Tree Frog Editor: This insight paper by political risk analyst Robert McKellar offers a strategic lens on how a second Trump administration is shaping US behaviour as a global actor — an issue with direct implications for trade-exposed sectors. McKellar is a founding partner at Harmattan Risk and the co-author of “Trump’s Second Term: Political Risk and the Forest Products Sector,” an analysis of US trade policy, tariff dynamics, and geopolitical uncertainty. In this paper, he steps back from industry-specific analysis to explore the broader strategic logic — and contradictions — underlying current US global behaviour, providing context for the policy volatility and trade uncertainty facing the sector.
Robert McKellar
The US, a lynchpin global player, has become a change bomb, and having a clear sense of the US as an agent on the world stage is critical to sense-making that can inform appropriate strategic responses. But as it stands, Trump, whose character shapes his administration, is a wildcard. He is seemingly bored to tears by stability in any issue he deals with, and bored by a set menu of priorities. …Do we resign ourselves to perpetually playing catch up with US moves and their reverberations, or is it possible to get ahead of the Trumpian storm with a reasonably accurate sketch of the US as a global actor? If its moves were guided by strategic rationality, we would be able to extrapolate some idea of its future behaviour, and even a sense of how the international system might look in a few years and the critical challenges any given state might present…
Seasoned observers of US politics and international behaviour might have foreseen some of what is happening now, but by and large they did not expect Godzilla. Thus, they have often latched onto their own predispositions to fill in the considerable blanks. This has, for the most part, yielded two poles of interpretation. One is that Trump and his team are acting on a strategic assessment, and that despite apparent mayhem their moves are rational, even coldly calculating. The other is that the US has succumbed to the baser aspects of personal rule. Thus, Trump’s eccentric character and ego are the main source of US global behaviour. …The emerging reality no doubt lies somewhere in between, but to triangulate to an approximation, we need to prod around both poles of interpretation.
ALEXANDRIA, Va.
RUSS TAYLOR provided the latest quarterly report from the 
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A state panel this week extended its offer to help finance construction of a new 129-room boutique hotel in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood. While that doesn’t guarantee the hotel will move forward, the developer leading the project said construction can’t start without the state’s financing. The board… offered until Jan. 31, 2027 are $35 million worth of state bonds for the roughly $55 million project that would build a Marriott Tribute Portfolio boutique hotel. …The air quality facilities noted in the resolution include the seven-story building’s proposed use of mass-timber in its construction. …The presence of wood-timber construction above a first-floor reinforced concrete deck is noted in this axonometric view of the proposed Ohio City Hotel (DLR). The use of mass timber instead of reinforced concrete can save up to 40% in ongoing heating and cooling emissions for a building’s user as well as reduced emissions, according to Dan Whalen, at Places Development. 
Two conservation groups are suing the Trump administration, challenging a U.S. Department of Agriculture rule that strips public comment requirements from most national forest projects. In a federal 
Oregon’s forestry department has proposed a flexible approach to managing state-owned forests west of the Cascades over the next 70 years. Staff say it will allow them to adapt as scientific understanding evolves — and as the climate changes. But environmental groups say the department has drafted a plan that’s too vague. They would like to see more focus on saving the mature and complex forests. Members of the public can 
The Washington wood-products industry says timber harvests will spiral downward if lawmakers pass a bill championed by Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove. At Upthegrove’s request, legislators are considering authorizing the Department of Natural Resources to sell “ecosystem services,” possibly by delaying or canceling timber harvests. DNR officials say ecosystem services could be a new source of revenue as businesses buy carbon credits to “offset” their emissions. Carbon credits could add to the money rural counties and schools receive from timber sales, according to DNR. The timber industry, backed by the Washington State Association of Counties, argues its more likely ecosystem services would replace timber sales. Rural public services would get less money, Paul Jewell, the counties’ policy director, said. More importantly, rural counties will lose timber jobs, he said. “Sales of ecosystem services can’t replace those economic benefits,” he told the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee on Jan. 28.
Over the past year, a wave of high-profile development proposals — from oil fields and mining roads to timber projects — has reshaped a fast-moving debate, propelling Alaska into the center of the national conversation over how to balance energy production with conservation. These projects have revived long-running tensions over what the state’s public lands are for, and who they ultimately benefit. The federal government has long viewed Alaska as resource-rich, a posture that’s intensified under the Trump administration. After meeting Trump in 2018, Gov. Mike Dunleavy called Alaska “America’s natural resource warehouse.” But the last time Alaska figured this prominently in national energy and conservation debates was in the late 1970s, said Philip Wight, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. What makes today’s landscape different, Wight said, is a unified federal government pushing multiple contentious development proposals at once, with fewer moderate Republicans willing to oppose them ….
A 34-year-old rule exempting some commercial logging projects on federal lands from environmental review is unlawful, a federal judge recently ruled. Judge Michael McShane in the U.S. District Court in Medford earlier this month struck down the exemption, and with it, reversed recent approvals for three commercial logging projects covering tens of thousands of acres in Fremont-Winema National Forest in southern Oregon. The decision is the result of a 2022 lawsuit brought against the U.S. Forest Service by regional conservation groups Oregon Wild, WildEarth Guardians and GO Alliance. Since 1992, the U.S. Forest Service has been able to bypass environmental reviews required by federal law for logging projects on federal land, if the logging is meant to “improve forest stand conditions,” habitat or prevent wildfires, without “significant effect” on the human environment.
NEW YORK
UK energy company Drax’s ambitions of becoming a significant wood pellet supplier to Asia are in danger of faltering as Japanese policymakers wind back generous subsidies for the biomass sector. Japan is set to soon surpass the UK as the world’s largest wood pellet importer after a post-Fukushima push to diversify power sources that caused hundreds of plants to spring up that burn wood pellets, palm kernel shells — a palm oil byproduct — and other organic materials. But policymakers in Japan are pulling support for the controversial industry after realising the hurdles to bringing down fuel costs. Tokyo has already cut subsidies for new projects of more than 10 megawatts. “The real intention is quite simple: no new government support, phasing out. We don’t see any clear path of bringing down costs in the foreseeable future,” said one government official. “Existing projects might survive but no new projects are coming.”
…Timber prices have been low for a long time; they never really recovered from the 2008 housing crash. Nearly a dozen paper mills closed across the South in recent years, and Hurricane Helene tore down trees in much of Georgia and the Carolinas. It’s left many in Georgia, one of the leading states for forestry, with a dilemma: what do you do when your income relies on a forest but nobody wants to buy your trees? A group of researchers and industry leaders thinks paying landowners for carbon storage could help. “We may see a decline in the number of acres that are kept in forests and the quality of the land that is forested,” said David Eady with Georgia Tech’s business school. Losing those trees would shrink the industry and be devastating for the environment. …So Eady and others asked: why not use that carbon storage to keep foresters in business?
