America goes to war with the world

Um. What really got to me this morning was a meme—a screen capture—of a purported tweet on X posted by Eric Trump yesterday afternoon. It was so outrageous I thought it was fake. Turns out it WAS a fake—according to Snopes and Eric Trump himself. The fake stated:


“Any and all who dare to defy the American Golden Age, heed this warning: You WILL lose. Tow [sp] the line, or we WILL run you down! The gloves are off, and we’re not playing around this time. For now, it’s tariffs, but trust me: we can, and will, do SO MUCH WORSE.”

Well even as a fake, as a nervous Canadian, that made an impression. I was sucked in to believing it. After checking it out when I first saw it, it seemed legit. It wasn't. To riff on the old saying: "it was too bad to be true."

The fake X tweet fed on my fears of Trump and his expansionist remarks. The question is, what is this all  about and how did we get here?
 New York Times columnist David Brooks had the best answer, I think, when he went “spelunking” into Trump's mind. It's a good read. Trump really does have a 19th century fixation. He’s obviously not alone.

Much as been written over the past two decades about the decline of the US ‘empire’. Donald Trump has been listening, as have many Americans, both rich and poor. For the second time Trump has vowed to Make America Great Again, in no uncertain terms. So this is a de facto war in which the US will reclaim its position of dominance in the world. The very slogan, ‘Great Again’, admits that America has been in decline for a long time.

Identified as fake by Snopes

We could get into the myriad causes of the actual decline. For the sake of brevity, I’ll settle for a few key observations:


• Beginning in the late 1960s, the US moved from a production economy to a marketing economy.
• The Nixon administration dropped the gold standard, removing tangible backing for the US dollar and allowing the eventual erosion of trust in the dollar as the global standard.
• The American political class, allied with the American business-corporate class, began a process of neoliberalization, deregulating corporate responsibilities and cutting corporate and high net worth personal taxes.
• US corporations began offshoring and outsourcing labour to reduce costs, break unions and increase profits, which led to the rapid decline of America’s industrial production base, and sidelined an entire generation of blue collar workers, eliminating their skills from the workplace.
• Remaining US-based production centred around weapons development and production to ensure the protection of trade routes, foreign resources, and sustainability of a permanent war economy running continuously since the end of the Second World War.
• The US corporate-government duopoly, moved from a consumer marketing model to a financialization model, placing the big banks and Wall St. at the top of the American—and global—economic system, resulting in exponentially escalating personal, corporate and government debt worldwide, which as of December, 2024, stands at $322.9 trillion dollars, outstripping the existing money supply, stock exchange capitalization and cryptocurrency total of $195.3 trillion. In other words, there is 40 percent more debt than actual money.
• Nearly all of the money identified above is virtual. It exists in zeros and ones on computers, and although attached to real, physical securities such as buildings and factories and machines, it can all be wiped out at a stroke, as we all witnessed in 2008, and the effects personal incomes, bankruptcies, et al.—except at the top.
• Finally, the balance of production, innovation and wealth has moved eastward toward China, southeast Asia and now India, making the collective BRICS economy larger than the collective G7 economy (35 percent of global GDP vs. 30 percent). With that economic shift, so shifts the balance of power in the world.

  
The rise of desperation

At street level the American people have been on the receiving end of these changes. Their unions, created to protect their interests, have disappeared, real wages have flatlined since the early 199os, social safety nets and basic infrastructure such as roads and bridges have not improved significantly for five decades.

One simply has to compare US transportation infrastructure with modern China’s. The difference would be shocking to most ordinary Americans, and the private-public health care available to citizens in the United States falls far behind the rest of the leading nations world in both affordability and effectiveness, as COVID outcomes in the US showed.

In the 2016 presidential election cycle both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were resonating with American voters, Trump playing to the right, Sanders to the centrist-left. Tens of thousands of people poured into stadiums across the country, energizing both movements. The words ‘fascism’ and ‘socialism’ played through the media. Meanwhile, traditional candidates like Hillary Clinton barely filled rooms. From a distance it was easy to see that both Trump and Sanders were tapping into the deep fears, concerns and anger of ordinary citizens.

The Republican party was unable to derail Trump. The Democrats took a more instrumentalist approach with Bernie, and through the usual backroom dealing, engineered Clinton as candidate. The rest is history.

But the election outcome was a just the final symptom of a deep and decades long frustration with government and the owner class, or as Bernie would say, “the billionaire class”. Ordinary Americans knew the system, as such, was not working for them, by any measure.

Four years of Biden—elected as the Trump antidote—did little to allay the public’s frustration or to rebuild confidence in government, and the result is another four years of Donald Trump. But this is not the same Donald Trump from 2017.

America First means everyone else loses

If the mission is to make America great again, the direct message is simple: one winner vs. everyone else. America must win, everyone else must acquiesce or lose. True to Trump’s background, he’s applying basic business practices as he sees them. Rather than building relationships based on global collaboration and trust, the Trump administration is playing hardball. Team Trump-USA must win in every situation. But world beware. This time Trump’s team includes the world’s wealthiest five or six billionaires, the House, the Senate, the judiciary, the support of slightly more than half of American voters, the world’s largest military—and the keys to America’s nuclear arsenal.

At this writing we are seven days into the Trump administration. Already the president’s initial executive actions have put much of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in force, including this sampling:
    

• Clamping down on immigration and border security  
• Leaving the Paris Climate Agreement  
• Expanding oil and gas exploration and production  
• Leaving the World Health Organization
• Withholding foreign aid unless recipient governments support Trump’s policies 
• Restructuring the federal government, aiming it at private sector ‘efficiency’ 
• Reinstating two genders only, dismantling DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion)

No longer is America a good global citizen, the last vestiges of that have all but disappeared.

Trump, to his credit, wants to avoid hot wars. I believe he wants the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to end. But on what terms? Just this morning I read that his plan to limit further genocide in Gaza is to out-migrate Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt, and is planning to work with the leaders of those two countries to facilitate that. Who knows what will become of Ukraine. Already Trump is pushing back at Putin. Ending that war may not be so easy. Neither US economic sanctions against Russian nor the supply of weapons to Ukraine have deterred the Russian advance into eastern Ukraine. The wisest move, and likely the end move, will be to have Zelensky fall on his sword and simply give up. Since Trump’s election Zelensky has been actively pursuing increased support from Europe, advocating for 200,000 European peacekeeping troops to be deployed and stationed in Ukraine after a cessation to the war. Clearly, he now fears the almost certain end of US financial and military aid for the war.

Trump prefers economic war. It’s a battleground he understands—with the added benefit of having America’s formidable military to back up his position. He has become, dare I say, somewhat all-powerful. This is a dangerous moment in history. Especially when off-the-cuff remarks have the potential to become reality in some form, such as the annexation of the Panama Canal, acquisition of Greenland, and incorporation of Canada as America’s 51st state.

America first is America alone

Masking this display of belligerence is the fear that America really is weak, weakened or weakening. America has turned to a fascist, for lack of a better word, for a solution. Trump’s solution of choice, as always, is financial intimidation. Trump is a man perfectly tailored for this time in American history. He’s a bully, and there’s nothing bullies fear more than having their weaknesses exposed—which is exactly what America and the people who run it fear the most.

The reflex, then, is to tighten up, to consolidate. It’s the us vs. everyone approach that leads directly to isolating the country from the rest of the global community. In his inauguration speech Trump shone a positive light on “American exceptionalism”. It was more than a dogwhistle, putting the world on notice that the US will now do whatever it wants to get what it wants. The reverse side of this approach is that the entire world will now feel itself in direct opposition to the US, with a few exceptions (pardon the pun) such as Israel. So this is the beginning of a new era of American isolationism, both from inside and outside. The danger for America is becoming the world pariah.

What, we might ask, are the downsides of isolationism? In his NY Times piece David Brooks cites America's 19th century aspirations. But on isolationism the more appropriate example is the 1920s, when the US backed away from world affairs. It refused to join the League of Nations, it closed down immigration, especially Asian immigration, it imposed high tariffs on imported goods, which resulted in rising prices for Americans and retaliating tariffs imposed on US goods abroad resulting in unemployment, and forced their First World War allies to repay US loans, while imposing tariffs on their goods. The debts remained unpaid, what remained was European resentment toward the US.

But the United States was a different country a century ago. It was a time of optimism. Industrial production was high, companies like Ford, GE and Edison were thriving. Wages were rising, small business and the middle class were growing, and ordinary Americans were investing their life savings in the stock market. With such a large and expanding domestic market the US had no need to chase global markets for its products. The speculation bubble in the overheated equities market burst in 1929 bringing it all to an end.

Today, the American economy is intricately interwoven into the fabric of the global economy. The domestic market is not large enough or wealthy enough, particularly among lower income earners, to support an America-only production plan. Nor is America ready to transition to the closed, mercantile economic model of 100 years ago. The US does not have the modern tools, factories, or applied skills available to kick start that model. Its workers are demoralized, depressed and unmotivated. Yes, America First might be an attractive call to action for billionaires and a modest majority of Americans. But the devil is in the details. The question becomes, “how?”

Where does this lead?

Already the US can’t unify its evermore polarized citizenry. Yes, taking over other countries, and taking on more economic adversaries might unify (some) Americans in the fight to overcome common enemies. But using this approach on a sustained basis, whereby America wins but then has to maintain new international responsibilities such as managing international discontent, both political and financial, leads only to fatigue and even greater frustration among ordinary Americans, who will still be the last to see any significant improvements in their lives under this form of autocratic corporate rule.

The US would require considerably more vision to realize an achievable version of America First. Like Henry Ford more than a century ago, American businesses would have to begin investing in American workers and American infrastructure. They would have to begin paying better-than-living wages, and building a viable social safety net for their workers. They would have to recommit to building high quality, high value products made in the USA, on par with or better than the Chinese and Asians can. To do that would take time. The relocalizing, retooling and reskilling of America will not only take time, it will take raw talent, money, and commitment. Real commitment, not mere profit-taking and generating annual report optics.

This transition could not be achieved even if Donald Trump were receive another three terms in office. Rebuilding an economy in decline requires much more than sloganeering and impulsive broad sweeps of the legislative pen. As it goes, the course he’s set out is headed for a slow motion—or perhaps not so slow motion—crash that will likely be, in the end, far more painful for the world than Trump’s short term solution for America. There is every likelihood that Donald Trump will discover, as all recent presidents before him, that starting new wars to prop up the domestic economy is his only viable answer.

It’s the age-old answer all old men have when they decide to send their poor young soldiers off to war. It isn’t for love of country, it’s merely the love of power and profits.

 

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https://www.reuters.com/markets/global-debt-surges-past-320-trillion-risk-appetite-returns-iif-2024-12-03/

https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/economy/how-much-money-is-in-the-world/

https://www.claws.in/brics-vs-g7-can-they-truly-be-compared/