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The USA would never do anything without expecting a return. I have spent time over there, then was in Europe again. Does the presidency make a difference? I think no, it doesn't. Trump is an ultra expression of what is happening anyway.
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You have very wrong conclusions here, and they both come from the same error: the US has changed
drastically under Trump. Things like good relations with Canada and our other (former) allies was a bipartisan sentiment for the last 80 years in the US. Trump has completely transformed his party, and that party is no longer the old "pro business" party it once was, it's now just whatever Trump says it is on any given day.
The USA would never do anything without expecting a return.
Trump's trade wars hurt the US, period. There is no economist, left, right or center, who doesn't believe this. The only ones you will hear defending Trump's madness are people under Trump's direct control, i.e. elected Republicans, party operatives and his captured media like Fox News (although the latter often gets out of line because these actions are so indefensible).
Trump is doing this to Canada because Canada refused to send their young men to Iran to fight and die in Trump's idiotic war there. And he's doing this because morons will believe his lies when he says that Canada has been "ripping us off" because of some narrow-focused precepts about prices. Trump and his party tells their voters that the US can use its military dominance to extort economic concessions from its trading partners. Every US president before Trump knew that this was at best a short term strategy which will be devastating to the US in the longer run as every country will be forced to decouple with the US and couple with China instead.
If you think of the US as a corporation with a large debt load, you base the risk of that debt on the company's ability to profit in the future and pay off its loans.
Before Trump, the US led the world in commerce and the safety of building on our platforms was unquestioned. A European company could build everything on MS Windows or Caterpillar tractors and not fear that the rules would be changed on them in the future. Under Trump, they can no longer make that assumption, and instead need to plan for the possibility that the US president will double or triple their costs in the future, or even cut them off entirely--thus ending their business--if their country doesn't send their soldiers to die in a US-led war. (Note how Trump's threats, well,
trump any kind of economic concerns! A country will do a lot for economics, but their voters will not accept being turned into fodder).
Now look at the US "corporation" in that context: Trump just drastically reduced our future ability to profit because countries can no longer trust US products.
In short, every country in the world now needs to treat the US the way the US has treated China. The most valuable companies in the USA are
platform companies like the FAANGS, Microsoft, etc. This is where almost all of our growth comes from. All of these companies are where they are because every company in the world can trust these companies for the long term. Trump and his party have destroyed that trust.
This is a
new version of the USA. Throw out all of your old assumptions, such as, "The USA would never do anything without expecting a return". That's simply not true anymore, and it's likely to remain the case for a while if not forever. (Only a political annihilation of the Republicans--and not just an ordinary loss--will signal to the world that this new mode of US policy is truly over. It's easy to see them lose in the next few cycles, but there's currently no evidence they will get totally eliminated like Mussolini was in Italy or something like that).
The reality is that Trump's policy (which is really just whim) is the "new normal" for the USA, and that's new policy is going be very, very bad for business, and thus very bad for US GDP growth, which is very bad for the US ability to pay down its debt.
The only question is, how long before the world's bond traders fully get this? When they do, the US could see the price of its debt skyrocket, and it doesn't need to go up much in order to cause major disruption to the US economic system. (Whether voters will blame Republicans for this is another story: it will in fact have been their fault, but voters will just vote out whatever party happens to be in power when the disaster comes).
