How Trump's obsession with "deals" blinds him to the bigger picture

Out of the blue, the Trump administration, through some Pentagon "Under Secretary" or other, has announced that it is putting on hold, pending review, the US-Canada Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD).  

The US says it us "pausing" its participation in the PJBD because it says that Canada has "failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments" (i.e. military spending targets), even though Canada has, for the first time in decades, just increased its defence budget to meet or exceed NATO targets.

Now, most Americans and Canadians have probably never even heard of the PJBD, but it is a reasonably important advisory body and part of the joint North American security apparatus. Made up of senior Canadian and US defence officials, it is perhaps best known for setting up and administering the North American Air Defense command (NORAD) early warning system, although it does have other functions too. It was established in 1940, during the Second World War, and is an important symbol of the bilateral relationship between the two countries. And yes, as the name suggests, it is permanent.

Of course, the US could just as well review the Board's value and efficacy without putting it on hold. That, and the conspicuous timing of the announcement, is how you know that this actually has nothing to do with regional security and military preparedness, but has everything to do with Donald Trump's peevishness at Prime Minster Mark Carney's very public comments (particularly his Davos speech) about Canada's realignment away from an unreliable and antagonistic United States in favour of more reliable partners in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. 

It's also a pressure tactic to get Canada to buy more American military equipment (e.g. F-35 fighter jets), given Canada's recent pivot away from the US and towards more dependable, decent and welcoming providers in Europe and South Korea.

And last but not least, it is also very much about strong-arming Canada and softening us up as we start to get into the nitty-gritty phase of the scheduled renegotiation of the Canada United States Mexico Agreement on free trade. 

This, then, is all part of "the art of the deal".

Now, I have never read Trump's book The Art of the Deal, nor am I ever likely to. But it seems pretty clear to me that this kind of intimidation and duress masquerading as negotiation tactics is never going to foster long-term relationships and goodwill. All it does is piss people (and whole nations) off. This combative and transactional approach to negotiations - reliant, as it is, on an existing economic and military dominance that Trump himself was not responsible for building up - may make some short-term gains for the US, but only at the expense of its other "partners", and to the detriment of the relationship as a whole.

Trump's frenzied quest for wins of any kind and at any cost (viz. his Iran war), and his psychologically unbalanced pursuit of "deals", will not win him any friends. I don't even know what "friends" means in Trumpian terms: this is a man who calls Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping "friends", apparently blissfully unaware of just how much they despise him. Maybe Canada can be friends with the USA again one day, but that's not going to happen while Donald Trump is in power. His willful destructiveness will take decades, maybe even generations, to repair.