I don’t think it’s this. Rather, IMHO, it’s another psychological phenomenon at work: MAGA folks don’t understand the concept of trade-offs.
Most people understand “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” They understand that many things are mutually contradictory and you can only pick one or the other, but not both. For instance, you can verbally bully your allies, or you can have their respect and support, but not both.
But MAGA people don’t get this. They think Trump can verbally bully and mock and insult U.S. allies, yet still have their respect and cooperation of these allies (or former-allies?) the way they would with Obama. Similarly, they think the US can economically bully other nations with tariffs, yet still enjoy all the benefits of good-natured free trade as before with zero retaliation. They are always surprised and baffled to find that this isn’t the case.
You see this with narcissistic parents who think they can be tyrannical to their kids and yet still get the love from kids that normal parents get from kids, and are baffled that they can’t.
So it’s not that Vance, Trump, MAGA don’t want US allies. They want allies for sure. It’s that they think they can bully allies and allies will still treat America as if America isn’t bullying them. They cannot understand that there is a trade-off to everything. They’re like football fans who think that if an offense throws deep every play, they’ll score lots of points.
That would be another lucky break we need, although I don’t think that particular one will require that much luck.
I was, however, referring to elections all over the world, not just those in the United States. We need to get lucky and have modern day versions of people like FDR, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, etc. to win elections the world over.
overall I agree w your post, but this bit isn’t quite the issue.
They are so full of jingoistic We’re Number One! cocaine that they think the USA can simply dictate the terms of whatever and the rest of the world will grumble but meekly comply beasue our power is so overwhelmingly greater than everyone else’s.
It’s not a bull in a china shop, to borrow someone else’s metaphor from a couple posts farther up. It’s a bully in a china shop, and one that vastly overestimates its own power in the places that matter.
IOW, we’ll just order the Chinese not to have retaliatory tariffs and they’ll have no choice but to comply.
When your cheering section, the MAGA public, actually believes this nonsense they will happily cheer for us driving straight into a sheer cliff face, certain that our car is more powerful than that mere cliff.
They don’t understand that trade imbalances aren’t necessarily attributable to tariffs. We have a fairly substantial trade imbalance with Japan and Germany, but I read/heard somewhere that their average tariffs are, like, 2% maybe? Certain things are significantly tariffed once certain quotas are exceeded, but they way MAGAs tell it, other countries are basically weaponizing trade against us.
I can’t speak to MAGA voters, but there are those in the administration who really are drinking their piss as if it were champagne when it comes to their grand strategy. It goes beyond just shot calling and trash talk. They seek resource dominance - hemispherically first, and then in the Arctic and MENA.
Related to that, I just came across a meme on Facebook, which appears to be posted on the official White House account as well as the official Trump account. It’s in celebration of Star Wars Day, and is an image, presumably AI generated, of a muscled Trump wielding a red light saber. They aren’t even pretending anymore.
I mean, supposing that the world of liberal democracy is decaying and doesn’t matter anymore. Nations still want their sense of sovereignty respected. I think many of our current ‘allies’ would make strange bedfellows of China and Russia if they ultimately concluded we were no more liberal democratic than the DragonBear.
If the USA takes a thoroughly authoritarian snarling bear style turn, I’d sooner expect the rest of the so-called “West” to band together in opposition to the Big Three Boss Bads: Russia, China, and USA.
Or we could see smaller nations ally themselves with the larger powers that are furthest away, and thus present the least direct danger. Europe allying with China, Latin American countries with Russia, and East / Southeast Asian countries with the US.
It’s tricky. The rest of the so-called West would need to figure out energy security and build military capabilities - fast. In the interim, they’d need strategic partnerships that provide them the ability to pivot between powers (China and Russia, but also including rising individual & bloc powers like India, Brazil, ASEAN) long enough for them to develop a reliable bloc of their own. Maybe EU, CAN, and others put their weight behind BRICS or something like it.
These powers are going to want and expect something in return, but seeing the US throw away decades, even centuries, of good relations and becoming a global pariah might be enough of a reward for China and Russia, such that their demands for friendship aren’t too steep.
At some point - like soon - we will have to ask ourselves if this is really the nation we want to be.
Book I’m currently reading The Next Civil War claims the world is too far down the track to dodge the consequences.
Disturbing and glad I moved a bit further from the conflagration.
Main claim is that the dumpf is a consequence not a cause.
That the seeds were planted long ago and growing robustly now.
Disturbing read as it it appears to be occurring in real time/fast time.
MAGA ideology is absolutely about power, hierarchy, and submission to authority. There’s a hierarchy and they are naturally at the top of it. Most likely, the only way liberals can truly show MAGA (and people who are otherwise indifferent) that they should embrace progressive values is to endure some sort of experience so bad that it shakes them to the core, such that it makes them introspective enough to question their values. A Great Depression. A Great War. Maybe both at the same time.
Sadly I feel the most likely outcome is that with the world realizing that US voters are too deranged to be trusted with power, the world finds ways to keep their economies and militaries going without us. Nobody wants to trust a country with 65-80 million immoral, deeply misinformed voters controlling politics.
I don’t think the EU will be able to step up because their GDP growth is so low. China will likely become the new world power which sucks because like it or not, the US did at least try to promote democracy and human rights to a degree.
I hope the rest of NATO can step up and become a bastion of democracy and human rights. But many of those nations are seeing their own authoritarian political issues.
A world led by an authoritarian China is going to suck quite a bit.
Russia is, as Obama put it, a regional power. They will try to sow discord and promote right wing politics in western democracies but they do not have the military or economic power to matter on a global scale. Russia has a lot of power to empower far right wing, anti-democracy movements in the west. But their economy and military are garbage.
If you look at what’s happening lately with oil, you can see where this is going. OPEC shouldn’t be boosting production at a time of global economic slowdown, yet that’s what they’ve been doing. The conventional wisdom is that pro-energy US presidents would push for higher prices, but Trump doesn’t really seem to be pushing for that. Instead he’s trying to squeeze the more vulnerable petrostates like Iran, Venezuela, and even Russia, all of whom need higher prices per barrel.
Curious to know the particulars of any deals the MAGA White House is making with KSA and Qatar. Perhaps broader economic partnerships, and undoubtedly military support as well.
I read an article that said when OPEC cuts productions, that several countries who are part of OPEC just take advantage of the higher prices to sell more oil, which causes the prices to go back down. So as a cartel its not really as influential as it was if several of the members just sell additional oil, negating the effects of any cuts in production.
Supposedly if oil prices drop below $60 a barrel, some domestic US production will not be cost competitive.
That was my immediate reaction as well, but the tradeoff is deregulation and an administration that will prioritize fossil fuels over ‘green’ energy. They’ll drill where they want. Burn off whatever they want. No more worrying about emissions or environmental standards or pollution cleanups. The earth’s crust is theirs to tear up as they please. There will also probably be more continued M&A in that space and verticalization of exploration/refining. They might get subsidized at some point, with the administration choosing favorites and setting up a rewards system (kleptocracy is another way to think of it).
But you’re describing “client states,” here, not “allies”. I think Trump et. al. want client states like the old Soviet Union, or like ancient Rome used to have, before switching them all over to centrally governed provinces.
Potential allies don’t want that kind of arrangement, and short of forcing their compliance with nukes and the military, they won’t stand for it. They aren’t standing for it.
Trump and co. are absolutely destroying the world order we had, but they’re already finding they can’t just put whatever they want in its place. While they are a big factor in ending what came before, I don’t foresee their team having much constructive influence on what comes after. And that’s going to be something of a crap shoot.
The “repeal Obamacare” debacle was the whole thing in a microcosm. They want to tear things down, but have no coherent plan or even capability to build something new up.
They’re just leaving the pieces on the ground for the rest of us to pick up later, if we’re lucky and there are any pieces left. That’s the way I see it at least. They’re like robbers, destroying whatever they can in the process of pocketing as much of value for themselves as possible. They have no plan nor even consideration for the cleanup afterwards. That’s some other sucker’s problem.
