Eric Ramsden

Power is partly material, but coercive power is also perceptual. A state possesses armies, economic resources, financial leverage, alliances, and institutional authority, but its ability to compel others depends on their belief that it can and will convert those resources into the outcomes it demands. Used judiciously, power can achieve its objectives without ever being fully exercised. Used recklessly, it reveals its own limits. Failed threats are particularly costly because they provide information: every adversary, ally, corporation, court, and government watching learns something about which threats are credible, which constraints are real, and how much resistance Washington will tolerate. The Trump administration has repeatedly failed to understand this distinction. Iran is perhaps the clearest example. The United States entered the conflict with overwhelming conventional military superiority and nevertheless demonstrated that destructive capacity is not the same thing as political control. Five months after the start of hostilities, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains roughly 90 percent below prewar levels. Washington can destroy Iranian targets and escort vessels through the Strait, and it has established a corridor that has restored some oil flows, but escort operations cannot plausibly substitute at scale for the normal functioning of one of the world's most important maritime chokepoints. The United States has demonstrated enormous capacity to inflict damage while simultaneously demonstrating the limits of its ability to compel Iran to produce the political and economic outcome Washington wants. Then there are Trump's tariffs. He announced them with his characteristic bluster, treating access to the American market as an instrument through which virtually any foreign government could be forced into submission. The Supreme Court then held that IEEPA did not authorize the president to impose tariffs, forcing the administration into a humiliating retreat and a search for alternative statutory authorities that are considerably narrower and themselves vulnerable to legal challenge. The spectacle matters beyond trade policy. Foreign governments have now learned that an American president can announce sweeping economic punishment that he may lack the legal authority to sustain. Greenland offers an even more absurd example. Trump repeatedly threatened to acquire territory belonging to a NATO ally, at times refusing to exclude military force, only to discover that neither Denmark nor Greenland was inclined to surrender it and that Americans themselves overwhelmingly opposed taking it. What was originally presented as an exercise of American strength increasingly looks quixotic: the world's most powerful state threatening an ally with consequences it has neither the political support nor the strategic justification to impose. The same pattern is visible at home. Trump attempted to end birthright citizenship by executive order despite the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment and more than a century of constitutional precedent. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the attempt. Whatever political theatre accompanied the order, the result was another demonstration that declaring presidential authority does not create it. And now Canada has provided perhaps the most revealing example of all. Trump appears to have assumed that economic asymmetry would ultimately force Ottawa to accept Washington's terms. Instead, when the United States demanded restrictions on Canada's ability to negotiate trade agreements with other countries, interfered with Canadian cultural and language policy, and sought other concessions that Ottawa regarded as infringements on its sovereignty, Carney ordered Canada's negotiators home. The smaller power chose to absorb substantial economic costs rather than submit to the larger one. Trump threatened Canada with economic pain to compel acquiescence and instead demonstrated that even America's closest and most economically dependent allies can decide that resistance is preferable. This is the recurring failure of Trump's conception of power. He behaves as though possessing overwhelming resources means that others must ultimately yield. It does not. Coercion works when the threatened cost is credible, proportionate, sustainable, connected to an achievable objective, and greater than the target's willingness to resist. Trump routinely makes maximal demands, publicly escalates them, and leaves himself little room to retreat without exposing the gap between the threat and what the United States can actually accomplish. For all America's wealth and military power, and for all the authority accumulated in the executive branch, Trump is flailing precisely because he uses power injudiciously and does not understand its shape or its limits. He repeatedly converts latent American power, which can be extraordinarily intimidating, into observable contests that reveal exactly where American leverage ends. That is why these failures are more consequential than individual policy defeats. Each one generates information. Canada learns that it can resist. Denmark learns that threats over Greenland have little domestic constituency. Iran learns what level of disruption the United States can endure without achieving its political objectives. Other governments learn that presidential tariff threats may collide with American courts. Allies learn that Trump's maximalist demands can sometimes simply be refused. Adversaries update their estimates accordingly. Quite aside from being remembered as America's most corrupt president, Trump may well be remembered as one of its most ineffective. Yet ineffectiveness does not mean harmlessness. A president can fail to achieve his objectives while doing extraordinary damage along the way. Trump has weakened institutions at home, strained alliances abroad, imposed enormous economic costs, and, most dangerously, repeatedly invited the rest of the world to test the outer boundary of American power. He has given America's adversaries the scent of blood. And every time he makes a threat he cannot carry through, the scent gets stronger.