, nor is that aspiration “contingent on cheap baubles [Americans] get from China.” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick went further and extolled the exciting opportunities Americans would now possess to make t-shirts, shoes, and television sets—all low-end goods America’s manufacturing sector has advanced beyond—thanks to Trump’s trade policies.
Then there are Trump’s threats to allies and friends like Canada, Denmark, and Panama—all of which have some real or perceived relation to their natural resources or strategic byways. Trump’s longing for Canada in particular exposes the illogic inherent in his push for territorial aggrandizement: he says that the country has nothing of value to offer the United States, yet he covets it for reasons he cannot fully explain or even articulate. In a similar fashion, Trump’s unworkable “Golden Dome” ballistic missile defense scheme reflects his craving to build a technological wall over and around the country to reestablish the false sense of security once provided by the Atlantic and Pacific.
All in all, it amounts to an extreme and irrational form of American autarky, the putrid fruit of a paranoid and small-minded worldview—and, ultimately, a way for the United States to pretend the outside world does not exist and do away with the need to care about it in even the smallest degree.
Beyond the obvious contemporary example of Juche, there are other historical and modern points of comparison for Trump’s instinctive drive for autarky.
For starters, the quest for autarky underpinned classical fascism—not necessarily as an end in and of itself, but as a logical consequence of the fascist worldview. Hitler’s murderous thirst for conquest and “living space,” Imperial Japan’s brutal attempt to impose a “greater co-prosperity sphere” on East Asia, and even Mussolini’s quixotic effort to create a new Roman Empire all testify to the integral role fantasies of extreme autarky played in classical fascism and its campaign of savage aggression around the globe.
It also fits with the impulses behind the historical America First as well, right down to Charles Lindbergh’s bullying rhetoric toward Canada. While Lindbergh beseeched Americans to isolate themselves behind the oceans, arm themselves to the teeth, and accept a Nazi victory as inevitable, he presumptuously warned Ottawa “to behave more circumspectly” and refrain from supporting Great Britain in its fight against Hitler.1 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, by contrast, cautioned his fellow citizens against the misapprehension that “an unprepared America, single-handed, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.” Indeed, the isolationist pipe dream described by Roosevelt appears to stand at the center of Trump’s foreign policy—the notion that the United States can, in fact, build walls and hold off the rest of the world in its own imagination as well as in reality.
Britain’s exit from the European Union provides a more recent and seemingly apropos analogy, one that works to a point but ultimately does not go far enough in describing the totality of Trump’s apparent intent. However, it does give an abject lesson in overestimating a nation’s own economic power and influence: Brexit advocates and activists didn’t claim that leaving the EU would leave Britain free to pursue autarky; quite the opposite. Instead, they contended that other nations including the United States would rush to strike fabulous trade deals with a Britain unencumbered by EU membership—never mind that President Barack Obama explicitly stated Britain would go to the back of the queue in a visit before the 2016 referendum.
With his own undying conviction that trade in and of itself inherently harms the United States there seems to be no such thing as a good trade agreement for Trump, not even those he himself negotiated. Trump does not see tariffs as a means to an end but as an end in themselves except, perhaps, as a way to fulfill his seemingly undying and innate autarkic impulses. In so doing, he betrays an overestimation America’s economic power and influence so immense that it borders on delusional.
Ultimately, any attempt to describe Trump’s push for autarky needs to deal with the fact that it’s the result of what the scholar of fascism Robert O. Paxton dubbed “subterranean passions and emotions,” a “nebula of attitudes” and an “affair of the gut more than of the brain”2—not anything remotely rational or even adequately thought-through. Classical fascism was shot through with irrational aims and incoherent means; as the historian Richard J. Evans noted in the final chapter of the final volume of his three-part history of Nazi Germany:
In launching a war to be fought on a European scale with the goal of world domination as the long-term aim, Hitler and the Nazis were living out the fantasies that had impelled them into politics in the first place: fantasies of a great and resurgent Germany, expunging the stain of defeat in 1918 by establishing an imperial dominion on a scale the world had never seen before… But Germany’s economic resources were never adequate to turn these fantasies into reality, not even when the resources of a large part of the rest of Europe were added to them. No amount of ‘mobilization for total war,’ no degree of economic rationalization, could alter this fundamental fact of life.3
Irrationality is part and parcel of Trump’s rhetoric and his set of policies. They don’t make sense because they’re not supposed to make sense in any real or meaningful way. Or more precisely, perhaps, Trump’s agenda isn’t meant to add up; rationality and logic simply were not factors in its formulation. With Trump and his acolytes, we’re left dealing with a set of sub-rational, id-driven impulses and urges—not rational or even semi-rational thought. It’s certainly possible to discern these drives and compulsions from Trump’s words and actions, but it’d be an error to attribute any sort of thought-through strategy (much less a masterful gambit) to Trump and his administration. In this case, the whole adds up to far less than the sum of its parts.
History has repeatedly vindicated the Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s assertion that the sleep of reason produces monsters—and all the more so when said irrational monstrosities seize control over the awesome and powerful apparatus of modern states. Unfortunately for America and the world, Trump and his administration seem determined to prove Goya right once again: reason has vacated the White House, and it shows no sign of waking from its deep slumber and returning any time soon.
H.W. Brands, America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War, p. 106. According to Canada’s national archives, more than 1.1 million Canadians would serve in their nation’s armed forces during World War II, with 44,090 losing their lives in the line of duty.
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 40 and 42.
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 760.