Evangelical Authoritarianism
By 
The Trump administration isn’t Realist; it’s ideologically pro-authoritarian and is taking active steps to spread authoritarianism around the world:
President Trump said on Wednesday that he planned to impose a 50 percent tariff on all Brazilian imports, partly in retaliation for what he sees as a “witch hunt” against his political ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is facing trial for attempting a coup.
In a letter to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Mr. Trump wrote that the new tariffs would take effect on Aug. 1. “The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace.”
Mr. Trump’s effort to use tariffs to intervene in a criminal trial in a foreign nation is an extraordinary example of how he views levies as a one-size-fits-all cudgel.
Don’t be surprised if we see further coercive steps taken against South Korea.
Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s ousted president, already on trial on insurrection charges, was rearrested and sent back to jail early on Thursday after a special prosecutor accused him of additional criminal offenses.
Mr. Yoon was impeached by South Korea’s legislature in December and arrested in January after a short-lived attempt to place his country under martial law in 2024. He was the first president in South Korean history to be indicted on criminal charges while in office.
Dramatic affirmation of Bret Devereaux’s argument that the Trump administration is primarily motivated by right wing authoritarian ideology, not by some concrete notion of “the national interest.”
But conspicuous by its absence is a fifth model that might help explain the seemingly chaotic and contradictory decisions: ideology. What may seem like a nonsensical constellation of foreign-policy positions presents a coherent list of desired friends and hated enemies when viewed through the lens of the ideological worldview that animates key decision-makers in the executive branch.
Such an ideological approach is often uncomfortable terrain for foreign-policy realists, but its facility in explaining the decisions of historical regimes is considerable, particularly for relatively closed, personalistic ones. As Andrew Roberts observed in his book, The Storm of War, Adolf Hitler’s foreign-policy decisions, which were often inexplicable from a strategic perspective, were perfectly congruent ideologically: He lost the war for the same reason he started it—“he was a Nazi.”