The Trump administration's foreign policy, embodied in the National Security Strategy, is explicitly a call for total American impunity.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.

For the past year, the world has been in a state of chaos. The United States, in the grips of its mad pirate king, has installed tariffs, removed tariffs, made deals, overturned deals, made threats, backed off threats, and all with the randomness of an infant that has not quite achieved object permanence. Nonetheless, a logic is starting to emerge, a logic that explains America’s actions: the logic of the rapist.

The President has always said that men like him have a right to “grab ’em by the pussy.” The American people elected Donald Trump knowing that he had been found responsible for rape in the case of E. Jean Carroll. Since then, rape as a way of life, as an approach to the world, has extended to U.S. institutions generally. Some right-wing U.S. intellectuals are calling it “coercive diplomacy.” The plan to annex Greenland by military force, a plan which has apparently been shelved, for the moment, operates perfectly on the logic of rape. Before the threats, the U.S. could have........

© The Globe and Mail