Week signals: Revolting things
Plus: watch points for the Ukraine, the Balkans, India, Somalia, and Ecuador.
This week:
IN REVIEW. A Thermidorian Reaction, constitutional limits, the real revolution, and musings for Musk.
UP AHEAD. Washington goes to Europe, Kosovo votes, Modi visits, Somalia fights, and Ecuador decides.
The Week in Review: Change, continuity, chaos and collapse
The week began with threats of 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. It ended with 10% duties on Chinese goods, other than packages worth less than $800 after a pause on earlier ‘de minimis’ changes.
In between, public servants were shut out of their offices in Washington, Trump sought to take Gaza, Syria's president continued his charm offensive, and shifts towards a US-Iran deal began. Elsewhere, France's prime minister survived, the M23 continued its offensive across Congo’s east, and Xi Jinping rolled out the red carpet for visiting dignitaries.
Even by recent standards, it was a chaotic week. Markets, having largely faded geopolitics in 2024, were whipsawed. Western corporates, when not scrubbing DEI from their files, were grappling with new trade scenarios. Developing countries were re-examining budgets, with fresh uncertainty around USAid programs.
Throughout the week, many asked if this was not only a transition but a revolution in US politics. The Trump administration's changes have been both confounding and rapid. Like one of Lenin’s weeks where decades happen, and where all that’s solid melts into air, it was hard to keep track of the themes and implications.
And indeed, it was hard to see if there were themes, or implications, to begin with. The beginning of Trump’s second term is, in many ways, too random and seemingly uncoordinated to be called a revolution. Additionally, it’s more of a counter-revolution. Further, it could also be seen as a Thermidorian Reaction – the brief period of revolutionary France known as the “White Terror” after the “Red Terror” of Robespierre and the Jacobins – rather than the milder (and etymologically unrelated) thermostatic reaction of conventional electoral cycles.
Whether on gender, climate, regulation, alliances, or even paper straws, the changes have been sudden but could likewise be ephemeral (as per this week’s moves on trade). Enforced by orders and memoranda, many have already been stalled by the courts. Others are set to be opposed by Congress, which has so far been conserving its powder for a debt ceiling debate to come. Trump’s revolutionary (or reactionary) zeal could be ultimately confined to corners of the executive branch. And with policy instruments like DOGE both seemingly unpopular and in a legal grey-zone, the potential for more permanent, deliberative and consequential change may have in fact been destroyed.
The problem with revolutions is that they often spin out of control, leading to either a more lasting backlash (such as in Europe’s post-1848 monarchies), or to internecine struggles from within (such as in Western Marxism). The other problem is that they struggle to take root in decentralised and middle-class democracies like America’s.
Thanks to the War of Independence, many Americans see themselves as inherently revolutionary. Yet since that time, the US has been remarkably stable. Even including the Civil War, the constitution has, for better or worse, endured. Indeed, measured by the age of founding charters still in use, the US is the world’s oldest state, followed by Norway. Taking a more expansive view of statutory arrangements, only Britain is older. Between 1788 and today, France, by contrast, has had 15 constitutions (plus one never implemented). Thailand has had 20. The Dominican Republic 32.
There is, however, one genuine revolution worth noting, of which the US, and the White House is central, and that’s