The Shortcomings of Bully Foreign Policy

A new angle on tariffs and how our current foreign policy could topple the empire

Sometimes, being a bully works.

When I was growing up, one of my mom’s two favorite Christmas movies – that we watched every year – was A Christmas Story. The main character, Ralphie, and his pals spend half the movie running in terror from the local orange-tinged bully, Scut Farkus, and his sidekick, Grover Dill.

For a while, being a bully works for Scut. He owns the neighborhood and gets away with whatever he wants. Until, that is, one fateful day when he accosts Ralphie in a moment where Ralphie felt he had nothing to lose. Ralphie fights back, pummels Scut into the snow, and ends Scut’s reign of terror forever.

Because bully power doesn’t survive an embarrassing ass-whupping.

Many observers over the years have likened foreign affairs to the schoolyard, something that I saw firsthand doing arms control negotiations with NATO and Russia when I was a Marine on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. And, in 1956, the United Kingdom, just like Scut Farkus, learned the hard way just how true that is.

Although its empire was in the midst of decolonization, the UK was still considered a top world power and had long exercised bully politics in the Middle East, where it had controlled the Suez canal for nearly a century.

In July of 1956, though, to mark the fourth anniversary of his power-taking coup, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, seizing control of the Suez Canal from the British-French enterprise that had owned and operated it since its construction in 1869.

The UK, still thinking it was a great power, responded with force, teamed up with its sidekick, France, and invaded Egypt. The US and USSR were both furious and demanded that the troops withdraw. The US threatened to offload its British currency bonds, which would have wrecked the UK financially, and the UK was forced to slink away with its tail between its legs. A United Nations peacekeeping force came in. The UK ceded the canal to Egypt forever, and the British prime minister was forced to resign in shame. The whole world now knew that the UK could no longer do its own thing without US permission, exposing it as a second-rate power.

Exposure is the worst thing that can happen to a bully, both on the playground and on the world stage, and right now the US seems to be seeking exposure risk in every single direction.

To continue the analogy, we used to be the rich cool kid out on the playground. Sure, we pushed some other kids around and excluded others, and not everyone liked us, but we always had a circle, and everyone wanted to be in it or at least wished they had something similar. But over the last few months, we decided to cast our circle aside and pick fights with every single kid on the playground

We’ve won more than a few of these fights over the years, and will probably win most of these, just like the UK discovered, you can’t always win them all. And the more fights you pick, the higher the chance that someone with nothing to lose will smoke you, and if you’ve tossed your circle aside, well they might just take that, too.

Unfortunately, according to Rick Waters, former coordinator of the State Department’s China House, at least one of our targets seems ready to fight back:

“I spent most of March in China prior to the tariff announcement and it was clear the Chinese aren’t going to pay tribute to another emperor.”

Since then, China’s leadership has repeatedly said in the news that they have prepared for this and are ready to go. We might have found a government that thinks it has more to gain than to lose by fighting back, a sentiment that seems to extend to at least some of its people, too.

"We don't care about sales to the United States," Hu Tianqiang, a maker of toy fighter jets, recently told the BBC. "Other countries have money too!" he added. "We now sell mostly to South America and the Middle East. We are not lacking money, we are rich."

Despite Treasury Secretary Bessent repeatedly saying, as if the repetition will make it true, that China needs us more than we need them, China hasn’t made public overtures to the US to negotiate. In fact, in one critical way the US is in a similar position to the UK back in 1956. Remember how the US threatened to sell UK bonds to sink their economy during the Suez crisis? Well, China owns nearly $1 trillion in US debt.

And it seems instead that, despite Bessent’s cool insistence that everything is good, the US is tasting fear after China said that “if the United States insists on having its way, China will fight to the end.” In fact, it appears that after picking this fight we have now reached out to China through multiple channels to try to prevent an ass-whupping that exposes on the world stage.

And it’s not just China that doesn’t respect us anymore. Russia has seemingly refused to accept a single term proposed by the Trump administration in the Ukraine negotiations, causing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to admit that the US might just have to “move on.”

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Iran envoy, even admitted– before hastily retracting it– that in order to get an Iran deal they might just have to let Iran keep enriching uranium (the exact thing they mocked the Obama administration for allowing).

We all know that deep down the root of bullying is cowardice, and these guys seem to be tasting the fear that their one dimensional bully foreign policy is going to get exposed. People are already calling their bluffs and the next step, public humiliation, will bring the whole house of cards crashing down around us.

In which case, left alone on an island, our best case scenario will be to become post-1956 Britain, and our worst case scenario will be to turn into modern Russia: a shell of a country with an oligarchy reliant on vast military expenditures and fossil fuels, just waiting until it all runs out.

As always, though, where there's failure, there's opportunity.

If there's one thing the American people will not stand, it's to be humiliated and made weak. This could be a real turning point in domestic politics if folks start to feel humiliation and weakness creeping up on our country.

One note on that, though, is that it’s not the other countries judging us that matters. People love feeling judged, especially by foreigners/outsiders. So if you’re talking about this, the point isn’t that our policy is embarrassing and that other people think we are stupid. That’s not humiliation, that’s a reason to stay the course to prove folks wrong. The point to get across is that we are on the verge of losing.

And that losing will not just be humiliating, but it will cost us our way of life and turn us into a second-rate power like Great Britain. Believe me, no red-blooded American wants us to become the UK.

As always, please share this with anyone you think might find it valuable, particularly folks who are looking for a way to talk about what is happening internationally with a tariff talking point that goes beyond the price of goods.

Lucas