The myth: “law of the jungle” politics is natural. The reality: humans (and a lot of the animal world) survive by cooperation, relationship, and mutual obligation.
I’m watching coverage of Canada moving toward deeper economic relationships with China—and the obvious backdrop is that Trump is alienating allies at exactly the moment the U.S. needs trust, strategic patience, and long memory.
The deeper issue isn’t partisan drama. It’s civilizational: there is no durable “law of the jungle” model for human life. That idea is a story we tell inside capitalism. And it’s a story that collapses the minute you look seriously at how people have actually survived across history.
AmericaFirst Isn’t Isolationism—It’s Transactional Empire
“America First” gets misread as restraint. But in practice—especially under Trump—it becomes a license: we do what we want, when we want, and relationships are secondary to leverage.
And under Trump, America First isn’t isolationism, it’s a license for Empire built out of a broader sense of “impunity” that spans the Monroe → Roosevelt → Donroe → Bibi Netanyahu-style politics of “do what you want because nobody will stop you” (The Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, or the BIBI Doctrine? The evolution of a politics of impunity).
The point here is simple: Trump’s core move is to treat the world like New York real estate— everything is a deal, everyone is replaceable, and the only thing that matters is the immediate transaction. But geopolitics isn’t a condo project. It’s entire nations, public opinions, cultural barriers, nevermind supply chains, raw materials, security commitments, war-risk, diplomatic memory, and reputational inertia.
Mutual Aid Is Not “Nice.” It’s How Humans Actually Survive.
The “every man for himself” fantasy sounds tough. It also misunderstands human history. If you zoom out far enough—bands, villages, informal economies, subsistence systems, even disaster response— you see the same pattern: cooperation is the baseline.
This is exactly what Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid argued against Social Darwinist myth-making: cooperation isn’t a moral add-on; it’s a survival strategy embedded in evolution and social life.
Even the most “independent” lifeways people romanticize—homesteading, rural self-reliance, “frontier grit”—are historically communal. You can’t raise a barn alone. You can’t build a house alone. You can’t defend a village, coordinate harvest, share childcare, or survive winter shocks without reciprocal support and social infrastructure.
This is also what my research in squats and autonomous centers shows in practice: you don’t get autonomy without community. “Self-sufficiency” is almost always a collective achievement disguised as an individual virtue.
What Trump Misses: Trust Is an Infrastructure
In international relations terms, Trump is burning the resource that actually makes alliances work: credibility.
Classic IR work on “complex interdependence” emphasizes that states aren’t just isolated billiard balls; they’re entangled through trade, institutions, and mutual vulnerability—meaning cooperation is often rational, not naïve. (See Keohane & Nye, Power and Interdependence.)
When you threaten allies (tariffs, annexation talk, coercive leverage) you’re teaching them a lesson: the U.S. is not a relationship partner; it’s a transactional risk. And rational actors hedge risks. That’s how you get allies diversifying toward China—not because they suddenly love China, but because they can’t trust the U.S. not to turn on them the minute it’s convenient.
This is why the “America First” posture doesn’t create strength long-term. It creates isolation-by-design: people cooperate elsewhere because your “friendship” is structurally unstable.
Anthropology’s Point: Politics Is Social, Not Mechanical
A lot of mainstream political talk treats states like rational calculators and “order” like a set of rules enforced from above. Anthropology tends to notice something different: politics is lived inside relationships, legitimacy, and everyday practices.
If you want strong anthropology anchors for this: Julia Paley’s work on democracy and power, Carol Greenhouse on law/citizenship and political fractures, and David Nugent on state formation and political modernity are all useful touchpoints.
They’re different projects, but they converge on a shared reality: political order depends on social foundations—and when you treat politics as pure leverage, you corrode the foundations you later need.
The Daoist Warning: “We’ll See.”
There’s an old Daoist parable people often summarize as “good luck / bad luck—who knows?” It’s commonly known through the idiom 塞翁失马 (“the old man lost his horse”), traced to the Huainanzi.
The point isn’t mystical. It’s strategic humility: short-term wins can generate long-term losses. You can “get the minerals,” “win the negotiation,” “force the tariff,” “take the territory,” and still lose the alliance system that made your power stable in the first place.
Trump keeps acting like every outcome is immediate and final: “We won.” “We got it.” Daoist logic says: you don’t know what you just set in motion.
Why This Pushes Countries Toward China
When the U.S. signals that it will treat allies the same way it treats targets—coercion, extraction, humiliation, constant leverage—then the rational response is diversification.
- Canada builds parallel options.
- Europe hedges and rethinks dependence.
- Smaller states look for multi-alignment strategies.
- Everyone learns to treat the U.S. as a risk factor, not a stable partner.
That doesn’t automatically mean China “wins.” It means the U.S. is voluntarily dissolving the trust that made its leadership possible. And in world politics, trust is power.
Related reading inside the Alternative Ideas ecosystem
- America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s a License for Empire
- The Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, or the BIBI Doctrine?
- Sovereignty Without Permission: Why Latin America Needs their own version of “NATO”
- The Age of Dependency: How We Lost Our Personal Sovereignty
Also relevant on Interpreting Capitalism
There is a clear time in here to the “anarchist interpretations of capitalism” at Anarchism (Interpreting Capitalism). It directly frames anarchist autonomy as inherently social (mutual aid) rather than the capitalist myth of “autonomy” as isolated self-interest.
