the one thing that the US still has is money. countries want to trade with countries that have money, whether they're trustworthy or untrustworthy, moral or immoral. as long as the US continues to be rich, they'll continue to have good trading relationships. we've all just got to hope that this current trend reverses before the us stops being a rich country.
> It will be a slow, multi-decade process, but it’s probably irreversible at this point.
I don't think any Western democracy can keep up such a project for that long, after the immediate political irritant has disappeared. I mean, FFS, pretty much everything "new" that's people build is dependent on China. Trump is an stupid old man, China is a bigger long-term threat to democracy and is smarter and more strategic.
What I'm saying is: is once Trump leaves office (and especially once he's dead), the process you talk about will almost certainly reverse. It may seem hard to believe in this moment, but people will move on from Trump.
> It will be a slow, multi-decade process, but it’s probably irreversible at this point.
I think it is important to distinguish talk intended to appease the public, that currently is very anti-US, from real policies. For example there is lot of talk about sovereignty in the EU, you can even see lot of that here, but so far no real steps were taken. Globalism cannot be reversed, not without some external factor like global cataclysm. And the public opinion on anything, in the age of Twitter et al, change as often as Trump's proclaimed policies.
Truth is, EU countries have not other potential ally that could replace US, especially among themselves. In Poland some groups dream about European army and French nuclear sharing, when first is pure fantasy, and second is even less reliable that the US one.
You can balance however much you want between US and China, but there may be time when you need to choose. As bad as current state of US is, China is an antithesis to everything EU and its democracies say they stand for.
It's pretty clear that governments engage in such two-sided talk at their peril going forward. This is exactly how you get populism - usually of the far-right variety, with its specific blend of parochialism, jingoism and nihilism.
What will change, however, is no country will build anything new that is entirely dependent on a U.S. entity, and every country will now try to find alternatives to existing dependencies.
It will be a slow, multi-decade process, but it’s probably irreversible at this point.
The problem, from a U.S. perspective, is that 2 decades from now, these decisions might have cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars, but it will largely be impossible to tell because the nature of losses will be in billions of dollars of economic activity that could have been created but were never even conceived, so the alternate path will be impossible to know.