We shouldn't assume that our enemy is acting out of pure stupidity, as entertaining as it is. We've been laughing about how stupid Trump is because his actions look stupid under our assumption that the US want to maintain their vassals empire.

But what if the new Republican administration decided to change strategy?

Here's a theory I've seen than makes sense to me:

The US is putting tariffs on and souring relations with their own vassals because they don't want to keep these increasingly expensive to maintain vassals anymore. They are looking to ditch them, grabbing anything they can on the way out, so that they can concentrate their ever dwindling military and economic power on protecting the American ruling class (including the foreigners capitalists who de-localized to the US) instead of having to protect the entire western ruling class.

The US ruling class must have realized that global dominance was a lost cause no matter what, and they are making an admittedly costly strategic retreat to avoid an even larger and more costly debacle later.

If this is the case, then suddenly, Trump's tariffs frenzy makes sense: they are tariffing the EU and Canada to hell, cutting subsidies to them and ditching Taiwan even though they are US vassals because they are ditching them, the US is cutting their losses before the cracks of the empire becomes a fatal wound.

It also explain why he didn't do any of that during Trump's first term back in 2016: the empire was still relatively stable back then, there was no other political, military or economic block capable of challenging NATO to the extent BRICS is doing now.

Heck, that would even explain why Trump of all peoples was the one to get a ceasefire out of Israel.