This is a good thing and a bad thing.
I’d agree that there may well be less unity between states. I believe that’s actually what our founders intended- individual states united, without local/state politics being an afterthought.
Problem is our system in concept is based on the idea that the only good source of authority for how to govern is the people who are governed taking an active interest in their own government. Sadly that kind of engaged population hasn’t been the case for a while. Sadly the ones who are pushing for this are more so our conservatives- not for any useful reason but because it gives them more ability to set discriminatory policies against gay people and enforce religion based socially conservative policy in primarily conservative states.
IMHO the only thing that can save us is if the American people once again take active interest in the running of their government. This is easier said than done.
I don’t blame you.
You are correct that America is no longer a trustworthy reliable partner. And of that IMHO Trump is a symptom rather than a cause. The simple fact is that the American people have become disconnected from their own politics. So every 4ish years maybe half to 2/3 of the country opens one eyelid just enough to either blindly vote for whatever primary color they subscribe to, or to vote for whoever’s TV ads sucked less. The number that do real research is sadly very low.
The result is we flip flop back and forth between the red asshole and the blue asshole. Red seems to have more assholes the last couple decades but it varies when you look at the big picture. The real problem though isn’t red or blue is that the sense of national identity is gone. Go back 20 or 30 years and someone like Trump would be laughed off the stage in the first primary because rounding up immigrants with secret police squads is obviously not how America operates. Now people get so caught up in the ‘us vs them’ divisive narrative that they actually think the ends justify the means (or more likely, they just don’t research the reality of what’s going on and just say ‘yeah get rid of illegal immigrants!’)
The point though is that no set of policies, no matter how good or bad, can be assumed to last more than 4ish years. Look at Ukraine- Biden helped them out because defending freedom is what America stands for, Trump tried to shake them down for mineral rights then washed his hands of the problem.
So yeah, the fact that we as a nation are behaving this way is a failure. But the bigger failure is that we are so disconnected from the actions of our own government that we largely no longer care. We bitch about it online but ask anyone complaining online if they’ve done more than 1 hour of independent candidate research over the last decade? I’d be shocked if you get 1%.
Until that changes I’m sorry to say to anyone in the rest of the world, don’t assume any USA policy will last any longer than the administration that enacted it.
Personally if the situation was reversed, or if I was in charge of Canada, I’d just set a policy that each month, there will be a flat rate tariff on all US imported goods that will, over the next 30 days, be equal to the $ value of last month’s tariffs paid on all exports to USA. That money will be collected and made available to cover any tariffs USA charged on Canadian imports.
Result is the more USA tariffs Canadian goods coming south, the more tariff will need to be paid to sell stuff going north. And thus fewer people in Canada will buy USA goods because of the tariff, but people in USA will buy Canadian goods because the tariff is paid for by Canadian government.
Only works up to a point, but will definitely create a trade imbalance in Canada’s favor. And we can say you want it to go away, kill the tariff on your side and it’s automatically gone in 30 days.