With What Infrastructure?
While Cory Booker’s historic filibuster is maligned as “performative,” Trump gets a pass.
It’s too bad that NPR regularly disappears its hourly updates. But knowing that, I managed to capture the follow gem over the weekend.
At least 1,600 people are dead, and hundreds more injured. After an earthquake struck central Myanmar yesterday, the magnitude 7.7 quake was also felled in China and in Thailand, where a building under construction collapsed.
Jan Camenzind Broomby has more from Bangkok.
Myanmar's military junta is calling for international humanitarian aid, and several countries, including the United States, have already responded. When asked by reporters, President Trump said, “We're going to be helping.” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said USAID disaster experts are assessing the requests and reports from the region to shape their response, adding the US was ready to provide aid, including food and water.
Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the world and engaged in an ongoing civil war. And with internet and phone signals cut in many areas, it may take some time to assess the true extent of the damage. For NPR News, I'm Jan Camenzind Broomby in Bangkok.”
From NPR News Now: NPR News: 03-29-2025 4PM EDT, Mar 29, 2025
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“We’re going to be helping,” said Trump. “With what infrastructure?”, I asked aloud. What’s telling is the mention of USAID, dismantled in the DOGE Purge.
Two days ago, Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny and academic expat, penned an article for The Guardian, “Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous.” The lede is as follows.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump inherited a state with unprecedented power and functionality, and are taking it apart. They also inherited a set of alliances and relationships that underpinned the largest economy in world history. This too they are breaking.
Adages such as “shooting oneself in the foot” or “cutting off the nose to spite the face” are relevant here. I think of the cycles of the GOP running up deficits for tax cuts for the wealthy, and Democrats reigning that in through austerity for the rest of us. Here the GOP regime specifically undermines the power they claim with “America first.”
In Hour 14 of his historic filibuster, Cory Booker argued that Trump’s foreign policy was “leaving our allies abandoned, our adversaries emboldened, and Americans less safe.”
In the case of the absurd interest in Greenland, Synder documents the following.
Greenland, Denmark and the US have been enmeshed in complex and effective security arrangements, touching on the gravest scenarios, for the better part of a century. Arctic security, an issue discovered by Trump and Vance very recently, was a preoccuption for decades during and after the cold war. There are fewer than 200 Americans at Pituffik now, where once there were 10,000; there is only that one US base on the island where once there were a dozen; but that is American policy, not Denmark’s fault.
We really do have a problem taking responsibility. The US has fallen well behind its allies and its rivals in the Arctic, in part because members of Vance’s political party denied for decades the reality of global warming, which has made it hard for the US navy to persuade Congress of the need to commission icebreaker ships. The US only has two functional Arctic icebreakers; the Biden administration was intending to cooperate with Canada, which has some, and with Finland, which builds lots, in order to compete with Russia, which has the most. That common plan would have allowed the US to surpass Russia in icebreaking capacity. This is one of countless examples of how cooperation with Nato allies benefits the US. It is not clear what will happen with that arrangement now that Trump and Vance define Canada, like Denmark, as a rival or even as an enemy. Presumably it will break down, leaving Russia dominant.
The GOP regime would have us believe that it is our European allies who are not taking responsibility for our common security, for example, disparaging NATO. Snyder documents a different story.
When I visited Billings Farm and Museum with my young children, we learned that veal is a byproduct of dairy production. Likewise, the beautiful products that bring these thoughts to you rely upon the projection of US power around the globe. I think it’s important to bring justice to these economic relationships. That would be impossible if the US were to supplanted by authoritarian economic powers such as Russia, China, or even India, captive as it has been by the Hindu nationalist BJP. We have greater common cause with the EU, yet we turn these friends into adversaries.
For comparison to Myanmar’s earthquake, I turn to the 2004 Tsunami, especially as it affected Banda Aceh in Indonesia. International attention brought an end to the government’s war with Islamist separatists, and limited autonomy. Online donations broke the internet, quite literally. The US abandoning a meaningful role in international affairs, much less leadership is a marked departure from our postwar role. America should be first… in compassion. Not performance.