The Veruca Salt Strategy Has Metastasized

[Celerity]

Japan’s deferential theater aboard a U.S. carrier marked the moment Trump’s indulgence diplomacy became the global norm.

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-veruca-salt-strategy-has-metastasized



In Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the greedy and demanding Veruca Salt wants it all and wants it now—and the adults keep saying yes. The point is simple: Indulgence dressed up as strategy invites only more demands. U.S. allies seem to have missed the moral of Dahl’s story.

Nowhere was this more visible than on the flight deck of the USS George Washington in Tokyo Bay on Tuesday. Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi stood beside U.S. President Donald Trump, who promised a “new golden age” for the alliance while he praised her as “one of the great prime ministers.” The stagecraft was deliberate: announce rare-earths cooperation, speed up defense spending, float a Nobel nomination, and build a news cycle around harmony.

Takaichi seemed unbothered by any symbolism of deference—standing on a U.S. warship in the same waters where Japan signed its surrender 80 years ago. The tableau was one of subordination, not equality: the American president at center stage, the Japanese leader offering praise from his flank. For a nation that has spent decades defining partnership as parity, the image was jarring. The message to her own public was sharper still—reassurance abroad now requires ritual submission at home.

The same choreography unfolded days earlier in Kuala Lumpur, where the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations became another exercise in appeasement. Leaders signed framework deals heavy on platitudes, photo ops and vague tariff promises but thin on enforceable trade terms—leaving most members wondering what, if anything, they had gained once Trump’s plane departed. But that is the play: flatter, pre-agree, keep him calm. It buys time. It also puts credit in Trump’s account and strengthens his incentive to ask for more.

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