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Yahoo
17 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
The Father-Daughter Routine That Transformed Our Family Life
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In the early years, weekend adventures with my daughter followed a script: a park, a pet store, a local bakery or maybe somewhere for lunch. We'd do it every Saturday, on and on. Now my daughter is nearly 9, and the tone and tenor of our routine has changed. The music we listen to matters more—she's gone from wanting 'Baby Shark' to having strong opinions about how Kurt Cobain kind of sounds like a loud, angry version of the Beatles. We still go to bakeries (this is a topic on which we fundamentally agree as father and child), but now we can also talk about what we enjoy at them (both the pastries and the fact that we're supporting small businesses in the city we love). Conceptually, what my family has come to call 'Dad-urday' grew out of a common parenting-duo problem: Sometimes, even though my wife and I believe in sharing household duties equally, one person will end up doing more kid-related labor than the other. This, I will admit (with some discomfort and guilt), fairly accurately depicts my family situation. Although I do parent throughout the week, I travel a lot for work, which means my wife has had to take on many an early morning alone. So we designated Saturday mornings as my time to wake up with our daughter: make breakfast, watch some cartoons, then get ready to go out for a bit. I bring my wife a cup of coffee in bed and let her snuggle with our needy, oddball house cats—and allow her a full morning to herself. Dad-urday was a logistical decision that turned into a ritual, one that's become an anchor to my life: I design my work calendar around it and always try to fly home by Friday night. [Read: The default-parent problem] When my daughter was tiny and refused to sleep on a regular schedule at home, our Saturdays involved a lot of naps (hers, not mine), and I acted as a sort of baby-sleep chauffeur. The back of my Volkswagen was the only place she would snooze soundly—after a habitual 30-minute period of screaming-infant Sturm und Drang—so I would drive her around for hours on end, looping through neighborhoods and cruising up and down the hills of our Oregon town. But soon enough, as my daughter got a little older, Dad-urday became more dynamic: We'd talk over the day's agenda and debate which park to visit. Some weeks, she'd choose one with elaborate climbing equipment; others, she'd want one with trails and streams to traverse. Afterward we'd visit a store called Pets on Broadway because I love animals and so does she. It's like a zoo in there, with fish and lizards and guinea pigs and a cat-adoption station, and we'd always get a treat or toy to bring home for our kitties. Every Dad-urday, we aim to be out of the house until at least the early afternoon. This creates an uninterrupted period in which my daughter is the only person I'm talking to, and vice versa—me the planner, seeking order through scheduling, plotting out the best spot to have lunch ahead of an afternoon movie; she the great adventurer, up for anything, ready to let 10 a.m. become 3 p.m. if the getting is good at the park with the epic zip line. Now that my daughter is way bigger, our days reflect her changing interests and greater maturity. She's learning to play the guitar, so I've been subjecting her to my Millennial-with-Boomer-tastes CD wallet: Jerry Garcia, the Kinks, J Dilla, XTC. We roam around and visit music shops, plugging guitars into cool amps and fiddling with distortion and delay pedals, behavior that the guitar-shop bros seem willing to tolerate in small doses. [Read: I still get called daddy-mommy] Our conversations have also expanded to encompass the wider world and its fundamental truths. The other day, on our way to pick up some kimchi, my daughter demanded to know, in detail, the difference between a pickle (like the ones we had in a jar in the fridge) and kimchi, which I had previously—and not entirely accurately—described as 'a style of Korean pickle.' By the end of the chat, I was talking about the different preserving and fermenting traditions of various cuisines, and she was ready to conduct a taste test when we got back home. Another development: Whenever we order lunch, my daughter now has an ideal deli sandwich (turkey, cheddar, sourdough, light mayo). I find it charming, but it also feels like some kind of passage into adulthood, the fact that my child knows herself well enough to dictate her preferences to the deli guy. If her grandfather or great-grandfather, who both knew their way around a deli, were here, they would be positively verklempt. When we go to a park, I get to see other ways in which my daughter's personality has expanded. I listen to her rattling off the name and subspecies of every bird we glimpse. I watch her being kind to younger kids on the climbing wall. She is almost too big for a lot of the equipment—on certain sets of monkey bars, her toes nearly touch the ground—yet she calls over every couple of minutes, asking me to observe some feat of gymnastic glory. She still needs me to watch her on the playground, at least for now. I can imagine that to some people, 'Dad-urday' might just sound like a cutesy rebrand for 'parenting.' But something about putting a name to the ritual has helped underscore for me exactly how precious my time with my daughter is—and how swiftly it moves. A consistent routine we share each week allows me to easily track her growth, as with height marks on a doorframe. And in my mind, under 'Dad-urday,' I now have a memory archive of hundreds of Saturdays with my kid, which allows me to reflect on the changes over the course of her childhood, and the changes within myself, more clearly. Of course, nobody bats a thousand. Some weekends, if my daughter has a Saturday-morning birthday party or some other peg in her byzantine social schedule, we opt instead for a cheeky 'Sun-dad.' And every so often we'll miss a weekend. That makes the rest of the week feel out of balance, as if I'm missing some core part of myself. You see, I've come to love who I am on Dad-urday: gentler, more patient, more present and aware of the beauty of the world, because my daughter and I are seeing it together. Before I wrote this essay, by the way, I sat down with my kid and talked with her about it. I'm careful about what I share online, and like many parents, I feel conflicted about creating content out of intimate moments. But my daughter told me, in her kind, self-assured way, that she thought writing about Dad-urday was a great idea—because she wanted other kids to get to have Dad-urdays, too. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
19 hours ago
- General
- Atlantic
The Joy of ‘Dad-urday'
In the early years, weekend adventures with my daughter followed a script: a park, a pet store, a local bakery or maybe somewhere for lunch. We'd do it every Saturday, on and on. Now my daughter is nearly 9, and the tone and tenor of our routine has changed. The music we listen to matters more—she's gone from wanting 'Baby Shark' to having strong opinions about how Kurt Cobain kind of sounds like a loud, angry version of the Beatles. We still go to bakeries (this is a topic on which we fundamentally agree as father and child), but now we can also talk about what we enjoy at them (both the pastries and the fact that we're supporting small businesses in the city we love). Conceptually, what my family has come to call 'Dad-urday' grew out of a common parenting-duo problem: Sometimes, even though my wife and I believe in sharing household duties equally, one person will end up doing more kid-related labor than the other. This, I will admit (with some discomfort and guilt), fairly accurately depicts my family situation. Although I do parent throughout the week, I travel a lot for work, which means my wife has had to take on many an early morning alone. So we designated Saturday mornings as my time to wake up with our daughter: make breakfast, watch some cartoons, then get ready to go out for a bit. I bring my wife a cup of coffee in bed and let her snuggle with our needy, oddball house cats—and allow her a full morning to herself. Dad-urday was a logistical decision that turned into a ritual, one that's become an anchor to my life: I design my work calendar around it and always try to fly home by Friday night. When my daughter was tiny and refused to sleep on a regular schedule at home, our Saturdays involved a lot of naps (hers, not mine), and I acted as a sort of baby-sleep chauffeur. The back of my Volkswagen was the only place she would snooze soundly—after a habitual 30-minute period of screaming-infant Sturm und Drang—so I would drive her around for hours on end, looping through neighborhoods and cruising up and down the hills of our Oregon town. But soon enough, as my daughter got a little older, Dad-urday became more dynamic: We'd talk over the day's agenda and debate which park to visit. Some weeks, she'd choose one with elaborate climbing equipment; others, she'd want one with trails and streams to traverse. Afterward we'd visit a store called Pets on Broadway because I love animals and so does she. It's like a zoo in there, with fish and lizards and guinea pigs and a cat-adoption station, and we'd always get a treat or toy to bring home for our kitties. Every Dad-urday, we aim to be out of the house until at least the early afternoon. This creates an uninterrupted period in which my daughter is the only person I'm talking to, and vice versa—me the planner, seeking order through scheduling, plotting out the best spot to have lunch ahead of an afternoon movie; she the great adventurer, up for anything, ready to let 10 a.m. become 3 p.m. if the getting is good at the park with the epic zip line. Now that my daughter is way bigger, our days reflect her changing interests and greater maturity. She's learning to play the guitar, so I've been subjecting her to my Millennial-with-Boomer-tastes CD wallet: Jerry Garcia, the Kinks, J Dilla, XTC. We roam around and visit music shops, plugging guitars into cool amps and fiddling with distortion and delay pedals, behavior that the guitar-shop bros seem willing to tolerate in small doses. Our conversations have also expanded to encompass the wider world and its fundamental truths. The other day, on our way to pick up some kimchi, my daughter demanded to know, in detail, the difference between a pickle (like the ones we had in a jar in the fridge) and kimchi, which I had previously—and not entirely accurately—described as 'a style of Korean pickle.' By the end of the chat, I was talking about the different preserving and fermenting traditions of various cuisines, and she was ready to conduct a taste test when we got back home. Another development: Whenever we order lunch, my daughter now has an ideal deli sandwich (turkey, cheddar, sourdough, light mayo). I find it charming, but it also feels like some kind of passage into adulthood, the fact that my child knows herself well enough to dictate her preferences to the deli guy. If her grandfather or great-grandfather, who both knew their way around a deli, were here, they would be positively verklempt. When we go to a park, I get to see other ways in which my daughter's personality has expanded. I listen to her rattling off the name and subspecies of every bird we glimpse. I watch her being kind to younger kids on the climbing wall. She is almost too big for a lot of the equipment—on certain sets of monkey bars, her toes nearly touch the ground—yet she calls over every couple of minutes, asking me to observe some feat of gymnastic glory. She still needs me to watch her on the playground, at least for now. I can imagine that to some people, 'Dad-urday' might just sound like a cutesy rebrand for 'parenting.' But something about putting a name to the ritual has helped underscore for me exactly how precious my time with my daughter is—and how swiftly it moves. A consistent routine we share each week allows me to easily track her growth, as with height marks on a doorframe. And in my mind, under 'Dad-urday,' I now have a memory archive of hundreds of Saturdays with my kid, which allows me to reflect on the changes over the course of her childhood, and the changes within myself, more clearly. Of course, nobody bats a thousand. Some weekends, if my daughter has a Saturday-morning birthday party or some other peg in her byzantine social schedule, we opt instead for a cheeky 'Sun-dad.' And every so often we'll miss a weekend. That makes the rest of the week feel out of balance, as if I'm missing some core part of myself. You see, I've come to love who I am on Dad-urday: gentler, more patient, more present and aware of the beauty of the world, because my daughter and I are seeing it together. Before I wrote this essay, by the way, I sat down with my kid and talked with her about it. I'm careful about what I share online, and like many parents, I feel conflicted about creating content out of intimate moments. But my daughter told me, in her kind, self-assured way, that she thought writing about Dad-urday was a great idea—because she wanted other kids to get to have Dad-urdays, too.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Barabak: Is there a middle ground on immigration? This Republican thinks so
Bob Worsley has solid conservative credentials. He's anti abortion. A fiscal hawk and lifelong member of the Mormon Church. As an Arizona state senator, he won high marks from the National Rifle Assn. These days, however, Worsley is an oddity, an exception, a Republican pushing back against the animating impulses of today's MAGA-fied Republican Party. Here's how he speaks of immigrants — some of whom entered the United States illegally — and those who seek to demonize them. "We have people that are aristocratically living in another world," Worsley said. "Maybe they work for you, but you haven't really lived with them and understand they're not criminals. They are good people. They're family people. They're religious people. They are great Americans.... So I think that's a problem if you don't live with them and you're making policy." If that line of reasoning is too mawkish and bleeding-heart for your taste, Worsley makes a more pragmatic argument for a generous, welcoming immigration policy, one unsentimentally rooted in cold dollars and cents. "The Trump Organization needs workers, hospitality workers, construction workers," Worsley said. "The horse-breeding industry, the horse-racing industry, they need these people. The pig farmers, the chicken farmers." Read more: Trump's America: Views of the 47th president, from the ground up Worsley owns a Phoenix-based modular housing firm and is chairman of the American Business Immigration Coalition, an organization representing more than 1,700 chief executives and business owners nationwide. Their exceedingly ambitious goal: to find compromise and a middle ground on one of the most contentious and insoluble issues of recent decades — and to bring some balance to a Trump policy that is almost wholly punitive in its nature and intent. "We are employers ... and we don't have a workforce. We need this workforce," Worsley said. "And building a wall and stopping all immigration is not going to work, because the water will rise until it comes over." A serial entrepreneur before he entered politics, Worsley favor throwing the U.S.-Mexico border open to all comers. The "lines between countries" should mean something, he said. But now that America's borders have been practically sealed shut, fulfilling one of President Trump's major campaign promises, Worsley suggests it's past time to address another part of the immigration equation. "What we need is bigger portals, bigger legal openings to come through the border," Worsley said, likening it to the way a spillway releases pressure behind a dam. "We need a secure workforce as much as we need a secure border." The immigration issue was Worsley's impetus to enter politics. Or, more specifically, the scapegoating and vilification of immigrants that prefigured Trump and his "poisoning the blood of our country" Sturm und Drang. Worsley, whose ventures included founding the SkyMall catalog — a pre-Amazon everything store — was coaxed into running to thwart the return of former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, who was recalled by voters in part for his fiercely anti-immigrant lawmaking. (Worsley beat him in the 2012 GOP primary, then won the general election.) As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Worsley did his youth missionary work in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. "I developed a certain level of comfort and love for the people down there," Worsley said. Moreover, the experience colored his perspective on those impoverished souls who traverse borders in search of a better life. A person can't empathize "unless you've actually walked in their shoes, lived in their homes, eaten their food and socialized with them," Worsley said via Zoom from his home office in Salt Lake City. "And I think that's a problem." He left the Arizona Senate — and electoral politics — in 2019, vexed and frustrated by the rise of Trump and the anti-immigrant wave he rode to his first, improbable election to the White House. Read more: Barabak: In Arizona, relief along the border now that Trump is back in charge "It was really irritating because I had fought this in Arizona a decade before," Worsley said. "And so to have this kind of comeback on a national stage was incredibly frustrating." He moved part time to Utah, to be closer to his extended family. He wrote a book, "The Horseshoe Virus," about the immigration issue; the title suggested the convergence of the far left and far right in the country's long history of anti-immigrant movements. He became involved with the American Business Immigration Coalition, recruited by Mitt Romney, the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee, whom Worsley knew through politics and a mutual friendship with Arizona's late senator, John McCain. Worsley became the board's chairman in January. He's still no fan of Trump, though Worsley emphasized, "I am still a Republican and would vote for a Mitt Romney or John McCain kind of Republican." Read more: Trump administration investigates California's benefits to immigrants. Critics say its claims are misleading That said, now that the border is under much tighter control, Worsley hopes Trump will not just seek to round up and punish those in the country illegally but also focus on a larger fix to the nation's dysfunctional immigration system — something no president, Democrat or Republican, has accomplished in nearly 40 years. It was 1986 when Ronald Reagan signed sweeping legislation that offered amnesty to millions of long-term residents, expanded certain visa programs, cracked down on employers who hired illegal workers and promised to harden the border once and for all through stiffer enforcement — a pledge that, obviously, came to naught. "Once you've secured the border and you don't have caravans of people coming toward us, then you can address [the question of] what's the pragmatic solution so that this doesn't happen again?" Worsley asked. "We're hopeful that's where we're going next." It's long overdue. Get the latest from Mark Z. BarabakFocusing on politics out West, from the Golden Gate to the U.S. me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
13-05-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Is there a middle ground on immigration? This Republican thinks so
Bob Worsley has solid conservative credentials. He's anti abortion. A fiscal hawk and lifelong member of the Mormon Church. As an Arizona state senator, he won high marks from the National Rifle Assn. These days, however, Worsley is an oddity, an exception, a Republican pushing back against the animating impulses of today's MAGA-fied Republican Party. Here's how he speaks of immigrants — some of whom entered the United States illegally — and those who seek to demonize them. 'We have people that are aristocratically living in another world,' Worsley said. 'Maybe they work for you, but you haven't really lived with them and understand they're not criminals. They are good people. They're family people. They're religious people. They are great Americans.... So I think that's a problem if you don't live with them and you're making policy.' If that line of reasoning is too mawkish and bleeding-heart for your taste, Worsley makes a more pragmatic argument for a generous, welcoming immigration policy, one unsentimentally rooted in cold dollars and cents. 'The Trump Organization needs workers, hospitality workers, construction workers,' Worsley said. 'The horse-breeding industry, the horse-racing industry, they need these people. The pig farmers, the chicken farmers.' Worsley owns a Phoenix-based modular housing firm and is chairman of the American Business Immigration Coalition, an organization representing more than 1,700 chief executives and business owners nationwide. Their exceedingly ambitious goal: to find compromise and a middle ground on one of the most contentious and insoluble issues of recent decades — and to bring some balance to a Trump policy that is almost wholly punitive in its nature and intent. 'We are employers ... and we don't have a workforce. We need this workforce,' Worsley said. 'And building a wall and stopping all immigration is not going to work, because the water will rise until it comes over.' A serial entrepreneur before he entered politics, Worsley favor throwing the U.S.-Mexico border open to all comers. The 'lines between countries' should mean something, he said. But now that America's borders have been practically sealed shut, fulfilling one of President Trump's major campaign promises, Worsley suggests it's past time to address another part of the immigration equation. 'What we need is bigger portals, bigger legal openings to come through the border,' Worsley said, likening it to the way a spillway releases pressure behind a dam. 'We need a secure workforce as much as we need a secure border.' The immigration issue was Worsley's impetus to enter politics. Or, more specifically, the scapegoating and vilification of immigrants that prefigured Trump and his 'poisoning the blood of our country' Sturm und Drang. Worsley, whose ventures included founding the SkyMall catalog — a pre-Amazon everything store — was coaxed into running to thwart the return of former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, who was recalled by voters in part for his fiercely anti-immigrant lawmaking. (Worsley beat him in the 2012 GOP primary, then won the general election.) As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Worsley did his youth missionary work in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. 'I developed a certain level of comfort and love for the people down there,' Worsley said. Moreover, the experience colored his perspective on those impoverished souls who traverse borders in search of a better life. A person can't empathize 'unless you've actually walked in their shoes, lived in their homes, eaten their food and socialized with them,' Worsley said via Zoom from his home office in Salt Lake City. 'And I think that's a problem.' He left the Arizona Senate — and electoral politics — in 2019, vexed and frustrated by the rise of Trump and the anti-immigrant wave he rode to his first, improbable election to the White House. 'It was really irritating because I had fought this in Arizona a decade before,' Worsley said. 'And so to have this kind of comeback on a national stage was incredibly frustrating.' He moved part time to Utah, to be closer to his extended family. He wrote a book, 'The Horseshoe Virus,' about the immigration issue; the title suggested the convergence of the far left and far right in the country's long history of anti-immigrant movements. He became involved with the American Business Immigration Coalition, recruited by Mitt Romney, the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee, whom Worsley knew through politics and a mutual friendship with Arizona's late senator, John McCain. Worsley became the board's chairman in January. He's still no fan of Trump, though Worsley emphasized, 'I am still a Republican and would vote for a Mitt Romney or John McCain kind of Republican.' That said, now that the border is under much tighter control, Worsley hopes Trump will not just seek to round up and punish those in the country illegally but also focus on a larger fix to the nation's dysfunctional immigration system — something no president, Democrat or Republican, has accomplished in nearly 40 years. It was 1986 when Ronald Reagan signed sweeping legislation that offered amnesty to millions of long-term residents, expanded certain visa programs, cracked down on employers who hired illegal workers and promised to harden the border once and for all through stiffer enforcement — a pledge that, obviously, came to naught. 'Once you've secured the border and you don't have caravans of people coming toward us, then you can address [the question of] what's the pragmatic solution so that this doesn't happen again?' Worsley asked. 'We're hopeful that's where we're going next.' It's long overdue.
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Tariff Brinkmanship Is Going to Backfire
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. A trade war with our largest neighbors was averted at the last minute on Monday as President Donald Trump reached agreements with Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, moving him to postpone a 25 percent tariff that he'd said he would impose starting Tuesday on all goods imported from those countries. Was this a case study of Trump's mastery in 'the art of the deal,' as some Republicans claim—foisting the threat of economic pain with steady determination until the objects of his wrath submit to his demands for fair trade and tighter security on the border? Actually, no. In fact, Trump emerges from this showdown looking weaker than before. First, he didn't squeeze much out of Canada or Mexico at all. He boasted that Mexico agreed to help stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States by sending 10,000 troops to the border. But Mexico sent 15,000 troops to the border in 2019 and another 10,000 in 2021 after talks with President Joe Biden. In any case, whether as a result of those troops or of Biden's own tightening measures toward the end of his term, the flow had trickled to a five-year low before Trump's inauguration last month. Even so, the U.S.–Mexico deal reached on Monday was not a one-way thing: Trump also said he would try to halt the flow of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico. As for Canada, Trudeau told Trump, in a phone call not long after the Mexico tariffs were called off, that he would take various steps such as appointing a 'fentanyl czar' and pushing ahead with a $1 billion border-reinforcement plan—which, as the New York Times noted in its summary, 'had been announced previously.' (Italics added.) But Trump's theatrics were not merely ineffectual. They will likely damage his credibility in making tariff threats—or threats of any sort—in the weeks and months to come. In retrospect, because Trump got so little in exchange for suspending the tariffs, the whole Sturm und Drang looks clearly like a bluff. So the next time he goes through the same rigmarole, nobody will take it seriously. He is still warning that tariffs on the European Union are imminent. (He has described our trade deficit with the EU nations as an 'atrocity.') He has also threatened imposing tariffs on Denmark if it doesn't sell him Greenland. The Europeans will respond in one of two ways. They will either bow courteously, call him 'sir,' and promise to do things that they're already doing, or, if some of them are in a flippant mood, they might issue counterthreats, knowing that Trump really doesn't want to impose tariffs and therefore hoping that he backs down. (The Canadians did just that, and indeed it was Trump who backed down.) But what if Trump—frustrated by the scant winnings from the North American standoff and itching to slam somebody with serious tariffs ('the most beautiful word in the dictionary,' he cooed on the campaign trail)—doesn't take the Euros' maneuvering as an adequate answer and follows through? Then we will be in a full-scale trade war with our leading political, economic, and military allies, some of them among the globe's few and shrinking adherents of Western democracy and the rules-based order. That would come on top of inevitable price hikes here at home, across a wide range of goods, trashing his most potent campaign issue (his casual promise to lower prices, as if the task were easy). As Trump is threatening Europe, the tariffs against Canada and Mexico are merely postponed by 30 days, and he has gone through with a 10 percent tariff on China—sparking instant retaliation from Beijing. Whatever happens with all these tariffs, another consequence looms on the horizon: They will savage America's already tottering reputation as a reliable power, in the eyes of allies, adversaries, and the nations in between. There's a school of thought that, in tangling with adversaries, it's sometimes wise to seem unpredictable—to tip them off balance. But zigzagging has no upside in dealing with allies, especially when it comes to the partnership's leader. Alliances depend crucially on steadiness and trust. Yet when Trump threatened to impose tariffs on two of America's closest allies for no real reason (the Wall Street Journal editorial page deemed it 'The Dumbest Trade War in History'), he stepped on the brink of violating the trilateral trade agreement that he himself had initiated and signed during his first time around in the White House. In other words, he was telling not just Canada and Mexico but every other country in the world, 'Don't believe anything the United States says, not even in writing.' Our NATO allies already doubt—Trump has encouraged them to doubt—whether the U.S. would abide by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and help them beat back an invasion. Japan and South Korea have expressed similar worries, prompting some of their politicians to consider building their own nuclear deterrent. The first time around, Trump ripped up the Iran nuclear deal signed by five other countries (as a result of which Iran is now closer to building an atomic bomb than ever before). He stepped out of the Paris climate accords in his first term and has done so again now. He wants to quit the World Health Organization (which, for all its problems, at least keeps everyone notified of pandemics and other dangers). Now with the near-scuttling of the trade deals with Mexico and Canada, who would sign any accord with the United States and have much faith it would endure? The Chinese are no doubt celebrating; Xi Jinping is using the tariff threats as an opportunity for Beijing to step in as an alternative source of supplies and trade. The EU members are making more deals among themselves that exclude the U.S., seeing that they can't engage in long-term economic planning if Washington controls the spigot at whim. A recent 24-nation poll, commissioned by the European Council on Foreign Relations, shows that, even among our closest natural partners, America's sway and support are dwindling. As the British journalist-historian Timothy Garton Ash put it in a summary of the results: One of the most startling findings in this year's poll is that, taking the average across nine EU member states surveyed, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland, only 22% of Europeans say they regard the US as an 'ally.' A further 51% say they see the US as a 'necessary partner,' but what kind of an alliance is it when less than a quarter of those asked say the other party is an ally? Trump may not know about this survey. If he does, he almost certainly doesn't care. He has said many times that he doesn't much care for the very idea of alliances—multinational commitments to defend someone else at huge cost—preferring instead transactional arrangements with one state at a time. But in a world of vanishing power blocs, where countries can go their own way and seek out other networks if they don't like their current dominating partner's demands, the United States needs allies, and those allies need a sense of reciprocating respect. It's a dangerous world, and sometimes the United States needs to lay down a tough line, assert its interests, and not give in to those who endanger our interests. But countries like Mexico, Canada, and the members of the EU, including Denmark, don't pose such threats. They are fellow democracies, longtime allies, with many common interests and values. Shouting at them does little good—either for our own relations or for our image around the world.
