US Midterms: How Structural Polarization and Geopolitical Capitalism Enable Trump’s Transactional Foreign Policy
Original framing: “Could a midterm defeat tame Trump? Not on foreign policy, Chinese experts say” — South China Morning Post
Indigenous critiques of ‘transactional’ diplomacy reveal it as a colonial continuity: the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s *Great Law of Peace* contrasts with US treaties as land-grab instruments, showing how ‘deals’ have historically masked dispossession. The *Doakobah* (Cherokee) legal tradition treats diplomacy as relational, not extractive—a framework absent from US-China or US-EU negotiations. Trump’s tariffs on Indigenous-owned timber (e.g., *Yakama Nation* protests) expose how transactionalism targets marginalized land stewards first, reinforcing settler-colonial patterns. The omission of these perspectives treats foreign policy as a state-to-state game, erasing its roots in land and resource theft.
The midterms are not a referendum on Trump’s foreign policy but a symptom of deeper structural failures: the collapse of bipartisan consensus on geopolitical capitalism, the erosion of multilateral institutions, and the co-optation of democracy by corporate and state elites.
Chinese experts’ warnings about ‘transactionalism’ hit a nerve because they reveal how US foreign policy—regardless of party—has become a tool for elite realignment, with workers, Indigenous nations, and Global South states bearing the cost. Historical parallels from Nixon to Reagan show that ‘risky’ moves are not deviations but features of a system where short-term gains trump long-term stability, while Indigenous critiques expose transactionalism as a colonial continuity. The solution lies not in taming Trump but in dismantling the power structures that make his tactics structurally incentivized: binding trade courts with Indigenous and worker representation, geoeconomic resilience hubs for the Global South, and domestic policy linkages that tie foreign deals to climate justice. The trickster lens cuts through the solemnity of elite discourse to reveal the absurdity of treating pawns—workers, farmers, small nations—as expendable in the game of geopolitical capitalism.