When you put someone incompetent in charge of a country, a company, or a sports team, collapse is inevitable, no exceptions. We’ve seen it play out over and over again because of stupid choices only driven by ego.
Now it’s the US’s turn
We are in treason territory.
In fact, this administration has been so effective and brazen that if you were to try and write this as fiction, the scope and scale of what is occurring would be deemed unbelievable and would require toning down for the audience.
I find it particularly interesting how many popular US media people disseminate provably false Kremlin propaganda, as if someone flipped a switch.
Fascinating times.
>We are in treason territory.
Are we just going to start throwing "treason" accusations whenever a political opponent does the wrong thing? Being anti-free trade? Hurts US hegemony and makes US consumers pay more. Treason. Being pro-free trade? Sells out hard working americans while enriching corporations. Treason.
It's the perfect storm.
I don't see an end to this
Brilliant.
Trump just added some additional sanctions on Russia for helping the Houthis.
Sanctions seem worse than tariffs to me, but I'm not an expert.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-sanctions-russia-based-n...
But notice how people talk now - Trump might say he is "planning" something against Russia and people take it as a proof that he is not an asset. They forget about concept of sacrificing something to gain advantage. If heat turns to much on Trump, they might let him disrupt something and then run propaganda that Trump isn't bent. Until he makes next move massively benefitting Putin.
Seems like they can be doing this over and over and general public will see it as Trump just navigating difficult geopolitical landscape and that we should "trust the process". etc.
"Trump is committing treason because he is instituting tariffs" or "Trump is a Russian asset" is not a position any reasonably intelligent person can come to without being blinded by partisanship. It's simply not a serious position to have.
NATO is already over because none of our allies can expect Trump to honor our treaty obligations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/world/europe/trump-ukrain...
I don't really see another way to take that. Have you watched the full exchange on it?
And I mean his first impeachment was because of his impounding of aid to Ukraine.
Acting like he hasn't been working towards killing support for Ukraine is ignoring his actions and his own statements.
Rhetoric is a poor substitute for actual evidence.
Many moons ago, the fringe right used a similar argument to imply that Barack Obama was pro-ISIS. After his hasty withdrawal from Iraq, ISIS filled the power vacuum. Their "caliphate" grew for years and years, with no significant intervention from the US! At the time there wasn't a great answer to the question "If Obama were pro-ISIS, what could he possibly do to advance their interests more than he already has?". Yet (hopefully) we all know that this was simply bad faith, conspiratorial rhetoric. He was obviously not pro-ISIS, and there was no evidence whatsoever that he was. So how could people possibly have entertained such an idea? Easy--they already hated Barack Obama, so they were willing to give the conspiracy theory the benefit of the doubt.
Do yourself a favor and apply the old tried and true standard: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It'll save you a good deal of embarrassment.
Tulsi isn't Trump.
> Zelensky
Trump quite reasonably called Zelensky a dictator. Ukraine can legally skip elections while under martial law, sure. But seeing as Zelensky has the power to end martial law at any time, he is single-handedly preventing Ukranian elections, depriving the people of Ukraine of their voice during what is potentially the most pivotal span of time in Ukranian history. Surely you still call Putin a dictator, even though he attained his status without directly violating the constitution?
> Trump also said Ukraine started the conflict.
Are you referring to that time Trump uttered the words "you never should have started it" in one of his word clouds while speaking to a journalist? That is evidence that he is in thrall to the Russians?
> In his last admin he said that "Crimeans want to be Russian".
The vast majority of them are Russian, ethnically and linguistically. All polling prior to the 2014 invasion showed that a significant majority would support annexation by Russia. Don't worry, you can know this fact--and even repeat it out loud!--without the bad men in the Kremlin gaining control over your mind.
He doesn't. The President of Ukraine can only propose the imposition or termination of martial law to the parliament. Nothing happens unless the parliament approves the proposal. In February, the Ukrainian parliament even adopted a resolution to remind the dumbasses calling Zelenskyy a dictator of this fact.
> All polling prior to the 2014 invasion showed that a significant majority would support annexation by Russia.
Support for joining Russia was 23% in a 2013 poll, down from 33% in 2011. The majority opinion (53%) was that Crimea should remain as it was, an autonomous region within Ukraine.
In your opinion, what should the status of Crimea be? 2013 2011
----------------------------------------------------- ---- ----
Autonomy in Ukraine (as today) 53 49
Crimean Tatar autonomy within Ukraine 12 4
Common oblast of Ukraine 2 6
Crimea should be separated and given to Russia 23 33
Don't know 10 8Ukraine should hold elections. Delaying them is bad. This is the pro-democracy position. Calling it "Russian propaganda" is nuts. Pretending that Trump's support of this position is evidence that he is controlled by the Russians is literally insane.
Fair enough--the one poll funded by the American government (through the International Republican Institute) found that Crimea wanted to stay in Ukraine, after 5+ UN polls found 60+% supporting annexation for several years in a row.
Is citing the UN data evidence of Russian mind control? No. Arguing otherwise is insane!
Strikes like these occur daily and have become increasingly common in recent months. Holding mass gatherings under such conditions is utterly irresponsible, and any elections held in this atmosphere lack legitimacy because many voters are simply afraid to visit polling stations. Not to mention the millions of people in occupied territories who are completely unable to cast their ballots.
The narrative about Ukrainian elections - especially coming from Russia, which hasn't had free elections since the early 1990s - is indeed pure propaganda. With their progress on the frontlines stalled, this is nothing more than a transparent attempt to undermine Ukrainian unity by diverting attention to internal infighting and potentially replacing the current government with a less functional one. Zelenskyy's main political rivals share the broad consensus that elections should be held only after the war.
Ukraine's situation is a textbook example of why many (if not most) constitutions include provisions for postponing elections during wars and other emergencies.
Yet they don't ban vital gatherings, like concerts[0]. They only ban elections, for which large gatherings are hardly necessary.
> Zelenskyy's main political rivals share the broad consensus that elections should be held only after the war.
His actual main rival's party was banned. Now you see the leaders of the remaining parties toeing the line as sign of robust democracy? Is this a joke?
It's been several years, dude, time to get updated on the situation.
https://www.acslaw.org/projects/the-presidential-investigati...
Mueller's key findings include
- Uncovering extensive criminal activity on the part of Trump associates
- that Russia engaged in extensive attacks on the US election system in 2016
- that there were numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign
- that there were multiple episodes in which Trump engaged in deliberate obstruction during the investigation
If you are taking Trump's "no collusion, complete exoneration" at his word, understand that he was lying. The report literally used the phrase "does not exonerate", and the only reason Trump was not indicted was because of the DOJ policy that you can't indict a sitting president.
There may not be hard evidence of a fire, but there is so much smoke I choke on it.
Let's not forget where this Russian asset idea started: Hillary Clinton colluded with a Russian spy to investigate Trump when he was running for president.
This combined with her running her own mail server and sending government emails through it should have landed her at least in jail for a couple of years.
But lets focus on someone trying to avoid war with Russia at all costs and attempting to make peace.
To solve this we will all have to come together and accept that nobody on either side of American Politics are on the side of the working class. Instead of pointing fingers at democrats or republicans it is beyond time for us as Americans to come together and vote in people that will work for us as a collective regardless of what political affiliations they have.
I'm guessing you're cool with the current regime's handling of sensitive information, yeah?
So instead you want to give Putin the population of Ukraine to send in to get slaughtered as soldiers for his next invasion, and also send in Americans to get killed in Canada, Mexico, and/or Greenland? A++ very peaceful no notes.
I'm afraid it is. An unholy coalition of capitalist-anarchists and ultra-conservatives is the driving force behind it. They both want to reduce the influence of the government to a level as small as possible. That can only be done by dismantling the current federal government.
That doesn't sound right...
This would make the federal government dependent on tariff income, and, as the theory goes, diminish the funds the government has as American industry grows to avoid tariffs.
Probably not going to work out as it is only a first order effect view, but that is the idea they are chasing.
Ironically (but not really if you can clearly understand his platform, any why so many bernie bros became trumpets), Trump is doing a lot of ostensibly good things for the uneducated working class at the expense of American "elite" class. The autoworkers union president literally spoke yesterday at Trumps event cheering the tariffs. A union, cheering Trump.
The stock market is off a cliff, but how many factory workers actually have an appreciable amount of stocks? Poor middle America doesn't give a fuck about that. They give a fuck about having a place to go to work and make a good living.
Trump is doing what he was elected to do. Whether or not it is possible without making things much worse seems like a long shot, but his core base has a "I don't care if we destroy the system, the system sucks!" attitude, awfully similar to Bernie bros.
> Protectionism is a left-wing, big-government policy.
It isn't left-wing. Just check the US history of protectionism. Or Germany's. Or the France's. Even the UK's. Or even simpler: look at what happened just now. How can you call Trump left-wing?
Traditionally anarchism is a left-liberal idea. Now the far-right is same as far-left. Left-Right is now a circle.
They're extreme libertarians/neo-feudalists.
The ancient Greeks would have called it Tyranny. All of this has happened before.
This would severely hamstring the government, and make it incredibly difficult to reverse (you would need to re-implement income taxes, while removing tariffs, and hope to god that trading partners have mercy and forgiveness (unlikely))
Maybe don't put libertarians and feudalist together.
I believe it means libertarian in the context of present systems. In their new system, they no longer need to be libertarian. Just absolute ruler. King is even the wrong term.
Dictator
Can't believe they would be publicly calling for a monarchy, and still call themselves libertarian.
Leftist anarchists are acutely aware that power and capital accumulation go hand-in-hand.
Extreme libertarians are perfectly fine with the unfettered accumulation of capital and seemingly ignore that that results in unchecked power. Or they have faith that a “truly” free economy would somehow check itself before becoming effectively neo-feudalistic or dictatorial. As if the lion would fear the zebra.
Leftist-anarchists want to keep power to an absolute minimum. Usually relying on a combination of culture and group action to wield just enough power to prevent the growth of unchecked power in the hands of a few.
In my mind, culture is the key element. The capital-worshipping, me-versus-all culture we live in would fit quite well into extreme-libertarianism and then it would devolve into defacto rule by a few. (As seems to be happening anyways. Because, again, capital accumulates, protects itself and takes power where it can when no one is willing to or allowed to work together to stop it.)
Leftist-anarchism requires a more mature, selfless, introspective, cooperative culture. Anathema to the “United” States of America.
Most anarchists, just like hard-line communists, seem totally opposed to the idea of private capital at all. To me this seems just as bad and unworkable as allowing unchecked use of capital accumulation for political gain.
They are generally not opposed to personal property, especially if the property is actively used.
Extreme libertarians, “anarcho-capitalists”, do not distinguish between productive and nonproductive property. And so they ignore the end result of private ownership and accumulation of the means of production: new rulers in some form.
Opinions on money and currency vary.
Similarly, opinions on wage labor vary, but generally they expect a laborer to receive their full worth, ie wage labor would not see profit extracted from it.
When Democrats embraced free trade and globalism with Clinton, most of the liberal Reagan republicans and neocons became Democrats. What MAGA is today is what the bulk of the GOP has always been: a coalition of social conservatives and business owners.
Isn't competition in free markets something Republicans believe in anymore? Because forcing Americans to buy inferior locally-made products at a premium through artificial restrictions surely isn't that.
Free trade and globalization are also a pacifying force, by creating mutual dependencies between countries.
Protectionism doesn't work.
I'm skeptical of this historical analysis.
The two major political parties fundamentally realigned during the civil rights era of the 1960s. Before then, Democrats controlled the south. Strom Thurmond switched from Democrat to Republican in 1964. George Wallace ran for President as a Democrat 3 times before he became an independent. Robert Byrd was a Democrat until the end. Who were the "social conservatives"? Both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon (Californians, by the way) made their names as staunch Cold Warrior anti-Communists during the McCarthy era.
I don't think there's any such thing as what "the GOP has always been", or what the Democrats have always been, for that matter. I'm old enough to have seen the parties change several times, and the definitions of "conservative", "liberal", "left", "right" morph into something unrecognizable to former adherents.
The only constant is change.
This is an incorrect analysis looking at the wrong causal factor (civil rights rather than economics). Even in 1976, Carter did great in the deep south. The realignment happened in the 1980s, due to economic growth in the south. The south went from being poor and agrarian in the 1930s to being newly industrialized in the 1980s.
> Who were the "social conservatives"?
The 19th century GOP was a coalition of religious conservatives and protectionist industrialists. MAGA is a coalition of religious/cultural conservatives and protectionist industrialists.
Carter was a southern conservative, deeply, overtly Christian, whereas Ford, the accidental President, was a northerner and social moderate.
In any case, Presidential elections are not necessarily the best indicator of political alignment. After all, some were blowouts, such as 1972, 1980, and 1984. On other other hand, note that Lyndon Johnson lost much of the south, except his home state of Texas, despite winning big elsewhere in the country. But for political alignment, you also have to look at local elections, such as state houses.
> The realignment happened in the 1980s, due to economic growth in the south. The south went from being poor and agrarian in the 1930s to being newly industrialized in the 1980s.
This makes no sense, because first, the south is still poorer, and second, the political correlation you're implying simply doesn't exist. Why would wealth and industrialization turn a state Republican when that doesn't appear to be the case anywhere else in the country? To the contrary, at present the rural areas are solidly Republican and the urban areas solidly Democratic.
> The 19th century GOP was a coalition of religious conservatives and protectionist industrialists.
I can't say I'm very familiar with the 19th century GOP, and neither of us was alive in the 19th century, but I don't think you've correctly characterized the 20th century GOP. Moreover, I don't think you can characterize "the party of Lincoln" as socially conservative either.
> You should read the primary sources from the civil war.
Please refrain from this type of comment. You should know as longtime, prolific HN commenter that they are against the guidelines.
> The gap has closed almost completely.
I don't think that's true. Some random links: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Map_of_s... https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-by-state/
In any case, it's a red herring, because again, "the political correlation you're implying simply doesn't exist."
> For most of the 20th century, that was exactly the political dichotomy. Democrats were the party of the urban and rural poor, and urban social liberals. Republicans were the party of business and industry, plus religious conservatives.
This is merely a stereotype, an overgeneralization. The reality is much more complex, and inconstant.
But there's an interesting overlap in your claim: "plus religious conservatives". So what happens when "the urban and rural poor" happen to be religious conservatives?
> In states like Georgia, the first places to turn red where affluent educated collar counties around Atlanta, which were benefitting from metro Atlanta’s economic growth.
Given my skepticism of everything else you've already said, I'm not inclined to take anything without proof, but that's not really the issue here. My objection to your theory is not whether it can explain the political situation in the south but rather whether it can explain the political situation in the rest of the country, and I don't see any evidence that it can. Otherwise it's just cherry-picking.
> Abolition was driven by fundamentalist Christians, especially in the midwest.
Not all religion is socially conservative. There are various sects of Christianity in various parts of the country, each with their own social and political tendencies. The civil rights movement also came out of the church, e.g., the Reverend Martin Luther King, the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
> Remember that we didn’t have DNA in the 1850s, so the notion that the races were equal was a moral assertion, not a scientific one.
It's still a moral assertion.
Don't think that data point is as good as you imply it is.
> This is an incorrect analysis looking at the wrong causal factor (civil rights rather than economics).
Boy, is THAT ever a contrarian take, verging dangerously close to crank theory. Economics was distinctly in third place as a factor in the political parties' realignment. In first- and second places were the Vietnam War (nationwide) and civil rights (in the South, with race riots and black militarism being a factor nationally).
1. VIETNAM: I came of age during that era. I was very politically aware. My family on both sides had been Democrats for decades. Most of my family switched to the GOP in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their main driver was dislike for the Vietnam War protestors (and for race rioters).
Most of my family regarded support for the government's war policy as a patriotic duty, even if they happened to harbor doubts about the merits of specific policies. That was true during both the LBJ and Nixon administrations. (The men on both sides of my extended family were pretty much all veterans, from WWII, Korea, and/or the Cold War.)
2. CIVIL RIGHTS: I grew up in various southern states during the 1960s and early 1970s (my dad was military, we moved around). You need to read up on the GOP's so-called Southern Strategy, starting with Nixon's courting of George Wallace voters and continuing with Reagan's dog-whistle support for "states rights," Lee Atwater and the Willie Horton campaign ad for GHW Bush, etc.
A signature moment was when arch-segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond switched from being a southern Democrat to the GOP — and was welcomed. Sure, other reasons were cited for these switches, but those were mostly window dressing.
The race riots of the mid- to late 1970s, and the publicity attending the Black Panthers, were also a factor in my extended family's switch to the party of "law and order" (the GOP). Example: During the rioting after MLK's assassination in 1968, my dad carried a .45 pistol on his commute to work in downtown Washington D.C. And in our suburban Maryland neighborhood — populated largely by military, CIA, Air America, etc. — my dad and other men on the block loaded up their hunting rifles, put them close to the front door, and gave us kids strict instructions not to touch them. They did that because of rumors that carloads of black rioters were roaring down the streets in white neighborhoods, throwing Molotov cocktails. (That certainly never happened in our neighborhood — or anywhere, AFAICR.) My family members weren't racist, but they regarded obeying the law as paramount.
History would disagree with this. Republicans and Big Business were always for free trade and globalism.
Because in 80's-90's, big-corp was salivating over that sweet cheap-cheap foreign labor. To put this on Democrats is a retcon.
The far left and the far right are not the same either where do you even get that! A far left party in the american context is something like democratic socialism, or sure why not actual marxist-leninism. While the far right is proud boys, groypers, literal neonazis, christian integrationists. You may have equal distaste for both but that doesn't mean they share anything else.
Once you go down the rabbit whole of trying to define 'anarchist' , there are actually dozens of definitions, and they all argue about who is really anarchist. So, that they don't agree that some other group isn't 'really anarchist', I take it with grain of salt .
These extreme Republicans want to get rid of government. I'm using the highest level gloss over, that No-Government is Anarchism.
I'm sure in reality, humans would re-coalesce up in communes/tribes/feudal groupings, and thus re-form local groups, and is that still Anarchism? At what point of organization do we stop saying something is 'anarchism'. I'm just saying, when the US breaks up because there is no government, it will be anarchy, and that seems to be what Republicans are shooting for..
Which is why I avoided providing or using any definition of anarchism, instead describing the actions of people who consider themselves anarchists.
> and they all argue about who is really anarchist.
Yes, but there is only one group who consistently considers themselves anarchists but who exactly zero other anarchist groups recognize as anarchists. All other anarchist movements have at least one mutually-recognized peer movement. I'm not saying this is an absolute or the only definition, but it's very useful in this context. There is something different about ancaps.
> These extreme Republicans want to get rid of government.
They do not! They are not proposing an elimination of the military or police departments or prisons, for example. They are using the DoJ to pursue political enemies, the executive branch to enact and enforce tariffs. In fact exactly the parts of the state that are used to create and enforce hierarchy. I do not know any anarchist movements, other than anarcho-capitalism, that has this goal.
I understand why your view of it is alluring, I find it to be so as well. But I have found that it simply has very little explanatory power for this situation.
The only thing the far left and right truly share I think, is radicalism. By which I mean an intention or acceptance of rapid and comprehensive change to the dynamics of daily life for the whole population. But the actual changes they want have virtually no overlap.
In terms of today's landscape there is a list of things like LGBTQ issues, race, gender equality, abortion, religion, etc., and if you avoid things on that list you'll find a huge overlap between the views of the far left and the far right. Both are broadly opposed to what's popularly called neoliberalism, the post-Reagan/Clinton post-cold-war order, and the reasons for this opposition overlap quite a bit if you again avoid the topics that I listed. From that perspective, blowing up the system is the goal. When they see trade policies like these crash the present system, they view that as a success because they think the current system is such a mistake that it must be smashed.
(I am not making a judgment in this post, just explaining the landscape.)
I’ve been a left liberal my whole life. We haven’t gone anywhere.
It's called Oligarchy.
Shutting down USAID, cutting education, health benefits and dismantling the checks on executive power do nothing to curb what criticize. These actions actually destabilize and only give greater chance that what you dislike becomes more prevalent.
USAID is not a shadowy cabal, it is not an element of the deep state. It can be corrected, even isolated from harm, by reorganizing their leadership to a board instead a administrative seat. You're just not arguing in good faith, and I really have to wonder why you're falling for talking points aimed at the lowest-intelligence voting bloc.
It’s naive to think we can clean out the NSA, FBI, and CIA. I’ll take what I can get.
It's naive to shoot the messenger and think you've killed the message. If USAID is a conduit for the FBI and CIA's wrongdoing, then we haven't actually punished anyone responsible. We're cheering on our own ineptitude, patting ourselves on the back for dismantling a "deep state" on paper, one that still exists with the exact same motives.
If you have any privileged knowledge of USAID that proves me wrong, I welcome you to share it. It sounds like we both agree that the real problem is intelligence agencies that would disguise themselves in a Red Cross truck if given the opportunity. But sure, let's demonize the Red Cross instead of the people ignoring the conventions of lawful warfare. They are the issue.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo
Even if without cover CIA involvement, they operates parallel social services that don't answer to a foreign government to advance a foreign governments priorities.
Every Pakistani I talked to (living in Pakistan) has a negative view USAID and foreign NGOs. Why do you think that would be?
When you dismantle a government, which does include judiciary/legislative powers, who is gonna counterweight the executive branch?
This tariff regime is simply a “minimal viable product” aimed at the idea of reducing structural trade deficits.
This is how they cut taxes without cutting taxes. They've even said as much: "We'll do this huge tax cut and revenue from tariffs will pay for it." But tariff revenue IS tax. It's just a tax on spending versus income. It's quite clever because a tax on spending disproportionately impacts the poor and the middle class (who spend a much higher percentage of their income).
In fact he called these tariffs along with Trump's plan to cut taxes on he wealthy an absurd transfer of wealth:
> Trump's absurd idea to replace the income tax with a sales tax on imported goods would be the largest transfer of wealth in U.S. history. If enacted, taxes would go up by over $5,000 a year for a middle class family, while those in the top 0.1% would get a $1.5 million tax break.
https://xcancel.com/BernieSanders/status/1850933809384137106
And Trump's economic plan "insane"
> https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/bernie-sanders-...
Many agree, most polls have Trump far underwater in his handling of the economy.
> Respondents gave Trump poor marks for his handling of the economy, which 37% approved of, with 30% approving of his work to address the high cost of living, an issue that also dogged Biden.
https://www.reuters.com/default/trump-approval-falls-43-lowe...
Which is why I was pointing out your comment is disingenuous by insinuating Sanders would support the tariffs because it's anti-free trade.
This is the equivalent of saying that any anti-war protester is instantly a complete ideological pacifist. It's illogical.
I challenge you to find a policy paper endorsed by Sanders that said "let's do universal tariffs on the entire planet by taking the inverse of our trade balance - and leave Russia out of it".
Everyone knows tariffs are a tool, often meant to encourage domestic production (when applicable and feasible) or to protect against unfair foreign trade practices.
They do not work as a permanent source of revenue in the modern era, and they can never operate as both a strong source of revenue AND a tool for repatriation of production. If they work as revenue, that means production stays foreign. If they work as incentive, they will diminish in revenue.
Nothing about this makes sense unless your goal is to tear down the US and the USD as a global economic power and global reserve currency. This is not about making America strong.
This idea of blanket tariffs to try and kickstart industries is unique.
Not that I understand it, cuz am noob:
Admin thinks US dollar is too strong. So they want to devalue it. Which will then trigger a sell off of US Treasuries, further devaluing the US dollar.
I have no idea if this is the Admin's actual plan, the merit of such a plan, or if there's any realistic hope for achieving the intended outcome.
If any one can make any of this make sense, please chime in. TIA.
Trump is treating each country as a separate issue and wants to reduce the deficits with each of them. That's completely stupid because even if every country got rid of all trade barriers and protectionism there would still be deficits with some countries and surpluses with others because different countries need to import different things.
For example say country A needs some natural resource that they have no domestic supply of, so they import that from country B. A uses that to produce goods for their own use and for export.
Country B's biggest need is some other resource that they lack, so they use the money they get from selling their resource to A to buy the resource they need from C.
In this scenario A runs a trade deficit with B and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with this.
edit: The White House deputy press secretary posted their formula and it is just trade_deficit/2*total_imports per country just dressed up with a lot of fancy language to make it seem smarter but the two extra terms are constants.
Oh man if people in the White House are just using ChatGPT...
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee890e-b400-800b-ac83-90a6147d32...
(edit: fixed link)
404.
> White House are just using ChatGPT
Likely, Grok? https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_e8b4c405-3bb8-4f01-9...
Nah, all it has to do is offer to be "helpful" and do stuff for us and we'd be like "sure, go ahead, take over, here let me cut and paste your advice right into a policy document."
Oh wait its a 10% tariff on Australia too. Better make a new version of this chart with a -117% benefit to the US then...
If you think trying to balance out the trade deficit with every single country without any other nuanced consideration whatsoever is a good approach, that’s one thing (a lot of people would disagree), but there’s no getting around that the information around this is either misinformed or deliberately misleading.
From one economist who was cited in the rationale:
> It is not clear what the government note is referencing or not from our work ... But I believe our work suggests a much higher value should be used for the elasticity of import prices to tariffs than what the government note uses. ... The government note uses a value of 0.25 for ‘the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs’, denoted with the Greek letter phi. But our estimates found a value of 0.943 — very close to 1 — for this elasticity.
From another:
> this is where the discrepancies between our work and the table that President Trump showed arises ... our results suggest that the EU should not be tariffed, and yet they set high tariffs against them. Finally, our range of optimal tariffs is substantially lower than the ones the Administration just announced.
But it does provide a convenient fig-leaf rationalization for the class of over-confident economically illiterate folks to cling to, so it seems to have succeeded.
see: https://www.ft.com/content/bbaa8daf-b7b0-4dca-bc23-c2e8eee68...
non-paywall: https://archive.ph/wip/JMgcP
IIRC he is a lawyer, a field where strategically deploying intellectual dishonesty is particularly advantageous.
This is a real human being making these apologetics and using classic distraction and whataboutism techniques
(He's also getting about as close as you can get to the "out-and-out racism" line as you can get without maybe technically crossing it. Though I think he did cross it when it comes to Irish Catholics.)
You state this as fact that we should all agree on. Why should we do this? Why not rely on our allies and friends to do what they do well, while we continue to do what we do well? Is trade not the basis of peace? If we stand alone, we must ask why we must.
Generally, the clamoring for domestic production comes down to: 1. Employment. But because we are more prosperous, our employment is aimed elsewhere. We have jobs for people that are less dangerous, less manual, and better paid.
2. A fear that without domestic production, we're at a strategic or military disadvantage. But it's not that we _can't_ produce in an emergency, we can and have historically (see: oil in the 1970s). What protects us most is hegemony, which is threatened by things like across-the-board trade wars.
3. Nostalgia for the good ol days. Look, if you want to work in a factory, we have lots of them here, still. Nobody will stop you from putting on the hard hat. But in all likelihood you have a less stressful, less dangerous, and better-paying job today.
There really isn't an argument for this. Our trade was - as all trade is - mutually beneficial. Right now we're pushing the glass to the edge of the table when it was perfectly fine where it was.
One other important note: there are things we literally cannot produce domestically due to lack of natural availability (food products, certain textiles)
1) mandatory saving for future, like a Social Security for the country (which is ironically also comprised of Social Security)
2) investments made into the future of the country. People buy T-bonds because they're reliable returns. Low risk, relatively low reward. If suddenly our future looks less bright, our debt will slow, but it will be a pretty telling canary in the coal mine.
It's baffling to me that people generally don't grasp this. They treat it as though we're just ... buying stuff on a credit card.
I somehow keep eating 6-10 eggs a week despite not having a chicken.
The US is in the envyable position of having developed a globally dominant service sector. Putting that at risk of retaliation by imposing tariffs on all imports, including the lowest margin stuff like screws and bolts is utter insanity.
https://www.ft.com/content/aee57e7f-62f1-4a57-a780-341475cd8...
Cargo culting "manufacturing jobs" isn't actually a plan.
(I also notice nobody is talking about bringing back switchboard jobs or typing pool jobs)
Is laying our heads at the GDP idol's feet a reasonable measure of what these activities contribute to national welfare?
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
That it's relative share in GDP is down during that time means that other sectors were growing even faster (think Google, Netflix and so on, so services instead of things). That the service sector gains in relative importance is actually a sign of an advanced economy, every modern economy looks like that, not just the US.
Basically if you ignore computers, there was zero growth in manufacturing sector. If you take computers into account but ignore processing power increase, there was zero growth. So pretty much the only driving force in the manufacturing sector for the last 20 years was Intel, AMD, Nvidia. This is even with the increased productivity per person in manufacturing sector (so there was also massive reduction in employment).
It is highly concerning and the numbers were very much cooked up.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
You might as well say we "de-agriculturized" because we automated farming.
Like, we can't make more fish. Avocados take a few years to grow new trees. Steel mills don't just appear in Ohio.
The worst part is that, even if you believe Donny, he's so mercurial with these tariffs that no one is going to give you a loan to do anything about any of this. This Katy Perry doctrine [0] he's established is just poison to any sort of capital investment. You've got no idea if any of these tariffs will make it to Monday, let alone to the time it takes the mortgage on your t-shirt factory to be paid off. And then you've got a new administration in four years and no idea if they will keep that protection for you either. How are you going to plant a whole vineyard and get it profitable in 4 years when grape vines take 7 years to mature to fruit bearing?
There's no point to any of this, even if you believe him.
[0] 'Cause you're hot, then you're cold You're yes, then you're no You're in, then you're out You're up, then you're down You're wrong when it's right It's black, and it's white We fight, we break up We kiss, we make up
https://bsky.app/profile/chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3llu...
"Do _____ and maybe we can cut you some slack on the tariffs"
If there is a point and it's not just absolute stupidity.
Sure, they might be trying to do this. But I'd give that a ~3% chance.
There is no 'there' there.
They are 'burning down your house to cook a steak.'
The emperor has no clothes.
There are many more ways to say it, but as truly unbelievable as my mind keeps insisting it is, these people are just plain-jane morons.
The exact same kind of fail-upwards, born on third thinking they hit a triple, grindset grifter, loser mid-level management nepobabies.
Could not have put it better myself.
Welcome back.
Huge swaths of midwestern farmers will go bankrupt if tariffs are imposed. Subsidies and exemptions are being specifically added to prevent the complete collapse of multiple red state economies due to the harm from the tariffs.
Even things like oil and mines aren't guaranteed safe, because of complexities around where refineries are, loss of export market, or weakness of dollar offsetting any nominal gains when looking at actual purchasing power.
Another way of reducing trade deficits would be to make Americans so poor that they can't afford to buy things from overseas. Eliminating trade deficits in itself isn't a rational economic goal.
Having said that, American manufacurers on average will likely benefit (though maybe not if their raw materials are too much more expensive), but this benefit will only come at the cost of American consumers, who are denied cheaper options from overseas by the tariffs
Trump’s bet is that the upsides will be borne disproportionately by his base, while the downsides will be borne disproportionately by Democrats’ laptop-class base. It’s not irrational to think that will be the result.
Yes everybody, we are taxing all of your groceries - but all of those American coffee and banana farms (!) will be protected.
So given that, I would have assumed that this administration would focus on making things more affordable. Instead, I'm seeing people try to explain to me that, actually, raising the prices across the board is a good thing!
To put it plainly, it seems like the administration raising prices is, in fact, not a good thing for Americans. And I don't see how American labor can produce things that are more affordable than what we can buy now. So it seems like a net negative, because ultimately they are choosing to make everything more expensive for consumers.
I'm sure there are more companies, but that is all I've seen so far.
That tanks the revenue from the tariffs, which would make them an ineffective replacement for income tax.
I mean he's gone bankrupt 6 times including managing to bankrupt a casino a business where on average people give you money to get less money in return... He also confuses simple economic terms like equating trade deficits with tariffs.
That's imminently doable but would require more work than plugging in 2 numbers from the US trade delegation website so we get this complete lie instead. Trump has had it in his head for ages that trade deficit == tariff (or is lying about that to make his supporters swallow this as the US just fighting back) and it's a completely broken understanding of trade.
That’s just defining what a trade deficit is, it doesn’t explain why trade deficits arise. For example, other countries have cheaper labor and laxer environmental regulations. Simply looking at the country’s tariff rates on U.S. goods doesn’t account for the whole picture.
Besides, if the trade volume is what determines the tariff, why would any country want to have a trade surplus with the US? The best solution for other countries is to artificially limit their exports, or find more reliable trading partners.
I do agree that this madness will only encourage other countries to conduct their trade elsewhere.
Because the U.S. can buy from Uruguay only as much as 3.5 million people in that country can produce.
Next that's always going to be imbalanced because they produce goods cheaper and can't afford as much as the equivalent chunk of people in the US.
Assume good faith.
So we've exported our worst paying, most environmentally damaging industries? I mean the rivers catching fire was probably exciting but I'm not exactly pining to bring that back...
Tariffs can only set those industries up for internal markets, other countries will just continue to buy from the cheaper source so the protected industry has to continue to be protected.
Additionally who's going to work these labor intensive industries? We're already at 4.1% unemployment, there's not vast masses of people waiting for low paying work as seamstresses and one of the other major prongs of the Trump ideology is reducing immigration drastically so we're going to squeezed on that end too.
Finally we've done mass tariffs before and it always ends badly. Remember Smoot-Hawley? it deepened the Great Depression because people thought they could turn to protectionism to prop up and bring industry to the US. It just doesn't work when broadly applied.
Now, take that kind of mindset and apply it across the country—that’s how you end up with 40% of the population easily swayed.
But the truth doesn’t bend to emotions.
It took a new political party to uncover years of fraud, waste, and abuse—amounting to over half a billion dollars—and that’s just from auditing a handful of government entities. All the findings? Publicly available online.
Yet somehow, the focus remains on vilifying Trump and criticizing Elon.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-doge-false-claim-bill...
https://fortune.com/2025/03/13/doge-saved-federal-government...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/doge-website-now-saved-105-billion...
https://fortune.com/2025/04/02/doge-claimed-contract-savings...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-con...
> All the findings? Publicly available online.
You surely realise you are doing exactly what you criticise here? You are accepting a government propaganda narrative unquestioningly without verifying any facts.
The DOGE claims have been proven false numerous times. Get off your high horse and do some reading.
Maybe it's the "Why not inject disinfectant to beat covid" [1] for the economy. But this time nobody around him said no. (note: added around him)
To cure trade deficits imposing tariffs is rather like injecting bleach yes.
> Rex Tillerson on Trump: ‘Undisciplined,’ ‘doesn’t like to read' and tries to do illegal things
Sadly, people didn't vote for Trump so much as they voted for "anti-woke." Or: I am tired of being looked down on and this is my revenge.
It is. This is being done as part of a plan, with full intent.
The US presently suffers from future shock and stilted political process. We need more parties and better voting options both in the HR department and the mechanical process like ranked voting.
Since both parties benefit from the status quo, we shall see no change.
Paragraph 3 is a cynicism I don't yet fully buy: There are enough liberals and so-called Democrats that care about this country that perhaps they will be open to ranked-preference voting and the opening of our "political markets" to save the country.
Partial on paragraph 1. Biden should have left a lot sooner, and Harris, loyal to the president and unable/unwilling to break with him on anything of value, should not have been the "pick".
But she was and is infinitely better for this country than Trump in every manner, unless we're into accelerationism. I don't think she is incompetent. She was unwilling.
The only people promulgating this red herring would never have voted for her anyway.
> She was a poor public speaker,
Compared to Trump? A man known for his incoherent ramblings?
Post-Carter United States (and South Korea, and Japan, and the UK, and much of the developed world in general) is a prime example of the follies of prioritizing numbers-on-a-spreadsheet growth in the short term, over a balanced and robust domestic economic engine that ensures a healthy, happy, stable populace that wants to have kids (since they have the money and time to be good parents).
The Clinton social program cuts combined with the Bush II tax cuts is what gave us the poor distributional effects of the 2001-2008 expansion, which both set the stage for and magnified the impact on all but the narrow slice at the top of the Great Recession; while they seemed harmless in the unusually strong boom economy they were implemented in, monentary nominal budget balance acheived that way has had massive adverse long term effects.
It also, contrary to your claim, didn't pay down any of the national debt, which increased by at least $100 billion every year of the Clinton presidency.
If you have a debt problem, you need to both raise income and cut unnecessary spending. Clinton - and every Democrat since Carter, really - only ever did the latter, and always targeting the working class for spending cuts as opposed to the corporate or wealthy classes. God forbid we curtail subsidies to fossil fuel companies or sugar producers or big box stores with a disproportionate amount of workers on government assistance programs, god forbid we stop bailing out failed banks or bankrupt private enterprise, let’s instead make sure poor people can’t have housing and children can’t have three meals a day.
Throwing large numbers around without examining how those numbers were achieved is what politicians and despots bank on the populace trusting, because once you know how those figures are reached, you’re confronted with how the system really works and suddenly have a distaste for it.
I know it's a Republican joke to blame evil meddling globalists for the US's problems but it sure seems like a bunch of people looking to ruin the US for their own global ambitions are running the show right now.
I'm no economist, but I can see that there are second order effects that this addresses that other systems would lack.
1) Tit for tat on tariffs doesn't work because of other barriers to trade such as currency manipulation, subsidies, regulations, etc.
2) We've learned from games such as iterated prisoner's dilemma that strategies that succeed are ones that clearly communicate how they'll act and respond. A clear formula such as deficit/imports accomplished this. Countries know exactly what they must address in order to access US markets.
3) You can end up playing whack a mole with countries in that they can set up shop in other countries to bypass tariffs in their own country. By applying a consistent formula to all countries, you no longer have to play whack a mole.
Relate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1998/08/18/t...
The US is powerful on the international stage because the US is not an empire. US global power is based on the US being a mostly fair dealer. This is extraordinarily rare in world history and extremely powerful because it transforms a zero sum international competition game into a game where most countries are invested in the success of most of other countries.
Most of human history follows the logic of "The further off from England the nearer is to France" and that is why most of human history is soaked in blood.
Until this year, Europe didn't worry about war with the US. This meant that Europe didn't have to consider the risks that trading with the US or buying US weapons would weaken them relative to the US in a future conflict.
----
Melians: "And how pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?"
Athenians: "Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you."
Melians: "So [that] you would not consent to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?"
Athenians: "No; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness and your enmity of our power."
There, I fixed that for you.
We can control international relations that most of Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea have to a fairly strong degree.
I would say this along with us having had fairly strong influence in the economies of these countries historically and our ability to easily coordinate military operations with them make these countries part of the US empire.
But sure, that is the expansive redefinition of the word I was looking for.
Which is a fine vision. Of course, Americans will have to consider why the goods on our shelves are so plentiful and so cheap.
But to be clear, in this fantasy, do you acknowledge and accept that costs for Americans are going to up? Things are going to get more expensive across the board for Americans?
Do you trust that this administration is competent enough to protect American companies?
This isn't secret knowledge, it's like the first thing covered after "what even is International Relations?" It's the 2+2=4 of the topic.
With the tariffs in Asia (Vietnam: 46%, Thailand: 36%, Cambodia: 49%) it feels like a good opportunity for China to increase their trade/influence in the region as well.
To quote Alex Scaggs of FT:
Take the US’s goods trade deficit with any particular country, and divide it by the total amount of goods imported from that country. Cut that percentage in half, and there’s the US’s “reciprocal” tariff rate.
It’s all drunk monkeys driving a train… there is no economic theory to expect consistency from.
“Belief” or “dogma” or even “idea” would work, but there’s no logic in that claim.
There’s not even a policy goal. If the intent is to convert the US from a net importer to neutral or even a net exporter, it means our cost of production needs to be about average. Which means our populace’s quality of life needs to be about average; wealthy countries are more expensive to produce in. Mix in the supposed interest in economic and social liberty, and you’ve got a country trying to destroy its own wealth in the name of controlling what its freedom-loving citizens buy
There is no logic here. It’s drunk monkeys all the way down.
1. Why do you believe this is true?
2. Why do you believe that 0 trade deficits are a good thing?
> Besides, what do you do with a country where US is a net exporter? Provide subsidies for imports?
In this instance, I believe the thought pattern is: "we're being smart here".
Once people accept that this administration is very much like the Russian regime, where everyone is the type of person playing to an aesthetic, you see this stuff coming miles away.
This is what these sorts of people would do.
(Freshly made Sri Lankian tea is the best, IMHO! I mean, proper tea, not all these grasses, berries and synthetic aromas which are named "tea" in modern western world).
But really best "black" tea of my life (and I spent most of my life in country with strong tea culture, where loose tea and teapots are still very popular, and not, it is not UK!) was bough at random tea factory in the middle of nowhere in Sri Lanka, packed in simple 1kg vacuum bags. No brand, no name, only date of picking (two days ago) and packing (today at the day of bought) :-)
It shouldn't be called tea if it is not from a very selective small area of Hangzhou. You've never tasted real tea in your entire life, what a pity.
They also have some of GPs favorite: https://www.whittard.com/all/ceylon-orange-pekoe-loose-tea-p...
Ok, Germany or Netherlands never were known for tea tradition, but UK was THE Tea country. UK created Assam, Darjeeling, Ceylon teas in the first place! How did this happen?
To be honest, I've tried many red teas from China and all of them... Very Chinese.
It is not bad at all (some of them are very interesting!, but it is other style compared to Ceylon, Darjeeling and Assam teas (which are not the same too, but close to each other than to Chinese red tea).
Different styles of green ad white teas I like too, but as specialty, not on as day-to-day many-time-a-day go-to drink.
Not true, China's is on top of its existing tariffs.
It's mind-boggling because the US has been trying very very hard to pull Sri Lanka away from China for a decade now
influence for sure. But trade? Vietnam/Thailand/Cambodia already have ~40% of their imports from China and 5% or so from the US, I don't think this tariff can realistically increase trade between China and SEA countries much.
Is that from a decrease in demand, or an increase in supply from other countries? I'm curious what the price elasticity of demand looks like for Chinese imports.
I understand 6% of china may be a much higher percentage of, say, Vietnam's export, but I just don't think Vietnam can produce that much more of that, quickly.
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...
For Vietnam: China: 32.79%, US: 4.04%
Cambodia's top 3 is China 42%, Thailand 20%, Vietnam 12%
Thailand's is China 28.7%, Japan 10.2%, US 6.3%
Vietnam's is China 40.8%, South Korea 15.9%, Japan 5%
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/116/export-basket
You don't want to buy anything? You don't need anything? The British had one thing the Chinese "needed".
And a 10% tariff on the Macdonald Islands, which has a population of zero (not including the penguins).
Perhaps Trump thought he was taxing a fast food competitor?
Fun fact: these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.
> Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.
In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year.
Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?
Are you feeling great again, Americans?
Can you elaborate? Tried searching for it, all i found is that Kazakhstan reported 500M exports to Germany, when it was actually 7B. But you were talking about Exports from Germany to Kazakhstan, which I wasn't able to find.
In the case of Norfolk Island, it was apparently some mislabeled shipments from Timberland (based in New Hampshire, NH <-> NI) and from two companies based in Norfolk, UK.
For Heard & McDonald Islands, it was mislabeled machinery that actually originated in Austria and Germany.
Or maybe OCR is used somewhere and has made the error.
It must be the correct one then. :-)
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...
That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins.
Doge should look into this inefficiency.
So obviously you'll end up with 10% on all sorts of places where you actually have a trade surplus and no tarrifs on your goods, or, yes, islands inhabited only by penguins.
It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.
Joke of the month.
Only barely four years left, yaaaay!
Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.
Which might explain why the British Indian Ocean Territory - population, one US military base - has such a high tariff. The BIOT, aka Diego Garcia, has the ccTLD .io.
The Orange Emperor has a huge hard on to make Ukraine suffer ever since it led to his first impeachment. Zelenski didn't kiss the ring so down they go.
Even the UK gets 10% which is truly mad given we have balanced trade and tarrifs (if anything the US tariffed the UK more than they did them).
^So essentially MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports)
The EO and Annexes are not on the Federal Register website yet but on the Whitehouse website it has EO[1] and Annex I[2] and Annex II[3].
I do not see Russia or Ukraine mentioned in any of those so I would assume both get the base "10 percent" under section 2/3.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-...
[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-...
Also imposing high tariffs now would reduce the power of the threat to raise tarrifs: https://www.ft.com/content/ec99b3c2-9f4d-4f34-9a01-f97d98131...
So is Iran, and yet Iran is still on the list.
The others make sense since they have worse tarrifs (though different, yes)
But then, I have no idea if the reasonable explanation applies. Are the other countries not in the list Iran and Cuba?
The Trump admin couldn’t arrange a pissup in a brewery.
Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.
There is trade today between New Caledonia, or French Polynesia, and the US. They are probably going to be tariffed at the rate for France, which is probably going to be the one for the EU, but who knows, neither New Caledonia nor France itself are listed.
It is really apparent that there is no understanding behind this half-assed list.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2025/04/02/heres-...
I’m all for being charitable but at some point Occam’s razor says it’s just ChatGPT mistakenly including these places.
It takes a lot longer to set all of that up than it takes for Trump to just raise another tariff if that happens. So nobody would invest in that. It would only be a loophole for a week or so.
So why bother doing this pre-emptively (even if that was the reason)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.
Should have set that to 99% then eh?
Then you waste time discussing the unimportant, "funny" topic, while the big picture is ignored.
I would argue that for this to become even remotely possible, America's list of enemies must not automatically become everyone else's enemies too.
that is to say: the USA's secondary statutes have to become ineffective.
To do this, the EU's blocking statutes (to ignore secondary sanctions) have to be effective. Right now Europe's own companies just ignore the statutes to keep their US trade.
To make the blocking statues effective, the EU's own research recommended fines/sanctions/bans/… on licences for foreign (read US) banks, and companies that ignore the statue and don't serve EU companies trading with sanctioned countries.
But to do that, the EU would need alternatives to American services.
Power and influence follow sovereignty.
€0,02
What Europeans truly lack is the ability to defend itself without the U.S. They have the technical know how and can build the manufacturing capacity but that will take a decade at least.
Also, European financing is just not as strong.
However, with the U.S. voluntarily walking away from its role as the center of the world, this may not be a problem for too long.
Tech is the easiest service to replace considering American tech workers by insisting on WFH have already largely eliminated the geographical advantages American tech used to have.
What will take Europe most of a decade is the combination of all the things you really want during war so you are not forced to end the world. Air defense - they have some but not near enough without the US. 5th generation fighter jets. Bombers. A navy - they have some great things but are missing many useful ships. They seem to have enough tanks, but are missing many other parts a modern army needs. And all of the above needs ammunition - they cannot provide Ukraine what is needed 3 years into that war - means they can't scale up to their owns needs if a war were to break out.
Fortunately war with Europe seems unlikely right now, but that can change fast and you need to be ready. Never has a battleship started during a war seen battle in that same war. (I don't know how to verify that claim, but it seems reasonable anyway)
For fighters I don't think 5th gen is the magic number, you can do well against Russia with more 4th gen, and the generation counter is pretty imprecise anyway, rafale and Gripen are continuously modernized with new software and electronic warfare
Europe has Aster which is a replacement for patriot with similar characteristics. Since the technology exists it should be a small thing to scale up production.
And ammunition has been scaled up since 2022 and every shell used in Ukraina is a shell that does not need to be used in the rest of the countries.
For fighters I don't think 5th gen is the magic number, you can do well against Russia with more 4th gen, and the generation counter is pretty imprecise anyway, rafale and Gripen are continuously modernized with new software and electronic warfare
Europe has Aster which is a replacement for patriot with similar characteristics. Since the technology exists it should be a small thing to scale up production.
And ammunition has been scaled up since 2022 and every shell used in Ukraina is a shell that does not need to be used in the rest of the countries.
No, it's a deterrent. This is why it's so important that the systems are in place and functional. So they can actually be used, to make sure they never have to.
A deterrent is not like a bragging tool at all.
And the battleship was definitely NOT the king of the ocean. Carriers quickly took over that role, and aircraft quickly made mincemeat of the best battleships ever built, starting with the destruction of Force Z near Singapore and culminating with the destruction of Yamato and Musashi.
Pushing this message is disinformation that has been particularly successful part of the OrangeMan administration.
Europe can defend itself. Combined they have huge military resources and technological replacements for most of what the US can provide.
So - Europe can defend itself. But it prefers to use money, allies and Ukrainian soldiers lives to avoid having to.
If it’s the trade keeping EU companies in line, isn’t the destruction of trade that these tariffs are intended to achieve precisely the kind of thing that will then prevent them from staying in line in the future?
What Europeans need is pragmatic governments and politicians. In fact it might be easier to find a magic lamp than an honest politician.
If we were to ban US social media, European alternatives would emerge very fast.
I'd give an example, but every time I have previously shown an example of machine translated Chinese to demonstrate that AI is bad at translating English into Chinese, the responses miss the point of the example — criticising the translation whose very errors are meant to demonstrate how bad current AI is.
The U.S. seems especially vulnerable with its limiting two-party bias, among other factors.
I'd argue that the level of education of the general populace in (still) functioning democratic countries might be the prime mitigation factor.
Based on this, if I were placing bets on prediction markets, I'd wager that e.g. Finland would be among the last to succumb.
The real issue is the two party split and urbanized distribution. The way the voting works and the structure of the houses means that once you reach about 85% urbanization the rural areas won't matter. We can see this at many state levels that mimic national political structure. We have multiple nations within our county, with the biggest divide probably being between urban and rural. So all you have you have to do is promise the rural group who feels they are increasingly marginalized a candidate who will look out for their interest. The specifics of those promises don't really matter because in the 2 party system it's us vs them more than actual policy positions. You will find a much bigger difference looking at the urbanization based metrics than you will at the roughly 10pt difference in who people with bachelor degrees voted for.
Edit: why disagree?
In Finland, most university students go for a master's degree. A bachelor's degree is often seen as sort-of a safety valve, if it turns out you didn't have what it takes to complete the full master's degree. So you get at least some sort of degree from having been to university rather than just having your high school diploma as your highest official educational achievement.
Our country has not increased the number of representatives sufficiently to allow local issues to reach national stage, so instead we all worry about national issues over local ones, for one example.
The republicans were a third party. Granted the old Whig party was seeing significant troubles, but they still were a third party and thus prove you wrong. 3 parties are not viable, but third parties are.
But if things are passing by only 1 or 2 votes anyways, where anyone 1 persons vote is a major deciding factor, that's an indication of a bigger issue. Such a divide means that half the country feels they are getting screwed and there was little compromise to include their concerns.
> If these individuals are exceptions and the rest are competent
The same thing with the senate too. Current senate setup gives a lot of power to empty land.
That's the entire premise that got the smaller colonies to sign on. It's a feature, not a bug.
The university educated are the top. Politics is not about the top few percent, it's about the masses. At this the US education system is really bad, especially in poorer areas.
Domestic political antifragility means nothing if you're not anti-fragile in terms of the outside world.
It's called the anarchic global system for a reason. The only thing enforcing norms is power and the fear of it.
Antifragility would be the EU finally forming a real union. As someone living in Finland, I'm not holding my breath that happens in our lifetimes. If you take a sample of average, non-cosmopolitan Europeans, they can barely even communicate with each other in the same language. Let alone come to agreements on who's going to pay for each others bloated social welfare expectations.
The EU is the very definition of Fragility. While Finland has made far more rational decisions than its EU neighbors (having correctly prioritized energy security, military, and technology), it doesn't matter because size is more important.
Yes, the EU is fragile, but I think trying to fix it that way would be worse.
I think 1) the rich democracies in Europe are unlikely to go to war with each other and 2) have good reason to unite against common threats so I think a military alliance is military alliance makes sense.
Yes, we already have NATO but the US is going to be ever more focused on China, and Russia is not the threat the Soviet union was so a new military alliance focused on Russia and securing the Atlantic (the latter in cooperation with the US) makes a lot of sense. Obviously different countries have different interests (the Atlantic is a lot more important to the UK than it is to most others) but also enough in common.
Because there is one objectively correct way to prioritize /s
So objectively, there is a correct way to prioritize those items if we're talking about being antifragile. People like to forget the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually started in 2014.
But again, the inability of the EU to agree on even a common set of values is why we never have to worry EU countries will start seriously integrating with each other. We will remain disjointed sitting ducks as we are in love with our early 1900s romantic ethno-nationalist movement stories of who we are.
It also combats exceptionalism, that "Our nation is the greatest ever!" kinda stuff. Because in Europe we know we're not a nation but an alliance. That we need others to survive.
And remember that Finland didn't even bother joining NATO until Russia invaded Ukraine, if they thought it was so important to be together as a big bloc, this would have been the first step.
Ps: if the other countries in Europe didn't agree with Finland's smart decisions, how do you think these decisions would come to pass if Europe was one big country? Because the people wanting those would be in the minority. You would have very little input to the whole. And no chance to decide them yourself as you currently do.
If the EU had a cohesive strategy on these things, you can 100% guarantee Russia wouldn’t be starting wars along its borders. Russia is a small, weak economy compared to a theoretical unified EU (the irony of that phrase!)
Also, the reason Finland didn’t join NATO before is not because Finland felt they were so strong on their own. It’s because Finland didn’t want to piss off Russia in the slightest way and end up like Ukraine. An inability to make formal alignments comes from a position of weakness, not strength.
I don't think we should be a geopolitical strongman like America though. The world has seen enough of America oil police. Blowing up half the middle east under the guise of 'freedom' and leaving power vacuums that caused nasties to bubble up like ISIS. Which hurt Europe a lot more than it did the US (think mass refugee exodus, attacks etc). They caused these problems.
I think it's great that Europe has more ideals than just money. We still care about all our citizens, not the top 0,01% that has all the money.
> If the EU had a cohesive strategy on these things, you can 100% guarantee Russia wouldn’t be starting wars along its borders. Russia is a small, weak economy compared to a theoretical unified EU (the irony of that phrase!)
Well especially because we don't have a good nuclear deterrent. And this is nothing new. Putin has been massacring ex-soviet states during all of his career. Checznia, Georgia etc. But nobody gave a crap in Europe. Part of this is that the EU had their designs on Ukraine also and this is why we suddenly care. I don't like this expansionist EU. Yes, I do think the Ukrainians should be helped and they should be free to choose who to align with. But it's a bit hypocritical that we didn't help the others before them.
For the nuclear deterrent we should have worked on that more but America was always against that and they assured they would protect us. Clearly now we can stop trusting them. Even after Trump I don't think relations will ever be the same because we know there can always be another Trump.
But with a deterrent we will be fine. Putin is not going to invade Poland if he knows Moscow will be nuked the same day.
> Also, the reason Finland didn’t join NATO before is not because Finland felt they were so strong on their own. It’s because Finland didn’t want to piss off Russia in the slightest way and end up like Ukraine. An inability to make formal alignments comes from a position of weakness, not strength.
So, in other words appeasement. Which is something that you are accusing the EU of now.
I just don't think you can expect the strongman EU to emerge and there are many people like myself that don't want that to happen.
Also, military blocs (NATO) and economic (EU) are very different things. After NATO we should just form a new military one.
It's partly effective because they system wasn't really designed but evolved out of a lot of bloody power battles, going back to at least 1215 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
I used to think it was silly but if you look at rival European powers they had Russia with Stalin, Hitler in Germany, Napoleon in France, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy etc. The UK is one of the very few which avoided having a dictator.
[Edit - I was kind of talking about the wrong thing - avoiding dictators rather than Trump types]
It's very impressive in its way.
Although the winners won't get to enjoy their victory for long, because climate change is going to roll right over everything over the next few decades.
The reality is "left wing" parties have completely abandoned their traditional working class demographic - both through encouraging manufacturing to be offshored and allowing in mass unskilled labor to compete with them. During the Bush era I thought working class folks were voting against their self interest when they voted Republican. That's not the case anymore.
It's convenient to try to play this off as some kind of foreign influence thing, but the Democrats did this to themselves.
So yes, the democrat party has had many failings over the past decade if not more, but that doesn't make this a binary choice between Trumpian policies and democrat failings.
The aristocrats are narcissistic, shockingly racist, and often rather stupid - good at tactics like manipulating elections and news cycles, but contemptuous of most of the population, and clueless about how to build an economy based on growth and invention instead of rent-seeking and extraction.
https://www.youtube.com/live/hgPGPZRQdaU?si=4W0z1vkk2bfnueJZ
His analysis complements the crucial discussions elsewhere in this thread about the economic details (reserve currency risks, the tariff math) and specific geopolitical impacts, by focusing on the political drivers; the nature of post-truth populism, underlying societal weaknesses, the challenge of maintaining civic coherence in the midst of it all, etc.
Central government is weak, even if AFD would takeover the chancellorship there are few measures that would immediately allow them to intervene in the federal states or „Länder“, much much less than in the US e.g. unless there is war there is no way to use the military to force compliance.
You would have to take over the country 17 times, and since the elections are not synchronised you would have to convince everybody all the time that this is good idea.
Individual German federal states could be taken over much easier, Thuringia probably will be the first in 2028.
The biggest weakness than is that the legal prosecution on German federal state level is under control of the executive and could be used to prosecute political adversaries. But if this goes to far the remaining parts of the country could vote to takeover the executive if there was a breach of the constitution.
Can you elaborate on this? Every other country does not have the luxury of having its currency be the reserve currency but still manages to both inflate that currency when needed and import good just fine.
The other side is that as there is a demand for dollars. The value of the currency is higher than if it wasn't which increases the price of exports and reduce price of imports. Trump might want to weaken the dollar.
Who are those other people and why do they want to be paid in USD so badly instead of their own currency in which they presumably pay their employees and taxes? I never understood that.
Hard reason: Oil was traded in U.S. dollars. This was basically built off America’s status as the only open superpower and its military strength.
Soft reasons: U.S. political stability (yeah, it’s hard to understand that now after the past decade, but generally the U.S. has been extremely politically stable with Presidents largely maintaining their predecessors foreign policy even if they didn’t agree with them), US company culture which is much cleaner than the rest of the world (American companies are far less likely to bribe, for example), and strong financial institutions like the independent Fed and the publishing of reliable and open data.
[edit] someone who graduated college with an economics degree please come and correct the following vague and possibly totally wrong perceptions I have as a subject of the American empire /edit
The value of a country's money is backed by a combination of how much they produce and how much foreign currency and assets from other countries they hold (euros, dollars, gold) they have on reserve. Only the US gets away with having no actual reserve ...because a combination of military might and cultural strategic dominance has allowed it to BE the reserve for everyone else. This is why it somehow makes sense for America's economy to be based entirely on consumption rather than production.
OP is right. Whichever superpower controls the levers of global trade is the one that can sell debt and enforce the currency regime.
Some of us think that it's a lucky thing that it's been America, rather than a more authoritarian power, who had held that control for the past 80 years. Europe would not have recovered from WWII otherwise, and be living behind an iron curtain. Anyone who controls global trade after America is likely to be worse from a human rights perspective.
I wonder can China use this to make Yuan a new world currency (we all buy Chinese things anyway) or they cannot do it or doing this is not beneficial to them?
Part of the way they do this is with heavy currency controls. Those currency controls make it difficult to do international trade with the yuan.
But worse from Chinas perspective you can’t maintain a peg if your currency is used to trade goods, particularly fungible commodities because the commodity itself becomes the medium of exchange and derails the currency peg.
That would be disastrous for their exporters and their economy is not in a position to sustain that currently.
First of all, they can print Yuan. They want people to buy those pieces of paper for something of value. It doesn't do much good to have people send all that paper back in exchange for phones and tablets and stuff. Then they would've just got back some paper they printed in exchange for something that took time and resources to make.
No, they need something physical or at least valuable for that paper. Such as local labor. Then their own population can spend the paper internally, because it's in theory exchangeable for something external. When China buys stuff from the US, it spends dollars. Which it buys from the US not with Yuan, but with computer parts. It pays its own people Yuan to make the computer parts... but the Yuan is only valuable because the government holds dollars and euros to buy stuff that their citizens can then buy for Yuan.
This is why Trump's overall foreign policy and particulatly his tariffs scheme risks destroying America. If at some point enough countries decide that the USD is too unreliable, they may look for the next best paper to trade. That would be catastrophic for the US which may deserve it in any case, but it would be truly terrible if the alternative were a currency privately owned and manipulated by the leaders of a dictatorship. Perhaps the world isn't stupid enough to do that, but the size of China's economy compared to anything else would make it tempting.
I'll stipulate right now that if China were a democracy with civil rights and a fair legal system, I would have no problem with it taking over world trade from the US. But currently it's a repressive authoritarian state.
I can definitely imagine Yuan being used more
I suspect a strong precondition for this is to switch world oil trade away from the dollar, and that is currently enforced by a combination of military power and "winner takes all" network effect mechanics of the trade.
I think the simplest way to think about it is simply supply and demand. Currently there is constant high demand for USD due to its reserve status as you said (supply is also growing btw , deficits, printing of money etc). If demand goes down, there will be too much supply so the Dollar will naturally weaken against other currencies. As far as I know the fact that one USD equals 0.95 Euros (or whatever) is simple market forces of supply and demand.
I would have assumed the fisherman in the Philippines would like to be paid in Philippine peso.
If the fishermen could be paid in dollars, they would probably prefer that.
And the fact that they'd prefer that to being paid in Rubles or Renminbi is the underlying guarantor of American economic power... which, if it goes away and was replaced by Chinese power in the south china sea, would be catastrophic for the fishermen as well.
(Probably it'd be a pretty big fishing company, exporting to a far away nation like that. Not a single person in a small boat)
Edit: I suppose riffraff's sibling answer is better
That's why international trade uses "strong" currencies, which are very liquid: you can generally get USD/EUR and then trade them for anything else with a limited spread. Good luck converting Hungarian forints to Lao kips.
Being cut off from USD is why news of Russia resorting to barter[0][1] have occurred in the news since they got cut off from the US trading system
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oranges-trade-barter-pakista... [1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/first-russia-china-barter-tr...
Russia overall may have exported some stuff to Philippines but it’s a huge country. The specific company would now need to find a way to acquire a highly illiquid currency available in tiny numbers which would be expensive.
Instead, they simply buy dollars which are highly liquid, available in huge numbers, until now absolutely reliable, and accepted by everyone.
Trading in dollars was at the end of the day cheap.
Luckily, it's still possible to change governments. Sometimes, in some places. Maybe not for much longer. But the idea that crypto will free us is a fantasy that at this point is mostly being peddled by secret police agencies in name-your-country.
A currency is a social construct. It has no inherent value beyond what people who trade in it place on the currency.
As a result people don’t want a currency whose rules of trade are defined once and it’s unable to respond to actual world events.
If you have a currency that is indeed responsive to changes in the world then there needs to be someone who you entrust with making those changes.
At that point it doesn’t matter whether that currency is digital or cash based. I mean, in actuality even the USD digital trade is order of magnitudes greater than its physical trade.
The U.S.’s monetary institutions and its role as a trade promoting superpower is what makes the dollar stronger. Now that those institutions are not as reliable anymore and the U.S. is clearly not a trade promoter anymore, the dollar is definitely at risk.
Of course, there's more to it in the complex system of the global economy, but the power of the state is still an important central factor in a currencies' strength - it's not just about collective perceptions of value.
Next thing you know they might start sending innocents to megaprisons in El Salvador and lose track of them.
I think most Americans have no idea how much power their country wields. And it's horrific that they're susceptible to the kind of small thinking jingoist nationalism that doesn't befit a country so large built on an idea of cohesion.
It has a per capita incarceration rate lower only than Rwanda, Turkmenistan, Cuba and El Salvador (which is a prison subcontractor _for_ the US).
It has started more wars than any other country since the second World War.
It is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon in anger.
It has a death penalty.
It supports numerous regimes with abysmal human rights records, Israel, Egypt and Saudi spring to mind, but that's just `head(3)`.
It has bombed it's own population, shot its own students, had racial segregation in living memory.
Given its scale and reach, I'd suggest that the US is, in fact, the world's greatest human rights abuser.
I'm struggling to think of a country with a worse record.
Do you know what's going on to average citizens in North Korea?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aquariums_of_Pyongyang
Do you know that showing ANY anti-war symbol in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine will get you arrested?
Do you know how many Tibetans put their lives on the line to organize resistance in Tibet, now, against the genocidal CCP?
Do you know anything about the civil war in Sudan?
So
if the worst human rights abusers in your mind are America, the UK, France and Germany, is that because those are the only countries you can name? Or because you don't understand what the rest of the world is?
Yes, I'm very familiar with the Russia situation, but are you trying to say all arrests in the US are completely justifiable? Despite their apparent arrest-happiness, they've a much smaller prison population than the US.
China, I know less about, but let's call the Uighurs and Tibet equivalent to say, Iraq and Libya, the US has done far more besides.
Having worked in the aid business, I'd say I'm sadly a little familiar with Sudan. For example I know they've been victims of US sanctions which have created and exacerbated the famines and economic misery paved the way for this war. The US even lobbed a cruise missile them once.
The US has dominated the western world for 80 years, much of that in battle against adversaries who were much more brutal to their own citizens. Which by extension means more brutal toward innocent bystanders who fell under those adversaries power.
It's a form of confirmation bias to assert now that all the world's maladies and wars stem from American interventionism. One can easily imagine a counter-history in which any of the forces America fought against had run over neutral countries without opposition.
The very fact that South Korea and Taiwan, Germany, Japan, France, the UK, Norway, et al, are democracies with relatively decent human rights records and not, like, slave states subjugated to totalitarian regimes... does that fact not put hundreds of millions of human lives lived in dignity and freedom on our side of the ledger? Unless you think those lives would have just as well have been spent in a concentration camp or a gulag.
There are examples of that. Tibet, North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Warsaw pact countries.
On average the US side was MUCH better. There are examples that go the other way (e.g. Afghanistan) and that were bad enough it might have been better with the other side (many South American dictatorships)
As far as the outcome of WWII is concerned, I'm presuming this is what you're referring to, Europe owes just as much to the Soviet union in the fight against the Nazis, they gave many more lives. Does that go on the Russian ledger?
> It's a form of confirmation bias to assert now that all the world's maladies and wars stem from American interventionism.
At no point have I claimed this. My claim is that I struggle to think of a country that has a worse human rights record than the US, which I'd lightly tweak for living memory.
Still struggling.
What rights does Russia give to Ukrainian civilians? Not even a right to live.
So, from there you criticize us.
Like students protesting against Palestinian genocide?
> Do you know how many Tibetans put their lives on the line to organize resistance in Tibet, now, against the genocidal CCP?
Like the Hawaiian sovereignty movement?
Your North Korea info. America is the one that didn’t allow free elections and invaded (yes I know you will say North Korea invaded. I know what people who repeat every western talking point say).
—
How do you think Africa turned out the way it did? Which people in the late 1800s decided to carve up Africa? Which people continue doing [neo]colonialism?
Why is Sudan a country with its borders? It’s the west that did that. A country can’t be free when colonizers draw the borders. Even if you try to bring in the Arab states screwing Sudan up, those states are also a cause of western colonialism.
—
Tibet was a slave society and part of China for many many years.
Most Tibetan people speak their native language. How about native Hawaiian or indigenous people in continental US?
—
Like I said in another comment. If Xinjiang had been in Europe or America. The Muslims would’ve been genocided. Thank god my people were in Xinjiang China and not elsewhere.
I’d advise you to read Manufacturing Consent and learn more about the world before saying the most typical western talking points.
You can't do that in China or Cuba or Russia. You can't even mention it or you would be black holed and your family would be taken away in the night.
I'm in America and I have no fear of telling the authorities what I think.
As awful as some of the things America has done in the past 249 years are, you really can't compare them to the actions of non-democracies and authoritarian regimes. To do so is an insult to the people who struggle every day as prisoners under those regimes. You can hate America with all your heart, but you can't reasonably compare its foreign policy to that of Napoleon or Hitler or Stalin. You can't say that America ever attempted a Great Leap Forward leading to the starvation of 40 million people, or the Holodomor, or the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide or even the current genocide against Uighurs by China. Even the British empire looks incredibly cruel by modern American standards.
Is it still a big world power dominating other smaller countries? Definitely.
America has acted as if it were a global empire in its own self interest. But it's probably been the lesser of most evils, certainly throughout the 20th Century. What it is or may be now, it's harder to say, and we'll find out. But comparatively speaking, only a person who hadn't been to the countries you listed would make the claim that it was worse to have America running the world.
Someone's going to run the world, you know.
In recent years? I'd say the War on Terror was one of the deadliest things in 21st century so far.
You can't. They didn't exist.
Name one that opened its doors to immigrants, has the most diverse population in the world, progressively enhanced civil rights and enshrined freedom of speech, built a rule of law into its practices, and most importantly, name a single country that has had a peaceful democratic transition of power for more than half that time.
And are still happening today, under the thin disguise of for-profit prisons and no-work = no-healthcare.
The US has a long history of murdering people who are too politically progressive and/or get in the way of corporate profits.
Racial segregation was still considered normal in the 1950s. There's still a huge swathe of the population who can't cope with the idea of anyone who isn't rich and white, ideally a man, with political power.
As for immigrants - there are some people in El Salvador who won't agree with you.
> Name one that opened its doors to immigrants, has the most diverse population in the world, progressively enhanced civil rights and enshrined freedom of speech, built a rule of law into its practices
> most importantly, name a single country that has had a peaceful democratic transition of power for more than half that time.
I definitely disagree about the UK. We have nothing like the constitutional protections the US has.
The other country I know well, Sri Lanka, is fairly bad, but has got a lot better in recent years and that does not seem to be reflected in the change (I cannot see a history so maybe it got better and fell in the last year) and I find it hard to believe it is really just a few places away from the likes of Yemen or Belarus.
The quantitative part will have issues with data quality, and it focuses entirely repression of journalists and the media. It will be heavily distorted anywhere there is prevalent self-censorship.
Plenty of African ones none the less, Botswana, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal.
I think what you mean to say is name a European country that wasn't doing all that stuff, because most of the world wasn't. I can name a European one actually, Ireland.
That last bit doesn't sound so great to the non-US ear. Immigration, seriously? Ask MLK or Mahmoud Khalil about free speech. Democracy in America is a whole long conversation, but let's say it's at best of debatable quality.
As far as deporting visa seekers who lied on their forms and are shilling agitprop for terrorist organizations? sure.
Ireland wasn't a country until what, 1916 or something. That's like saying the Czech Republic never invaded anyone. It's not quite clear it was due to any moral high standing, obviously when you're not in any position to do so it's easy to say you never did. What Ireland did excell at was terrorism, (er, anti colonialism) similar to the early anti-British forces in Jewish Palestine, although you wouldn't know it since the IRA went off to train in Iran.
The entitlement in that statement is jaw-dropping. No, no one needs to run the world.
And I definitely, definitely can compare US actions to Hitler and Stalin. Vietnam alone, over fifty years ago, ignoring everything that's gone on since was 1.4 million deaths, more than Auschwitz, about a third of the Holodomor.
In the 20th century, leaving aside WWI and WWII, America fought its native population, and in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Lao, Indonesia, Lebanon, the Congo, Bolivia, Cambodia, Granada, Libya, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.
These are troops on the ground wars, in the twentieth century alone, which are a matter of public record. We're not even at the War on Terror, small scale secret stuff, or counting the viscous regimes the US has propped up. Or sanctions, or internal repression, lynching, assassinations and the like.
We don't have a body count as the US stopped counting in Vietnam, but I'd wager if we took all the deaths for which the US is directly responsible, it outstrip would outstrip Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined by an order of magnitude.
[Breathes] To the initial point, and speaking from somewhere where one's political views can definitely get one locked up. The (debatable) free speech of Americans means nothing to those not protected by US law, which is most of the world.
The American human rights record may look passable from the inside, but from the outside it's just another monstrous empire.
Previous to the current unipolar hegemony of the US, it was the bipolar days of the US and USSR, otherwise known as the Cold War. That gave us Vietnam, Afghanistan part 1, Korea, and the Greek, Lebanese, Nicaraguan, Angolan civil wars. Before that it was a multipolar system of competing empires, fighting and carving up sections of the globe, which gave us both world wars, and countless wars before that. Unipolar hegemony provides stability and reduces interstate violence. The idea that Russia, China, and the EU competing for power and influence is a better situation does not ring true for me. The war in Ukraine is the first major interstate territorial grab since the end of the Cold War, and that is only the beginning in a multipolar world.
Unipolarity has however also seen considerable brutality, in the places the empire cares about (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) and the places it doesn't, like Rwanda.
My point was made in frustration at the flippancy of the parent comment. The attitude that "someone has to run the world so it might as well be us" is precisely the source of the misery that the US, and every other empire, has inflicted on the world. It's a justification for untold evil and had to be challenged.
I'd further argue that the war in Ukraine isn't the first interstate territorial land grab, far from it. What else was the War on Terror?
The main characteristic of the (pre-Trump) US empire is that it doesn't incorporate territories, it plants bases and friendly governments. With varying degrees of success.
We should probably view these in context to alternatives. Just looking at Afghanistan, the 20 year “War on Terror” is estimated to have killed approximately 200,000 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In contrast to the Soviet Afghan War, which was half a long, but resulted in between 1.2 and 2 million people killed, an order of magnitude more bloody.
Your comparison of the US and “every other empire” and equating Ukraine to the War on Terror is the same lack of context argument. The US “soft empire” of economic pressure, military protection, and clandestine regime change is not comparable to empires that literally would invade, conquer, and rule over other countries. The US does not own land in Afghanistan, did not annex and take control of oil or other natural resources in Iraq. Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it is equivalent to other bad things and I think it is very clear that the US has been much “less bad” than the previous alternatives.
The notion that it's any better than a hypothetical does not address the core point that the US government, has in actuality caused more suffering, to more people, in more countries, over a longer period of time than any other since the end of WW2.
I don't want to see another empire, but the world won't be sorry to see the back of the US.
Lets look at that.
>Vietnam alone, over fifty years ago, ignoring everything that's gone on since was 1.4 million deaths
This ignores that the USSR was on the other side of this war, so those deaths are shared equally.
>Cuba, Nicaragua, Korea, the Congo, Cambodia, Lao
These are all Cold War proxy wars with the Soviet Union, a direct result of duopolistic fighting.
> the former Yugoslavia
The Yugoslavian wars were internal/civil wars over nationalism and involved extensive ethnic cleansing. The US stepped in and ended the wars after a fairly short bombing campaign.
>We don't have a body count as the US stopped counting in Vietnam, but I'd wager if we took all the deaths for which the US is directly responsible, it outstrip would outstrip Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined by an order of magnitude.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward is estimated to have caused 30 to 45 million deaths. Stalin’s Great Purge murdered between 700,000–1.2 million. Stalin also forcibly deported 15 million people as part of his Dekulakization, and cause 20 million deaths total. This claim that the US has killed orders of magnitude more people has no basis in fact.
A majority of the wars were proxy wars, and as horrible as they were, they were less destructive than wars of conquest they replaced. The Napoleonic wars killed 6.5 million with muskets and cannons. Meanwhile, the Iraq war, the worst US war since the fall of the Soviet Union, resulted in less than a third of the deaths in Korean or Vietnam wars.
Listing the United States Superpower misdeeds only sound horrible when you ignore the context of what the other Superpowers were doing. At it ignores the amount of violence in a unipolar US world compared to duopolistic and multipolar worlds.
What would have happened if the US hadn't entered WWII or hadn't remained in western Europe to stop the Soviets, or hadn't responded to the invasion of South Korea?
Presumably, someone or something besides what we politely call liberal democracy would be running those places, mmm? Probably in the manner in which either Germany or the USSR was run at the time, or in which North Korea is run today?
Perhaps after murdering all the intellectuals and landowners and shop owners, they would have come to some phase of neo-communist authoritarian capitalism like Vietnam or China now, (or if the Nazis had won, maybe their kids would have agitated for free speech and minority rights!) although it's debatable whether a Stalinist or Maoist country could get there without an evil capitalist villain to push it toward perestroika.
I'm not defending America sending troops hither and yon to defend banana companies.
But you say it's breathtakingly entitled to simply state that someone is going to run the world, and I think it's just a plainly obvious fact. By someone, hopefully you understand that I mean a polity and not a person, and ideally a group of nations with a commitment to the rule of law and civil rights. That would be as good as it has ever gotten in the long dark history of the world.
A US-led unipolar world existed between 1989 and 2025. Multipolarity is the norm, even the British empire was truly top dog for like 50-100 years at best.
Attempts to control the world are what lead to the sort of acts of barbarism, exemplified by the US, that are the subject of this conversation.
The US is, once more, the greatest human rights abuser in living memory, in large part because it believed it should run the world.
The main learning from WWII, which America has consistently eroded over its period at the helm is that on a global scale, multi-state governance based on mechanisms like the UN, the international criminal court etc should be the mechanism for global governance. Not some state with a manifest destiny complex's self interest.
The UN is not for “global governance”, it is to prevent the nuclear holocaust that would be WWIII by giving super powers a place to resolve conflicts. The international court at the Hague is only able to try war criminals, for example from the Yugoslav Wars, because the countries were not powerful enough to just ignore it. Just because we were able to try and convict Slobodan Milošević, doesn’t mean that China or Russia would ever extradite a former head of state for trial.
I said to him: "America is just as bad as China! We're becoming the same thing!" This was during the Iraq war.
He stopped me short. He said, "no you cannot compare them, at all, ever. You don't understand. I went to school at [ivy league college]. America is still a democracy. You have no idea how dangerous it is in China."
He was right. I didn't...I was a spoiled kid with good intentions, and no understanding of how much evil there was in the world. You don't have the reference point of experiencing pure evil either to say what you're saying.
America is a liberal western democracy. Just because you disagree with the democracy of China does not make it true.
You know in Tibet, 90%+ of people still speak their native language. Do you know how many indigenous people in Hawaii or the continental US speak their native language? Not close to the same.
I am Muslim. I see what the west does to Muslims. I have looked into Xinjiang. If Xinjiang was near Europe or in America, the Muslims would’ve been genocided.
Money is a credit. The US didn't get away with anything. Being a reserve currency has its advantages but the US is holding these liabilities with assets inside the country itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_inter...
I can easily see why Rubles would have been unacceptable several decades ago, but nowadays with the speed of financial markets why not set the price in the seller's currency and at payment time the buyer can trade enough of their currency for the seller's currency on the currency markets to get the payment?
Consider a country that has a large trade imbalance—they import a lot of goods and have very few exports. When a business in that country tries to import goods, say from the Philippines in Pesos or from Germany in Euros, the business will have to go to a forex markets and sell their local currency to buy the foreign currency.
Who’s going to take the other side of that trade? Normally, if a country exports a lot of goods, then foreign businesses will need to buy the country’s local currency to pay for them, and that provides a market for exchanging Pesos and Euros for the local currency. But the country doesn’t export very much, so other businesses in the Philippines or the Eurozone don’t have much use for the business’ local currency, and that means that there isn’t a large market of people selling Pesos or Euros to buy the local currency.
This example is a bit of an edge case where this fictional country runs a trade deficit with all of its trading partners. In reality, you’ll likely have a trade deficit with some partners and a surplus with others. If you decide to denominate some of your international trade in US Dollars, then you’re able to use the excess dollars coming in to your country from your exports to finance your imports. It’s a lot easier than hoping that you can sell enough of your local currency or the currencies of the countries you’re exporting to to buy enough of the currencies of the countries you’re importing from.
In some ways it’s similar to the hub-and-spoke model of airlines. If you want to get from small town A to small town B, there might not be enough traffic in both directions to warrant a direct flight. But if there’s a hub X, then there might be enough traffic between A and all the other flights into X to make it worthwhile to fly from X to B and vice versa. There might not be enough balanced trade between two small countries for there to be a deep market in their currency pair, but if you have both imports and exports denominated in US Dollars then you can generate an internal market in your country for exchanging your local currency for USD.
Supposedly Zimbabwe's new currency ZiG is gold based. Not sure how many people would trust them though. They don't have the best experience with currency...
Suppose a British company imports tea from Sri Lanka and Kenya, blends and packages it, and exports it to retail chains in multiple countries. If all the buyers pay in the same currency used to pay the suppliers the British company does not have to convert more to GBP than required to meet its costs (and profits!) so loses less on converting currency at all. The usual currency used for this is USD.
So rather than:
customers currencies -> GBP -> suppliers currencies
we have customers currencies -> USD -> suppliers currencies.
Edit: I have not explained very well in the bit immediately above. The point is that the British company will not need to convert the currency at all as they will be paid in USD and will pay in USD. In most countries you get better rates converting to USD, and its easier to hedge this way. Even more so if there is a longer supply chain as then you get
A's currency -> B's currency -> C's currency to D's currency
vs
A's currency -> USD -> D's currency.
There are a few wrinkles on this in that customers may already have USD accounts, and suppliers might keep some money in USD, but obviously customers will be paid by their customers in their own currency, and will pay their staff and most other costs in their own currency.
But I also wonder what's wrong with other currencies and why they are not used more often.
But of course, current US move will greatly help recent Russian efforts in persuading other countries to switch the trade from US-controlled dollars.
[1] https://www.asianews.it/news-en/Delhi-pays-for-Russian-oil-i...
I think that they are less stable and more controlled by their countries of origin. The US has, relative to the rest of the world, an exceptionally stable political system, little control over the dollar, and a huge economy.
In short: when two non us countries trade, eg., oil they settle on USD.
So for south Africa to buy oil from Kuwait, they need USD.
And you are more than welcome to use the internet if there are terms you don't understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodollar (Edit: I see you found d the article, will leave the link for other who are in doubt :) )
They are different concepts.
If I'm Romanian and my currency is leu (RON) and you're Mexican and your currency is pesos (MXN), you don't want my RON since you can't use it for anything except for imports from Romania and I don't want your MXN since I can only use it for imports from Mexico.
If we both agree on USD, I can go to any other country which wants USD (all of them) and buy whatever I want.
You can't inflate your currency to payoff a debt that's due in in a different currency. As soon as you inflate your currency, the exchange rate changes.
That isn't how it works. You issue bonds, denominated in your own currency, and promise to pay the bearer of the bonds a coupon (interest) and repay the full amount (in USD) at the end of the bonds life.
Unless I misunderstood what you're saying.
I don't think this is true. The US issues currency in two forms:
1) Deflating dollars
2) Treasury notes
At the time you've issued a T-bill worth $1B, the effect is pretty similar to printing $1B. If interest rates are in-line with inflation, it's a safe way to maintain foreign reserves. If interest rates are higher -- long-term, the US has a problem, and if they're lower, the foreign government has a problem.
But issuing treasury notes is not too dissimilar from printing physical dollar bills.
Trump doesn't really know what he's doing. He surrounded himself with yes-men that know perfectly not to contradict him.
The global Dollar order was built to American advantage. Trump is dismantling it for no reason. If the dollar order crumbles, the US will discover it has much lower productivity.
There is no American exceptionalism: it's just Dollar exceptionalism. No Dollar, no exceptionalism.
But yeah, surprises can happen so interesting times.
Why are you making it sound like EU is a third world country? Are you aware that living standards are higher in many European countries than the US, right?
If we measure the total pie then its much smaller in Europe than in the U.S (I mean total wealth/gdp per capita). Only small countries like Norway or Switzerland have high gdp, in France or Germany its almost 50% lower than in the U.S.
Now the pie does not distribute equally in the U.S that's true, but still, there are tons of millionaires in the U.S and I mean pretty regular people (doctors, finance, software devs etc) that had they lived in Europe they would have been comfortable and nothing more. think something like 100k Euro a year (at best) instead of 3-5 times as much which is what they make in the U.S. If the U.S loses reserve status there just won't be enough money to go around for those salaries, or if there will there will be a horrible inflation, either way it just wont be sustainable.
P.S - lots of middle class people in the so called rich European countries like Germany or the Netherlands cannot afford heating anymore. So no, it is definitely not third world but its also not particulalrly rich. The main advantage though is Europe has mostly free healthcare and the U.S is an absolute mismanaged mess in that regard.
But it is certainly the case Trump is trying to bring US income down to something closer to EU levels, which will hopefully cause Congress to get its spine back.
The UK is reconsidering. If the bloody UK is not confident, who else would be? They might be too tight inside for now, but that is a strategic weakness and it will only go one way. Short of the US making it a satellite, it will only loosen.
Why do you think that the standard of living would become better after losing reserve?
On the contrary, it most definitely did come around twice (hence the 2), and those same geographic advantages are still at play, barring thermonuclear war. It wasn't pure chance that Europe combusted in WW2, Europe had been on fire off and on for hundreds of years. Its geography just lends itself to large scale conflict.
The recent period of peace is an exception, but it's not the first exception and there's good reason to suppose this one won't last forever either.
And not sure how this will play out long term, I don't get an impression that USA states are so aligned on everything.
You can't really compare a period of 160 years to a period of 80, especially given that there's war in Europe once again so the streak is already broken.
80 years is actually shorter than the gap between the Napoleonic wars and WW1 (~100 years), and only represents one generation that lived and died without a local war. On the other hand, 160 years out of 249 is 64% of the existence of the US spent in one continuous period of no widespread local conflict, and represents 5 generations that were born and died without any war on their doorstep. How is that an exception?
The point was that armed conflicts also happened on North American soil (even if consider only USA soil) for long time, so not so different for what happened in Europe. The last period of peace is as much an exception for one as it is for the other given a significant part of the history of the continents.
Also, if we think of countries, there were various European countries that did not participate in or had fights on their territory, during neither WWI or WWII (Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain) and some of those did not have a war on their soil for similar as USA ...
But... it's not. 160 years of straight uninterrupted time without total war out of 250 makes no-total-war the norm, not the exception. >50% of the last 250 years have been spent in one continuous period of people not having to wonder if bombs would be falling on their heads today.
That's totally different than Europe, whose longest gap between total war was the 100-year gap between Napoleon and WW1.
> Also, if we think of countries, ... some of those did not have a war on their soil for similar as USA
Yes, but those are each the size of a US state, so unsurprisingly didn't lead to them taking the place of world superpower.
If you're going to be criticizing my argument it would be helpful to keep in mind that I was replying to this:
> But a large degree of the exception was being excepted from being blown to smithereens during WW2, which is the kind of opportunity that doesn't usually come around twice.
You're taking things in totally different directions that aren't relevant to the question of how often the US will continue to be the largest Western country with no threat of total war on domestic soil.
Your choose to mention arbitrarily 250 years. I see no reason for that, as there were things happening on the same soil before those 250 years.
> That's totally different than Europe
Europe is not a country, as mentioned not all Europe had the same conditions.
> that aren't relevant to the question of how often the US will continue to be the largest Western country with no threat of total war on domestic soil.
This started about "excepted from being blown to smithereens during WW2, which is the kind of opportunity that doesn't usually come around twice.". Nowadays, some countries in Europe do have nuclear weapons which reduces somehow the possibility to be the only ones blown up. If a nuclear power is hit by nukes, it will retaliate automatically hitting the complete list of enemies.
I think we both exposed our arguments and as we don't seem to be inclined to take into account each other analysis (the 250 years, Europe as a country, risks of current conflicts, etc.) will not add others comments - we can agree to disagree. I still learned various things I did not know before so it was a useful conversation.
For future reference, it makes for much easier reading if you just reply to me instead of editing your comment to respond. This isn't a Notion doc, it's a forum, and I'm not leaving feedback on an artifact, I'm engaging you in a discussion.
There is a _2_ in WW2 :)
Sadly looking at history these "opportunities" come around quite regularly.
Stephen Miran is believed by some to be the "mastermind" behind this. I'm not sure Trump has ever had a singular original idea.
Might have been the case some many years ago. Not anymore with many nations not all that far behind.
Nothing has changed. The dollar simply has no alternatives. The EU? After the freezing of Russian assets? Uncompetitive. BRICS? Even worse, you have one dictator literally controlling all monetary policy. Gold and bitcoin are too volatile.
The American action doesn’t follow a discernible strategy other than the fantasy that we can somehow “win” every trade relationship. That’s why you see massive taxes on poor countries we buy a lot of raw materials from - Madagascar can’t afford to buy the kind of expensive goods we primarily make, but we love to buy vanilla, so that trade “deficit” is both voluntary and to our mutual benefit.
Trust the experts: America will be poorer because of these tariffs.
Euro? - Nowhere near as stable as the dollar, and some quite shaky fundamentals and history? Yen? Pound? Swiss Franc?
I suspect Yuan will be unpalatable.
Pound is about 5% if I remember correctly, which is a higher weighting than the Euro for trade:reserve holding ratio.
Whatever basket we come up with has all the same properties that cause the Euro to not displace USD but worse. Much worse.
No government could benefit from manipulating it. How cool is that ?
Apart from having access to cheap energy which is collocated with... specific geographic features like geothermal / hydro energy which not all countries have access to.
Who keep it stable ? Well, who keeps gold stable ? Once an asset becomes the reserve asset, it becomes the standard and other things are priced in that unit, or in units derived from it (here's a kilogram of beef, I'll sell it to you for 2 British pounds which are worth x units of reserve asset)
But maybe you're talking about the stability of its inner properties (its supply, for instance). That for sure is not as stable as gold's. But is its distributed consensus stable enough ? That's a good question. So far, so good.
China has repeatedly tried to activate a consumption economy (like the US) but the Chinese just save and buy real estate, in part because there is no retirement benefits so they have to self-fund that.
So what currency? Currently, there is no viable alternative to the US dollar. It is backed by the largest economy in the world AND the US military.
You might find people who talk about BRICS like it's a real thing. It is not. It's just a group of randomly selected countries meant to sound nice (literally, South Africa is only there for the S sound) with no unified policy or currency.
It's not the euro either. Europe ultimately is still dependent on US defence and beholden to US foreign policy.
https://www.cfr.org/blog/what-chinese-pension-system-and-why...
Source? Pretty sure BRICS is comprised of the largest regional economies that specifically aren't in the first world, that make for useful alliances for Russia & China specifically.
Africa for a long time didn't have any serious economic contenders for something like BRICS other than South Africa. Nowadays Nigeria is a closer contender on the continent. And of course you have long histories of South African politicians having spent their time in exile during Apartheid in places where they learned to call each other "comrade" even to this day in their political parties. It's not an out of the blue arrangement.
Brazil as far as I'm aware seems to be by far the most economically active in South America too?
India seems like third fiddle to Russia & China in this arrangement as a large economy in Asia.
Framing this as purely a win for China and Russia is very partisan, this has potential for all non-US countries to get away from under US thumb long term and at least for that we should be grateful to mr. Trump, from his foreign policy it seems like he is not interested in those games as he views them a net loss for US.
And the Greenland situation is showing us exactly what happens when you position yourself as leech on US military/NATO.
There were a number of occasions in the 50s to 70s when the US stepped in directly to neuter world-leading aerospace projects in the UK, forcing the UK to buy from the US instead.
Virtually all of the cost of the UK's Trident deterrent goes to the US.
And it would be unwise to write off the EU, especially now there's a mass exodus of researchers from the US.
Exactly, and with the recent moves Trump administration is directly calling out EU to arm - so a good development in my book.
It's not only that
Outsource defense to USA
Outsource production to China
Make yourself critically dependent on raw materials from Russia.
I'm all in favor of Europe merging more tightly, scale brings a lot of benefits - moves Trump is making are forcing EU members in this direction where they otherwise wouldn't go so easily for petty interests.
To add to this as an EU citizen, try and buy any good from the US as a private EU citizen: not only will you be visited with a bill for 25 percent of what you paid, you will also pay a truly staggering "handling fee" to essentially state-sponsored grifters (here in Denmark called "Told") that will ensure you never buy anything from the US again.
The US had de minimis allowing US citizens to buy most anything they could imagine from abroad without additional fees on import, which Trump has now thrown out the window, but I can't help but feel we're getting our just desserts here.
This is exactly right and it is insane that people don't see this. The dysfunction that Pax Americana has inflicted upon Europe must go away. A continent that cannot defend itself is not a sovereign continent.
I know squabbling is the norm for European countries but I feel there are some recent big own goals. Crazy how we can't get our crap together in such times. (Crazy opinion: UK needs to be in the EU again to be the grown up in the trio of UK, France and Germany)
I'm not sure I know what you mean. Do you mind elaborating?
What a completely baffling statement. It's like saying the left arm should be grateful that the right arm cut itself off of the body because now the left arm has to strengthen itself. Sabotaging the alliance system that has prevailed since World War II leaving both Europe and the United States more dangerously exposed and compromising the safety of our shared democratic values that were once the bedrock of our alliance.
It's so obviously catastrophic that I can't fathom how someone would try to portray this as a win other than out of an appetite for a JV debate team sophistry. Europe is banding together not out of positive diplomatic achievements, but in the same sense that they would band together if a meteor is headed toward Earth and you're asking us to thank the meteor.
EU and US are not two hands of one body.
The EU is not worried about Germany re-arming, as the world has changed dramatically since WW2 and we have much stronger bonds in Europe than we did when Nazi Germany was around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Germa...
https://historyguy.com/How_Many_Wars_Were_Fought_Between_Fra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
The US rearmed Germany immediately after WW2 to be a buffer against an invading USSR.
We literally put Nazis back into command as long as they were willing to fight the Russians again.
Nobody in NATO was ever afraid of a militarized Germany, except maybe Germans.
Europeans you talk about see Russia as a threat. They are not fascists themselves, so Germany having to arm itself more because Russia just got new ally is not a good news.
So when you get other people paying your defense bill, don't be surprised when your territory gets annexed and you get left out of the conversation on the Ukraine issue ?
In my opinion Trump is trying to do everything he said he would in his campaign, he is trying to get the war in Ukraine over ASAP and be the peace bringer.
Even in the leaked Vance messages you saw his view on Europe, which I have to agree with in that case. They feel like they are getting screwed in the EU-US relations and they are looking to pull support, ignoring what the OP said about them being the reserve currency/global police. I guess they see that as a bad deal.
I think big picture Trump sees Russia as a regional player and China as US main rival so he doesn't really care about pushing Russia or "winning" in Ukraine. The minerals deal looks like he wants to show he got something for the money spent compared to Biden.
None of that has anything to do with tariffs.
Need I remind you that Angela Merkel set the stage for all these Russia moves by building german "green transition" on Russian "green gas" ?
From what I'm seeing in Trump moves he doesn't care about Ukraine or Russia much other than showing his supporters how he ended the war that "Biden let happen" according to him. And the minerals deal to show he got their money back that Biden was giving away for free. Not really seeing any Russia alliance other than not buying into the Ukraines vision for the outcome of the war.
Trump who openly admires Putin. His latest moves were literally trying to steal from Ukraine with nothing in return. Who even declared America free from Russian meddling.
They are just not like the guy who tried to extort the Ukraine to hurt his political ennemies, they are not openly praising Putin, they are not giving concessions to Putin ... while lying on TV in front of Ukrainian president ... and then having complete meltdown when he factually corrects you
Like common ... Merkel and Trump are here completely uncomparable.
It might be technically true in some circumstances, but I still don't want some jackass burning my house down thanks, I like my house. That's why I live there.
At this point, who is *not* America's enemy?
I think his (and much of the far right's) mind is characterized by:
- a deep incuriosity and unwillingness to learn about the world
- extreme overconfidence in his own judgment
- an understanding of the world as being pervasively zero-sum (shared with Putin); your loss = his win
- obsessive preoccupation with the dynamics of humiliation: he feels an extreme need to be perceived as strong and to humiliate his enemies, and he greatly fears being humiliated
I feel like these characteristics explain most of his policy. The idea of tariffs arises from his zero-sum mindset: the only way to gain is by making someone else lose. This is of course factually wrong, but he's too incurious to learn from history or economics. And, of course, he's massively overconfident, so the thought that someone else could know better does not occur to him. And once the ball is rolling, his fear of humiliation will ensure that he has to stay the course. His perceived enemies (which is everyone) have to come crawling to his throne, begging to have their tariffs reduced while praising his brilliant policies, and then he might consider it. So if that doesn't happen, his only options are (a) perpetually retaliating with ever-increasing tariffs, disregarding the consequences entirely; or (b) capitulating in the trade war (lowering or abolishing tariffs) while not admitting that it's a capitulation ("don't worry, my brilliant policy fixed the mass influx of fentanyl and illegal immigrants from Canada, so now we can drop the tariffs on Sri Lanka" or something similarly incoherent).
Due to lack of adversity, his theories have never been tested, only reinforced. He thinks he’s been flying the plane his whole life when really it’s been on autopilot.
People are arguing about the economic rationale here and forgetting the philosophical.
They’ve broadcast a desire to send as much of the world to a new “dark age” as possible so they can sweep in and “save it”, reforming it as they desire. Vis a vis Prospero
That basically pushed the belief that if you believe something enough the universe will make it so, such as 'I won in 2020'.
Problem is, reigning in wages for labor after decades of encouraging rampant consumerism and being in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis especially for housing seems like a political earthquake in the making.
Like many of Trump's ideas, maybe they could work if carefully managed over a long period of time so as to give the economy time to readjust but these are not careful managers and patience is not their virtue.
> Problem is, reigning in wages for labor after decades of encouraging rampant consumerism and being in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis especially for housing seems like a political earthquake in the making.
My guess those people are fine with basically converting most of the American labor force into indentured servants but normally politicians wouldn't go for it. Trump probably assumes he is immune to any reaction, let's see.
Many factory blue collar jobs left the US two decades ago and most of those aren’t coming back yet somehow Trump is infatuated with this idea too.
There's no reason to believe that Russia will not continue to be a declining, stumbling, brain-drained backwater hawking a nuclear arsenal over its current borders, Belarus, and The People's Freest and Greatestmost Republic of Donetsk-Luhansk.
If I understand Trump correctly he wants a weaker U.S dollar to make American exports more attractive. I'm not sure though he wants it to become THAT weak that its on longer the reserve currency. However, simply abandoning the Dollar will prove quite difficult for many countries because there is no clear alternative (the Euro perhaps but it has a tiny market share currently) and also I'm certain Trump will threaten to remove American military support from anyone who dumps the Dollar - so Europe will probably stay, Australia, Canada, Saudi and quite a few more.
The EU would need to issue eurobonds, and that also seems unlikely.
But then this whole decade has been one unlikely thing after another, so who knows?
Europe already has the mindset US military support is no longer a given. Europe is already re-arming. I wonder if additional threats by the Trump administration are going to make much of a difference. Even though it will take atleast half a decade to re-arm the main adversary, Russia, is currently in no shape to launch any kind of new offensive against a European country.
> I'm not sure though he wants it to become THAT weak that its on longer the reserve currency.
Intentions aside, with big moves like these the question will be how much control he has over what happens next.
As you said it will take at least half a decade (which sounds quite optimistic to me actually to go from barely any forces at all to independence) and then there are many more unsolved questions like where does Europe get all its energy from - Russia again? It will have to be a mix of U.S LNG and the rest I suppose from Arab/African countries. Or you could be right , and everyone will dump the USD - I think not though. Europe isn't in good shape as it is, I'm expecting more carefulness going forward.
BTW - I'm not advocating for anything here, I have no personal skin in the game and I think Trump is a horrible bully. I'm just not certain he's a complete idiot yet.
But then they sell it back. What you’re describing is not a trade deficit. To produce trade deficits they need to actually trade with the US. Buying forex does not do that.
> If trade stops occurring in US Dollar, which is a consequence of the stated goal of our current ruling regime, that would be the coup de grace on this country's hegemony. It is the definitive end to it, and the birth of Chinese hegemony.
Nobody will use Chinese currency because it doesn’t float and it’s subject to tight capital controls. Nobody in their right mind would switch to that from outside of China.
You can argue that China could become a hegemony anyway, but that is because everyone wants to trade with them, not because they want to use their currency in 3rd party transactions.
Of course that umbrella could soon be gone, so it would be a moot point
People are coming out of the 90s mindset where the US was substantially more important than its competitors. It was easily worth paying for US protection then because it was obvious the US could back it up with muscle. Now the calculation is a lot less clear.
So it doesn't cost the US anything.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
It also is meant to keep American industry active (to some degree) in case it is needed.
The Europeans couldn't deal with a few land pirates practically in their backyard.
The US isn't sending sad cases over to Japan to cash welfare checks.
It doesn’t matter which currency you pick in that world apart from capital control. As long as it’s reasonably stable you flow through it with many billions of dollars a day with ease. The conversions are effectively free because the spreads are tiny.
Using the US dollar to trade between two countries that are not to US does nothing to the the currency. It just shifts a deficit.
Regardless of the response from China, America is showing that it is irrationally willing to cede its incredible advantage for no decipherable reason beyond that some logarithmic curve of population idiocy has crossed the already absurd hockey stick of its own national wealth. It's a realtime lesson in the ancient rule dating back to the fertile crescent, that civilizations destroy themselves from within before they're conquered from without.
These markets are extremely liquid and the longer term trends of the USD value are irrelevant because players can move in and out so quickly. They can even preemptively take short positions or buy options on futures markets to completely derisk an event while holding USD.
This is why “petrodollar is good” analysis in modern forex is completely off-base. At this point it’s become a great flag to indicate someone who doesn’t understand forex and trade at all.
Of all of the things valuable to the US, the petrodollar is about as far down as renaming the Gulf of Mexico the gulf of America.
Also us trade is not bilateral.
The usd that are exported from the US, is not used to buy gods from the US. They are used to buy gods from other countries.
However, the OP was wrong about the fact that China will become a hegemony, for reasons like you mention, and so what’s likely happening isn’t the change of hegemony, it’s the beginning of the end of the era of the American Empire and to a likely a multi polar world. It’s going to take another world war, in some form, to create enough of a vacuum to give us another superpower/hegemony like we have with the US currently.
In any case, I think we're seeing the beginning of the Chinese century.
2) Failure to send Nixon to prison.
3) Loss of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan.
4) Failure to send a whole list of Reagan's folks (and maybe Reagan) to prison over Iran-Contra and other misdeeds. And those same names keep popping up, making things worse for the '90s and '00s. This was a huge mistake.
5) The Democrats totally surrendering economics policy to a newly farther-right [edit: more accurately, a set of policies championed by a certain set of pro-capital right wing interests—we recently saw this totally overthrown by right-populist policy, when Trump took over the party in 2016, which was the most remarkable development in US party politics since the '80s] Republican view, in the '80s, and adopting basically the same policy. This set the stage for the current backlash, because this all-in neoliberal shit was never popular, but persisted because both parties supported it.
6) Loosened media reach ownership rules in the early '00s.
7) CU
8) Nobody at any point finding a way to dismantle the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society (if you're wondering "how", it seems the NRA had been doing all sorts of illegal shenanigans for a loooong time—I'd be absolutely floored if these two don't have some big ol' skeletons hanging around)
9) We all watch a coup attempt live on TV (re-watch some of the news footage if your memory is fading, it remains shocking) and then the Biden administration dicked around during the six months or so when it might have been possible to go after the leaders of it.
10) The Internet putting intense pressure on the news media, leading to even more profit-focus than before (and see also the loss of various controls above) with nothing done to try to mitigate that.
11) Extreme centralization of control of the narrative online under a handful of platforms (and the narrative is "whatever gets us more eyeballs", see again #11) and nothing done to fix that.
From within. Make no mistake: whatever influence has been or is behind, this is entirely driven by USA citizens.
My anarchist wish is that we figure out that large states have large benefits but also very large downsides. A country as big as many Western countries have simply no business existing, as they are unworkable. How is it realistic to have a functional government for 300 something millions souls and an area the size of the United States?
I don't know why you would single out western countries when China and India make most of them look like tiny.
This was done by Trump, nobody else.
Here is an explanation of what it means:
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/trivia/buck-stops-he...
> if foreign governments spend money, they can elect their preferred candidates.
> We institute regime change in other counties, and I see no reason to believe we are immune.
Do we really need such conspiracy theories? There's a much more mundane explanation, which is well-documented:
"Trump’s Love for Tariffs Began in Japan’s ’80s Boom" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/politics/china-trade-d...
"Allies and historians say that his admiration of tariffs is one of his longest and most deeply held policy positions."
In the 1980s, Russia still had a state-run socialist economy, and China was just beginning to grow (albeit quickly) after its 1978 economic reforms. These countries did not purchase Donald Trump's policies.
If you're concerned about foreign influence and foreign money in American elections, you should be much more worried about Australian Rupert Murdoch, for example, who founded Fox News, or South African Elon Musk, who just spent a whopping $250 million to elect Donald Trump and is now personally dismantling the US government (although Musk's money didn't help in the local Wisconsin election), or Israel, which has had one of the most powerful and well-financed lobbies in Washington for decades.
Perhaps the world will be better for it in the end, but it's definitely a turning point. A new world order will emerge and America won't be at the helm.
For example, you hear people say that the US invaded Iraq because Iraq was threatening to denominate oil sales in the euro. This particular conspiracy theory used to be more popular ~20 years ago for obvious reasons. Even if true, it's absolutely no threat to the petrodollar. You could sell oil in euros and what would most sellers then do? Immediately convert those euros into USD.
Trade occurs in USD because there's demand for USD not the other way around.
What really underpins the USD is the US military and the US still being the largest economy. So the USD will remain the global reserve currency up until the US collapses and/or another power rises to displace it, which really means the same thing at this point. That might ultimately be China but it's not yet and the Chinese yuan is wholly unsuitable to be a global reserve currency currently.
I imagine the Euro is a contender also even though the EU it's not one homogenous power.
> and the Chinese yuan is wholly unsuitable to be a global reserve currency currently.
Curious why you say this? I was considering holding some EUR and CNY in the event that one of those becomes a replacement for USD
1. Europe is still dependent upon the US military and, as a consequence, is beholden to US foreign policy; and
2. No unified fiscal policy.
As for the unsuitability of the yuan, there are several reasons:
1. The yuan was once pegged to the US dollar. It's now pegged to a basket of currencies instead. This, by definition, makes China a currency manipulator because you wouldn't need to peg the currency otherwise;
2. The yuan is undervalued by this manipulation. It should really be more expensive, making China's exports more expensive. China does this to maintain their export competitiveness. If anything, increased demand for the yuan would be unwelcome as it would increase the pressure to appreciate the yuan;
3. China runs a trade surplus. It's basically inevitable that the country with the reserve currency will run a deficit;
4. The US running a government deficit is actually kind of a good thing for maintaining a reserve currency. China, for example, holds trillions in US government bonds. Do you really think they want to upset that apple cart?
Its also the golden prize for America's victims, it has to be said.
We can't keep propping up the USA as a moral position to aspire to, when that state continually gets away with mass murder and human rights violations beyond the scale of any other peer.
The USA is the worlds #1 funder of terrorism, and violator of international law on the subject of war.
So its not just about 'enemies'. Its really about victims.
But if you want to inform yourself, follow https://airwars.org/ and look for reports on the matter by trusted sources, such as the Physicians for Social Responsibility, which has produced casualty reports for all of America's illegal, heinously irresponsible wars.
This report for example, from 2015, demonstrated the magnitude and extent of the crimes committed by the American people in Iraq alone - and things have gotten a lot, lot worse since then:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/civilian-and-combatant-de...
Acknowledging the mass harm war causes and the role the US has to play in that is absolutely true and valid. Pretending the US is acting egregious in comparison to others and only hyperfocusing on proving "US bad" when someone asks for context of how bad the US is overall doesn't serve anything than show your opinion and lack of willingness to discuss it on open and reasonable terms.
As shown, the US isn't the top or the majority of deaths in war over your chosen time period. Your have provided no actual basis for your claims the US is the worst, let alone the worst "by far".
Either put up facts to attempt to prove your argument or be dismissed as an ignorant troll I'm ok with either outcome.
Have you?
You seem to want to finish this argument without actually looking at any statistics.
"Ignorant troll"? The veracity of your vitriol belies cowardice. You have to be very ignorant to not understand the USA's heinous track record on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and immense violations of human rights around the world. By far, according to much open data on the subject, which I've already provdied - the USA is the worlds worst offender by a huge margin, that isn't even questioned in any sphere other than the utterly ignorant.
How many sovereign nations has the USA demolished since March 2003? Which other nation has demolished as many other sovereign nations since then?
I provided statistics on deaths and put the US in scope, and asked for you to provide proof of your claim the US is singularly the worst offender (its not).
I've not once claimed the US is not bad as you continuously suggest and attack (straw men as usual for trolls). I have simply stated that your claim the US is egregious is naive and myopic. You only prove that by failing to provide any numbers that put the US in context to back your own point.
>Since March 2003
Curious starting point. I tend to take a much longer view, but even within your own cherry picked 10 year window from earlier you are wrong.
The USA has demolished more sovereign states and continues to participate in mass murder, as it has done, since it illegally invaded Iraq on the basis of outright lies and murdered 5% of its population.
Note that the PSR report I quoted earlier was 10 years after the war - the situation has gotten a lot worse since, due to the use of DU in civilian areas.
The USA is by far the worlds biggest war crime-committing nation. No other state comes close. To be ignorant of this, is to be complicit in its continued criminal behaviour.
This is absolutely incorrect by sheer statistics, alone. Anyone making this claim is simply utterly ignorant of the actual statistics, and I challenge you to overcome that personal limitation.
Russia has a long, long way to go to catch up to the +million murders done in Iraq, alone - where the USA has murdered 5% of Iraqs population with its wars (including the continuing deformed baby deaths as a result of the widespread distribution of depleted uranium all over Iraq).
The USA is a major funder and supporter of the mass murder of Gaza - Gaza is just another Mosul, just another Raqqa .. Israel would not be getting away with mass murder if the USA hadn't set the precedent for war crimes and mass murder in multiple other theatres. Russia, too, follows the USA's lead and uses the USA's own prior inculpability for multiple illegal wars to justify its actions.
This is why it is just so dangerous for citizens to allow their nations to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, and allow those politicians responsible for such acts to go unpunished. This is why it is so irresponsible for the American people to allow their nation to degrade the capabilities of the International Criminal Court, and to fail to prosecute their own war criminals.
Because, if you let your nation do it, you are giving carte blanche to any other nation in the world to do it too. And that is precisely why states such as Russia and Israel are wilfully committing mass murder - under the cover of the prior unprosecuted crimes of extraordinary magnitude committed by the American people and their representatives.
If you want to do something effective about Russia and Israel, Americans, you must first prosecute your own war criminals and establish the international precedent for those prosecutions which can be used against Russian and Israeli war criminals, also. Leaving your own war criminals unpunished gives a free ride to all other nations, who will gleefully follow you into the madness - and have done so now, for 25 years of the utterly atrocious "war on terror", in which the American people gave themselves the ultimate right to destroy any state their callous rulling class - factually fundamentalist racists - decides is inferior to their own.
1) Direct combat fatalities (~15% of casualties)
2) Failing to stabilize Iraq post-invasion
3) Enabling conditions for prolonged conflict
However, attributing all excess deaths solely to the US oversimplifies the role of insurgent groups, regional actors, and preexisting sectarian tensions. The invasion’s destabilizing effects created a chain reaction with shared accountability.
Furthermore, calling it murder is disingenuous. Murder requires both premeditation and deliberate intent.
The problem is that internet services are making rich small group of people (owners, software engineers), military production is a niche, so there is a big group of people who lose jobs, are on low paying positions, as being, say, a car factory worker, does not bring enough money. Those people voted Trump, so Trump is trying to solve their issue by bringing back production back to USA, and the way to do this is twofold: make USD weaker and make foreign goods more expensive.
All this was not a problem till early '00, when USA didn't have much competition (basically Western Europe and Japan), but the times has changed and USA is seeing that. BTW this is not a Trump thing, Obama, Biden administrations were also noticing that and taking actions, like (in)famous Obama reset with Russia to be able to expand trade over there. "Pivot" to Asia - failed Biden project of Indo-Pacific, that was supposed to convince Vietnam and others to follow USA job regulations, what would make their products more expensive. Surprisingly, they told Biden to go away...
Another thing is that for years USA was in a sense donating European industry, for instance taxes on European cars in USA were 2%, while taxes on American cars in Europe (that is European Union) were 10%. Trump puts this to an end.
Sure and Europe is not at all donating to US arms industry or to US tech sector? Europe is pretty liberal about letting US dominate those domains inside the EU, without opposing that. Plus in geopolitics it simply follows the US, that's sort of been the deal.
Seems like this US leadership thinks it can both have its cake and eat it.
But devaluation of the currency will hurt people who have savings in this currency, and cause higher inflation, right? On the other hand, paying back loans and mortgages becomes much easier.
You might not see it, and maybe I don’t fully see it either, but as office workers, bureaucrats, and technologists staring at screens all day, we’ve lost sight of the fact that America no longer produces like it used to. Yes, there are still people out there working with their hands, feeding the country, and running small industries. But broadly speaking, the U.S. relies heavily on other countries for complex manufacturing — for actual building. Shipbuilding is just one obvious example. A lot of critical industries have withered to the point where they can't even meet domestic demand, let alone compete globally. Meanwhile, other countries are pushing forward in tech, producing better, more efficient, more productive products — and pulling ahead.
It’s not happening all at once. It’s a slow decay. Generational knowledge industrial skills, trades, machinists are all fading. And when those go, the backbone of resilience and self-sufficiency starts to collapse. A nation that can’t produce can’t stand. Export power becomes a dream.
And I think part of the issue is that we’ve become lazy. People don’t want to work anymore — they want things handed to them. Entitlements, bonuses, luxury homes, multiple cars, the works. But someone has to build all that. Someone has to maintain the food supply. Someone has to assemble the vehicles. Someone has to keep production alive. Yes, technology can help fill gaps, and we’ve done amazing things — and still do — but America’s edge in tech? That’s slipping away. China has surpassed the U.S. in key areas of advanced technologies, auto manufacturing, aerospace, and absolutely obliterating in shipbuilding. U.S. industry? Ashes in many places.
So what’s the answer? Unfortunately, hardship. Nobody likes to say it, but raising prices and tightening the belt forces people to make hard choices. And when that happens, the jobs that matter won’t be office jobs or desk jobs — they’ll be builders, machinists, welders, factory workers. Producers. And those jobs will start commanding the wages. People who’ve been unemployed or living on subsidies will be pushed — or pulled — back into that kind of work. Slowly, painfully, maybe, but steadily. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll rebuild that base. Maybe industry will return. Maybe factories and production will grow again.
That’s the end goal here; even if we don’t like how it’s being done. Even if it’s painful. Even if it doesn’t work the way it’s intended. Because maybe we’re not as strong as we think we are. Maybe we fail. It’s happened before — look at the USSR collapse. It was a fake economy built on fake production and apathy. They endured 20 years of hardship, and they’re still trying to catch up.
So yeah, that’s where I think we’re headed. Is Trump the guy to do it? He’s doing it. Someone had to. Is it the right way? I don’t know. Is it going to work? No clue. Will we succeed? Who knows. Or maybe we just keep punting the problem further down the road; business as usual — until it breaks completely.
But either way, the path forward is either a slow crumble followed by a rebuild, or a brutal reset with the hope of rebuilding something stronger on the other side.
That’s just my two cents.
Now they're run out of jobs to move offshore and they're looking to the government for the next handout. This time, it's by adding a new tax on Americans on what they buy from overseas.
The people to blame for the economic problems are rich Americans, and the solution is to increase taxes on poor Americans, but the story is that the problem is foreign devils and the solution is to make them pay. The misdirection is working and the magic trick is successful.
That’s something I haven’t thought about. Is there a 25% tariff on importing knowledge work? In the consulting world that would make onshore teams more competitive. Well you’d need about a 500% tariff to make it close.
> This time, it's by adding a new tax on Americans on what they buy from overseas.
If adding/increasing tax on product oversees increases the costs of said products, wouldn't American business look to reduce cost by moving back to America?
If I understand correctly that's what Trump is trying to do.
US businesses who offshored all the US manufacturing jobs now have their day of reckoning. The government can't really say, "move your jobs back," without some sort of constitutional change, they can only incentivize businesses do so, ergo tariffs on offshore labor / goods.
Millions of Americans returning to shit tier factory conditions is not a victory.
That said, it's really irrelevant since Trump's current approach isn't looking to support specific industries or outcomes, it's just across the board tariffs on everything. We're not just going to have to build our own ships or cars, but grow our own coffee and bananas. Targeted, strategic tariffs and subsidies on the industries we want to support could be arguable, but this is not that.
Based on what evidence?
"And I think part of the issue is that we’ve become lazy. People don’t want to work anymore"
Americans work more hours per week than a majority of countries. Low-paying factory jobs are off-shored because they're low-paying.
"So what’s the answer? Unfortunately, hardship."
You probably should do more research on the subject, and successful onshoring regimes that have been implemented by other countries. If you, for e.g., determine that America needs to produce a certain quantity of semi-conductors to insulate from various natsec risks, there are ways to tackle that problem and usually they don't involve hoping an onshore industry magically appears because you've haphazardly shivved trade across the board.
It has nothing to do with "people being lazy" and everything to do with poorly-run companies combined with globalization.
This started in the 70s/80s with American auto manufacturers. The Japanese cars were much more fuel efficient and a much more robust build. The line worker wasn't responsible for that, management is.
Then the global free trade / NAFTA in the 90s. Ross Perot was as popular as he was, because a big segment of the US population saw this coming.
Say what you well regarding Trump, he understands this.
Trump is a smart man to spot problems, but he surely didn't know how to do it in a way that doesn't lead to self harm. He crazes for a bombastic firework that demands for all and any attention.
The US version of capitalistic economy has driven its internal inequality to the point the political system can no longer sustain it, while in the meantime, doesn't have an established social safe net, as major European countries have. So the populace elected Trump to root it up.
It is absurd, it is ridiculous, but deep down it is logical. Weird and dangerous time ahead.
I judge things by outcomes, even Trump doesn't lack any credentials.
or, maybe those who voted for him are dumber than him!!
Getting a job, aka campaigning in elections, is very different from knowing how to do the job! During the 2024 campaign, he told everyone whatever they wanted to hear—cheap prices on day 1, a reduction in inflation, home loans, and the end of wars. He fooled and lied to everyone. Burnt by high prices, people trusted him. Sure, he could be called "smart" to con the voters, but still too DUMB to understand how the government works especially in the US. Every day, he picks a new fight with someone :-)
Maybe Dalio is right, but a lot of his data was sketchy [1].
My personal theory is that Dalio somehow benefits from saying nice things about the Chinese regime.
Why is the reserve dollar good for Americans? Arguments in favor of reserve currency status make the U.S. economy seem utterly fake. It’s as if the world is paying us to maintain borders frozen in 1945.
And without fail, it explains the unexplainable. This move is a prime example. This doesn’t help the billionaires in America, it doesn’t help ANYONE in America, but is sure is a massive bailout to a Russian economy that was on the verge of collapse.
This is just one facet of a broader point. When people talk about a "trade deficit" what they are really talking about is what's known in Economics as a "Current Account deficit". When discussing international trade and Balance of Payments, there are two accounts - Current Account (goods and services flow) and Capital Account (asset and liability flow). By definition, the two must net to zero. That's not an equation, it's an identity. If you have a Current Account deficit then you have an equivalent Capital Account surplus. It works in both directions. For example, foreign direct investment into another country in the form of a loan leads to a flow of funds into the country (Capital Account surplus) and then those funds are used to buy things (import) from the first country or other countries, leading to a Current Account deficit.
It is interesting to note that none of this panic applied when US trading partners imposed tariffs on US.
But if this is part of a larger shift in terms of funding the government, I would be somewhat open minded. For instance, if instead of taxing income, we had tariffs that play a role of basically a sales tax, I think that has some benefits. For one, I think tax policy should encourage productive work (income) as opposed to consumption (sales). So a shift from income to consumption taxes would be a positive development. You can make adjustments so that its progressive (i.e. tax credits to cover the first N dollars in consumption tax). The big problem is the geo-political effect less trade might have and the effect on the markets.
The thing is that we don't. That 39% Trump claims Europe is levying on US goods? It doesn't exist. I've heard they include VAT in this which makes no sense because it applies to all goods including those made locally. That is not a trade tariff. It's just internal taxation.
However I've also heard they calculated it with the trade deficit (which in itself makes no sense, it's not a tariff) but in the case of the EU that makes even less sense as Trump always quotes the deficit on goods, but ignores the deficit on services (eg IT) which is highly in favour of the US.
Also when I hear people say "they don't buy American cars in Europe", we do have American brands like Ford and Tesla. Ford just sell smaller models designed for our market here. Those big SUVs and pickups are not suitable for our traffic or environment.
I think you’re spot on about the risks of the tariffs (I’m not really sure where I stand on them today), but your arguments don’t produce this conclusion. China is far more protective of its markets, nobody has or will have any interest in trading in any Chinese currency, and tariffs from not just the US but other nations will continue to exacerbate existing problems at home for China.
Companies like Temu came into existence because global pullback on purchasing Chinese manufactured goods is resulting in job losses, and instead of having factories go under the Chinese government would prefer to sell products that very quickly fall apart or are built extremely cheaply or with very poor environmental practices to at least get some money.
Further, while these tariffs seem questionable and everyone is piling on Trump (which is deserved, with prejudice, in my mind), let’s not pretend that the EU, Japan, and others are saints here. They do enact trade barriers to protect their own domestic industries as well. On the tech side for example there’s simply no argument that the EU is fining US tech companies just because they happened to enact policies and rules that the US companies break all the time. Some portion of that is a shakedown or a form of a trade restriction.
The EU may be awful, Japan may be an unfair partner. But when you play with a handgun and shoot yourself in the foot, that’s on you.
The problem is that countries don't just take the dollars and sit on them. We're on the third iteration of solving this intractable problem:
Try 1 was gold. The US was running out of gold and Nixon had to end redemption of dollars for gold.
Try 2 was assets (think the Japanese buying everything in the 80s). That was unpopular and the Plaza Accords put an end to it with significant damage to the Japanese economy
Try 3 is government debt. But it's the same fundamental problem. The US isn't ever willingly going to give back assets for this debt. Everyone agrees with the polite fiction that the US will and so things are fine. But if they ever expect actual stuff for that debt it will all break down again.
There you go... "Deutsche Bank says risk of a dollar confidence crisis" - https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/deutsche-bank-say...
You've identified a potential severe negative consequence of a change or new policy, but you write as if this is a guaranteed logical corollary and there is no scenario where this consequence does not materialize. This creates an alarmist rather than genuine and analytical tone.
Describing tariffs as a "decapitation strike" feels hyperbolic and even perhaps conspiratorial. Saying this guarantees Chinese hegemony is exaggerated and ignores all the other equally (if not more) significant factors influencing both American and Chinese trajectories. Applying Dalio's broad thesis to tariffs specifically is a stretch -- tariffs may exacerbate tensions Dalio describes, but they aren't necessarily the coup de grace to hegemony.
Basically, you're highlighting real risks and issues, but packaging them in language that overstates their likelihood and doesn't take into account any other factors at play simultaneously. If your goal is to paint a doomsday picture of the future, this works well. If your goal is to understand the impact of tariffs on the world, there's too much emotion and speculation and not enough hard analytical work here.
I think it apt to boil it down to a binary choice: Either we give up our global empire and allow the multipolar paradigm to emerge for the chance at domestic prosperity, or we grip the iron to the bitter end and force the entire country to become the dystopic open-air homeless cities of the west coast.
This is about tearing down a system / world order that a lot of people are angry about, with little thought to how to replace it and make it work for the citizens. The global economy has changed, manufacturing capabilities in the west will never be competitive again for a wide variety of products, and those jobs are not ones that regular Americans want anyway. Just like they don't want the farming jobs that illegal immigrants are doing.
This vision to essentially return America to a idealized view of 1900 is in for a rude awakening.
If they fold and remove tariffs on the US (so the US can drop the tariffs on them) before coming to an agreement because the economical pressure of tariffs is too high, then this will result in the largest market expansion the United States has ever seen.
My point is: yes lots of negatives can happen, but let’s also look at what happens if it works out so we are intellectually honest about what’s going on here.
The issue with this is the "reciprocal" tariffs that were announced are not related in any way to tariffs imposed by other nations. According to the administration, they set the tariff rate for each country as (trade deficit / (imports * 2)). Obviously the country in question cannot undo this even by zeroing all tariffs with the US, because none of this is based on tariff rates.
If I make products better/cheaper than you, I’m going to sell more to you than you are to me.
Ditto if I have some valuable resource you need that represents a large share of my economy. The fact that you need my germanium more than I do doesn’t mean I’m ripping you off.
Those shoes are so popular in America that Americans buy $1 billion of those shoes every year. In order to address the problem as stated, this hypothetical country would have to spend a third of its household income purchasing products produced in some of the highest-cost conditions in the world. To do so, they would have to shut out their local trading partners from whom they currently buy goods at prices they can afford. This would have the effect of making them even poorer.
Does this make any sense?
Also, the administration created the loophole about which you worry by creating a 24% tariff gap between China and the new 10% baseline for most countries.
Part of the problem is that Trumps's definition of tariffs doesn't make any sense. VAT isn't a tariff but according to Trump it is.
Does he seriously expect other nations to just get rid of VAT? Or somehow replace it overnight with some other system all just to appease the US? Because that's the only way you can lower 'tariffs' to zero.
It just won't happen and we'll be in a continual standoff until Trump concedes that trade barriers are not in fact a good thing for anyone. He'll never admit it, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the illusion of a 'deal' is struck in order to save face and reverse this mess once it becomes clear it's not sustainable unless you want to shrink your economy and destroy others at the same time.
That would require other countries trusting the promises of the current administration, yes? How much credibility does the Orange One have on the world stage?
I agree with you that the current situation in the world really benefits the US and the current policies seem to undermine that.
The only way around that is the EUR. Otherwise, most countries have very little connections to one another. Even neighbors will trade with USD and settle in New York.
I have made a post about this after the election that got flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42755700
If you are still unconvinced that big fundamental changes are happening: https://goldprice.org/
I'm not convinced it works like that. When a foreign country buys something from another foreign country using USD, the seller country then receives that USD. The seller country then use those dollars do buy something else from a third country - unless they have imbalanced trade and keep accumulating the dollars, like China does. But, in general case, there's only a need for a limited number of USD in circulation to serve as "working capital" for all foreign exchange. There's no need to keep getting new dollars, as the old ones get recirculated.
As these countries move away from the dollar, there becomes a glut of US dollars in the world, triggering inflation like we have never seen before. Ignoring the barriers to trade that the tariffs represent and what that will do with our productivity. Ignoring the additional cost of an uncertain market future (because all decisions are made from the gut and could change tomorrow). The massive stagflationary impact of foreign countries unloading the 75% of US dollars they hold would effectively kill them US economy. The tariffs wouldn't even matter because you effectively couldn't give US dollars away -- they'd be worthless internationally. No one that is not rich could afford to import anything.
This is called Triffin Dilemma- And in many lies at the core of the most basic question every power in history has faced.
That is- You can either be a Geo Economic Super power or a Geo political Super power, You can't be both at the same. You have to chose to be one. China seems to be chosing the former. USA chose to be the latter, but can't seem to be sure about its choices so far.
If I’m buying 1 barrel of oil for $100, does it matter whether I convert my USD into 150 of this currency or 50 of that currency, according to the current exchange rate, before I pay? I still get 1 barrel of oil, and the seller still received an equivalent to $100 in exchange?
Decapitation Strike seems to be not a general principle that is applying here, but the title of a specific polemic against the Trump administration. Just mentioning for clarity, as it sounded like a general thing warned about in past times that's applicable here.
I think it is misleading to speak in terms of enemies even if that plays to the fears of US isolationists. It is good rhetoric but I think it obscures the truth, There was a time when the stability and strength of the US made the dollar a good choice for friends and enemies alike. The world is changing and the current US administration is accelerating some of those changes. China is going to play an increasing role as the US turns inward but I doubt they will ever replace the US dollar as a reserve currency. The Euro is the second most held currency after the dollar and there are probably a few others ahead of China.
Since trade is conducted largely in USD, that means other governments must purchase USD to trade. This is the core of trade deficits. Foreign countries buy US dollars so they can trade with other people. That guarantees the deficit since they give us something in exchange for USD, which they do not then spend on goods we make.
If you no longer want the trade deficit that means payments of fealty by those who trade in dollars, which countries aren't likely to tolerate, or abandoning the USD as a global reserve currency, which would be disastrous, truly disastrous. Our debts would suddenly become existential because inflating our currency to pay for them could result in functionally not being able to import goods required to run our economy. I don't think many truly understand just how disastrous it will be.
This isn't America's liberation day. This is Russia's and China's liberation day. While America was once able to check their power, America is no longer in a position to do so, we will barely be in a position to satisfy our own military's logistics requirements.
This is a decapitation strike (Timothy Snyder: Decapitation Strike -- https://archive.is/1xkxK) on America by our enemies. It is not only a de facto soft blockade of American trade, but it is an attack on the mechanics of American hegemony. Politicians already ask for money instead of votes or actions. That means if foreign governments spend money, they can elect their preferred candidates. America's own government was a result of french support. We institute regime change in other counties, and I see no reason to believe we are immune.
If trade stops occurring in US Dollar, which is a consequence of the stated goal of our current ruling regime, that would be the coup de grace on this country's hegemony. It is the definitive end to it, and the birth of Chinese hegemony.
Ray Dalio's Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order feels prescient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8