Not sure where to put this, but watching the MAGA machine roll on, going back to the summer of last year, I’ve been reading/following articles and information from various people (actually educated people) who seem familiar with the administration’s ideological bent. The terms ‘statecraft’ and ‘grand strategy’ have appeared and reappeared. Hamiltonian economics and mercantilism seem to be their orientation.
I think MAGA is going to break the American-built world economic and political order, and I don’t think there’s going to be a way to undo it all, though it’s possible that enough GOP governors, senators, House reps see the damage and maybe hit the eject button before it’s too late, but we’re probably months away from the proverbial Rubicon, if that.
What are the implications?
What does this mean for life in the US? What does it mean economically? Will there be a surge in manufacturing that helps workers keep up with inflation? Will the dollar tank? Bonds?
How do other countries (allies especially, and Canada and Mexico extra-especially) react? What new trade blocs form? Do countries lurch right or left (very recent elections may give us a clue), and what are their expectations when they do lurch? I mean, do voters in the EU, CAN, JPN, etc. expect US voters to come back to their senses? Do they end up making strange bedfellows like Russia and China?
It seems to me like this administration believes America’s golden age was 1870 to 1930 and wants to go back there again. Yes, fully aware that was the age of neo-classical economics and not Hamiltonianism per se but the administration seems sympathetic to both.
A Cold War between an increasing irrational and genocidal US and a China/EU alliance. Probably culminating in a nuclear war when Fascist America realizes it can’t win and its irrational policies are making a collapse of the nation and the regime imminent, at which points it launches a nuclear attack on as many population centers across the planet as it has nuclear weapons. If it can’t have the world, it will burn the world.
In other words, “What would Hitler have done if both he and the Allies had a nuclear arsenal?”
For now, EU has a major, major problem that China can’t solve: energy security.
That can, and I think will, change over time, but in 2025, EU doesn’t have the energy it needs to sustain its economic/political autonomy, and this is with minimal military investments. To have the military it needs to not only defend its space but its interests…that requires much more energy than it now consumes/produces/imports.
But we never invaded and conquered them. We won’t be able to be able to impose sanctions, between the fact that we are already destroying our international trade and that we’ll have no allies.
I think that if MAGA can remain unified and not destroy itself with infighting during the resultant tumult that will ensue as a consequence of chucking our current ‘rules-based order’ into the waste bin of history, this is going to have profound consequences, both in terms of how we deal with the world (and how the world’s nations realign and deal w/ each other) and in terms of how we function as a society domestically.
Taking a wrecking ball to the current global systems that the US has created since the end of WW2 (and more recently, the end of the Cold War) and taking a wrecking ball to the civil service and everything it supports makes little to no sense to wise people. It seems abjectly crazy, to be blunt. It only makes more sense when you conclude that the people running the country - not just the guy who fake fired people on The Apprentice, but the Russel Voughts, the Stephen Millers, and others - have a worldview that views neoliberalism, global cooperation, foreign diplomacy that respects sovereignty, foreign commitments, and liberal democracy (among other things) with outright disdain, viewing them as vices for the naive.
Allies? These guys just don’t believe in them. They believe that the world is a jungle, and that we’re locked in a life and death struggle for our survival, and that we either live or die. They would be completely fine with destroying the EU (or attempting to) before it can become an autonomous power and counterweight to the US. They are deadly serious about imposing US will on Canada and Mexico by force, as they are deadly serious about taking Greenland off of Denmark’s hands and retaking the Panama Canal.
If you’re thinking, Mmm, this sorta reminds me of Nazi ideology, well, you’d be right, because that’s exactly their blueprint, minus throwing Jews into concentration camps. If MAGA doesn’t break apart, if it can hold together (and they will use any means to do so), then I think this is what we have in store for the next decade or so: intense global conflict abroad, economic hardship at home, and probably the end of democracy as we know it.
My own desperate hope, as the best of many terrible possibilities, would be for a kind of manorialism reminiscent of that which followed the collapse of Rome in the west. Not likely and not pleasant, but better than war and complete collapse.
In one way, it’s even worse. At least the Nazis didn’t have something good that they were breaking. They may have been a bull on a rampage, but they weren’t in a china shop because the world order such as it was at the time hadn’t developed one yet. MAGA is the proverbial bull in the china shop, destroying everything good that we (human civilization as a whole, not just the US) have developed since 1945.
What next? Hopefully the rest of the developed world can rebuild what we’ve lost, maybe even dragging in some parts of the world (I’m thinking China in particular) who had been / might still be on the verge of joining the party. If we get to that point (where major players like China and India reach the point where the US was at the end of Obama’s term), then I think the US will be forced to come back with its tail tucked between its legs to rejoin the party. At least that’s what I hope happens. Will it happen? I think it’s unlikely, but not impossible. Maybe we’ll (the world as a whole) get lucky and China will end up with their version of a Mikhail Gorbachev some time in the next few decades. It’s not impossible, but I do think it would take that sort of lucky break to allow the world to rebuild what we’ve lost.
Apologies for the double post. In addition to the above, ultimately there’s a bigger problem than just Donald Trump. Even bigger than just the red hat wearing followers of Trump here in the US. The problem is that the movement seems to be a global phenomenon that started around 2015 or so, and shows no signs of letting up. How do we (the non-MAGAs of the world) get them to crawl back under the rock they came out of back then? I don’t know, but I suspect it would involve catching some lucky breaks rather than following a specific plan. What happens if they don’t? My best guess is that we go back to a world as it was (in terms of the relationships between nations) back in the late 19th / early 20th century in the years before WWI.
That’s the world we’re on our way to returning to, IMO. There’s always the chance it doesn’t happen. Maybe the MAGA coalition falls apart unexpectedly. Not likely but there’s still a chance it could. Centrist and center/left pragmatism is still viable in other parts of the Democratic world, as has been shown in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and now Australia.
I agree that there’s a chance. Unfortunately I think that chance relies more on catching some lucky breaks (in terms of who wins elections, especially the “primary process” for selecting the leadership of the non-MAGA parties around the world) rather than having a blueprint for a strategy that we can say “here’s what we need to do, now let’s go do it”. As far as I’m aware, such a strategy has yet to be developed. If it has been, please alert the leaders of the US Democratic Party.
More like two world wars . As I mentioned, I think that in order to avoid something really bad like that, I think it’s going to come down to us (human civilization as a whole) catching some lucky breaks.
. As I mentioned, I think that in order to avoid something really bad like that, I think it’s going to come down to us (human civilization as a whole) catching some lucky breaks.