As this week got underway, Donald Trump posted an item to his social media platform touching on an issue many of the president’s usual followers were probably unprepared for. “The United States is working on a massive Deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus,” he wrote. “The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

I’m mindful of the fact that some readers might find this a little too obscure, but don’t click away just yet.

Potash is a type of fertilizer, which the United States has traditionally purchased from Canada, the world’s largest supplier in the international potash market. But since Trump has launched a wildly unnecessary and counterproductive trade war with our friends and neighbors to the north, the White House is now looking elsewhere for its fertilizer needs, which has led the president to Belarus.

Except that’s a problem too: Belarus is, for all intents and purposes, a Russian client state. And since much of the Western world has taken steps to isolate Russia in recent years, the European Union has banned potash exports from Belarus since 2022.

As The Washington Post reported, since Belarus is landlocked, this means that if Trump were to try to circumvent Canada and increase U.S. imports of Belarusian potash, it would “need to pass through Russian ports.”

By all accounts, that’s not a deal breaker for the White House — which lifted sanctions on Belarus earlier this year, after its government took violent steps to suppress protests over the country’s illegitimate 2020 elections — but it turns out there’s a more immediate problem with Trump’s plan. Politico reported:

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has admitted his country doesn’t have enough potash to satisfy U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands for the critical fertilizer.

“Everyone keeps saying: Ah, potash! Even if we wanted to supply [potash] to other, Western markets, we simply do not have those volumes — everything is contracted,” Lukashenko said Monday at a meeting with Vladimir Orlovsky, head of the Belarusian state customs authority.

So to recap, Trump touted a deal that doesn’t and can’t exist with a Russian client state, which would likely benefit Putin, all in the hopes of going around Canada, which apparently hurt the president’s feelings.

I don’t know when the United States will have a coherent foreign policy again, but that day is not close.

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