The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency.
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.
What still baffles me is how people act like this was some kind of thoughtful decision.
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.
For extra sauce on the "they're barely even thinking about this" cake someone figured out where those crazy "Tariff Charged" numbers were coming from, they're taking the trade deficit and dividing by the total imports from that country.
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.
I just asked ChatGPT with a lazy prompt: "Come up with a formula to impose reciprocal tariffs that will reduce America's trade deficit to zero" and it came up with basically the same formula.
Oh man if people in the White House are just using ChatGPT...
The Terminator franchise had it that the AI has to nuke humanity and fight a giant war including time travel to take over.
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."
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. What rtkwe described is literally what they are? They didn’t say the tariffs are random (unless the comment changed, which would explain why yours makes no sense to me), they said they aren’t what the White House is claiming they are.
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.
I'm objecting to his characterization that "they're barely even thinking about this." He makes it seem like they picked this formula out of a hat. But there is an ideological rationale to scaling tariffs up with the size of the trade deficit, as described in the article I linked.
The "idealogical rationale" is not coherent or even consistent with the papers that the administration cited:
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.
I notice he seems to have a GPT-level understanding of issues, offering a thin justifications of his viewpoints, and then just completely ignoring any substantive discussions and instead only engaging in threads where he is "winning".
IIRC he is a lawyer, a field where strategically deploying intellectual dishonesty is particularly advantageous.
Rayiner of 10 years ago started his arguments from axioms other than "the Republican Party is correct" as he does now. I miss old Rayiner. His arguments against the Democratic position on e.g. Citizens United and Bush v. Gore were persuasive back then. Nowadays virtually nothing he says is persuasive, because it's incredibly obvious that he's starting from the position that the Republican Party is correct and working backwards from there.
(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.)
That's why I’ve stopped feeding the troll — I just downvote or flag when necessary. It’s a shame because, years ago, he was one of the better commenters on HN.
I've seen this comment a couple of times. What would be a better way of doing it? Also consider that if they would've had a more complex formula, what would be the cost of needing to explain it publicly? Would they then need to start defending the fairness of each tariff vs doing it the simple way and having a single formula across the board?
US industrial output is much lower than it has been relative to our consumption. We should mostly make in the country the industrial products we consume.
We are a consumer nation because we are more prosperous than our peers. It's the same reason you buy your food at a grocery store.
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)
I think people look at "national debt" as though we're buying trillions of dollars of stuff and not, fundamentally, two things:
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.
Manufacturing as a share of GDP is bound to fall. It is inevitably going the way of agriculture.
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.
> We should mostly make in the country the industrial products we consume.
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.
I'm curious, are you personally volunteering to work in the factories? Or is it a situation where we need industrialization to come back but you personally are not willing to see it through?
I mean, is the poster in question a senior robotics engineer? Because that's whose going to be working in any factories that open. Maybe they'll have some security guards and janitors, I guess
By looking at where things are made rather than by using hedonic adjustments to multiply up INTC revenue until it hides the problem (or whatever the strategy is today now that INTC is flagging).
Assembly is one example of manufacture, so that distinction isn't really the one you think it is. Output is tracked by value added, so the mythical "car comes missing a single bolt which gets added in Flint" doesn't really show up in the output numbers, if that's your worry.
Interesting, so basically no growth since 2007 if you exclude computers, even with increased productivity. And the drop in employment is insane and it's no wonder that there is a huge political movement with fixing that as a pillar. Not even to mention regional problems that have been going on longer in the Rust Belt. Yeah I find it pretty disgusting when workers in service based industries like here have no sympathy for the workers in these industries.
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.
In the end, the problem is that China manufacturing output is $4.6 trillion according to those numbers while the US is $2.5 trillion, while it was around the same back in 2010. This, along with its decline in percentage of GDP is causing the perception, and it also is causing decline in employment in manufacturing. The perception matters ideologically and the employment issues matters materially, and so we have these tariffs as an effort to bring manufacturing back to 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.
It is. But it's really a lousy conversation to have you two going back and forth several times, with each of you asking the other to substantiate their position, and neither of you actually doing so.
Jobs is not the same as production. Many of the jobs are lost due to automation. If you bring manufacturing back to the US you’ll be “hiring” a lot more robuts than humans.
Um, by picking and choosing what goods need protection in the long term?
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
Overall I agree, but I'm not sure there's literally no point. American primary producers will likely benefit - people who own mines, oil wells, farms, etc., and some American manufacturers too as long as they source enough of their raw materials from within the US that the price hikes on resources from overseas don't bite them too much. Still an overall loss that will be borne by American consumers, but a small section of the population who are already wealthy will greatly benefit...
I genuinely thought his cabinet was at least competent, they have credentials like they are at least, but then fucking Signal happened and made it obvious what they actually are:
The exact same kind of fail-upwards, born on third thinking they hit a triple, grindset grifter, loser mid-level management nepobabies.
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.
Exactly, tariffs may be a wise way to protect parts of your industry that need protection and investment. The Chinese for example have been using this tactic for decades. But you need to choose which sectors to invest in. The way Trump is doing is nothing more than an instant devaluation of the dollar purchasing power.
The problem is it's economically illiterate. Trade deficits aren't bad in themselves - they can be a sign that you're getting a good deal. Consider the case where a country with low wages exports raw materials to the US, and doesn't buy back as much from the US. This is the situation for lots of poorer countries who are exporting cheap raw materials to the US, and the US gains from these situations. Trump's policy simply makes all these raw materials more expensive.
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
You’re calling Trump “economically illiterate,” but what you’re saying will happen is exactly the motivation of Trump’s policy. He just thinks it’s a good thing rather than a bad thing.
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.
How much do production workers get paid in China? How will our production goods be affordable at American labor rates? This strategy just makes everything more expensive - nothing cheaper.
Exactly and even if it does work to reshore factories (which will take years and we'll just ignore the question of where all the workers for these factories will come from, and that the goods needed for making those factories are also being tariffed) they'll only be competitive in a protected market so they're only really producing for the US market which will be stunted because costs would have inflated through the roof!
Not to mention these are blanket tariffs, not protecting specific American industries. So anything that's not feasibly produced here will be more expensive anyway.
Yes everybody, we are taxing all of your groceries - but all of those American coffee and banana farms (!) will be protected.
I mean, a large point of their campaign was that price increases were a major national concern, right? Can we agree that they repeatedly made that point? I recall many lawn signs to that effect.
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.
What kind of financing has Trump made available so that the average American company (companies of what 5-20 people) can setup multi-hundreds of millions of dollars mining operations, smelters, manufacturing plants? Because it's gonna be a stretch for the average 5-300 person factory around me to vertically integrate into a billion dollars of supply chain infra business.
Trump did decent in the rust belt. Many of them have lost their good paying manufacturing jobs. If, and this is a big if, we can bring back manufacturing in the US they can get their jobs back.
If I'm company leadership, I'm not doing anything but trying to limit damage while this guy's in office. His tariffs can turn on a dime- his petulance is business poison.
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.
I was just talking last night about how ironically the things Trump is doing fall not to far from what Bernie bros have dreamed of. Heavy tariffs and no income tax is pretty much the conservative version of liberal hand outs.
What do they expect to happen if the heavy tariffs either move the manufacturing of those products to the US or make the imports expensive enough that consumers switch to domestic manufacturers?
That tanks the revenue from the tariffs, which would make them an ineffective replacement for income tax.
Consider actual tariffs? A trade deficit isn't a tariff or trade barrier it's just the natural flow of commerce from them selling more stuff than they buy. They're dressing it up like these countries are charging US imports these crazy tariffs but they're not at all, especially not across the board.
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.
> Consider actual tariffs? A trade deficit isn't a tariff or trade barrier it's just the natural flow of commerce from them selling more stuff than they buy
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.
Other countries also have different population numbers. To take a random example, why would e.g. Uruguay (population 3.5M) buy as much from the US (population 100x) as the US is able to buy from them?
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.
On the face of it that sounds reasonable, but then you look at say China with a 35x population over Canada yet Canadians don't just buy as much from China as vice-versa, they buy CAD$65 billion more. So I don't think the argument that larger countries necessarily have a deficit against their smaller trading partners holds water.
I do agree that this madness will only encourage other countries to conduct their trade elsewhere.
> Other countries also have different population numbers. To take a random example, why would e.g. Uruguay (population 3.5M) buy as much from the US (population 100x) as the US is able to buy from them
Because the U.S. can buy from Uruguay only as much as 3.5 million people in that country can produce.
First we don't import any where near all of Uruguay's exports, in fact we're only about 8% of their actual exports which should tell you this isn't the reason we buy more from them than they do from us.
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.
GP said other countries, not "Europe". And Europe does have cheaper labor. Even in western europe you can find a 5x-10x difference in certain salaries especially in white collar industries.
> cheaper labor and laxer environmental regulations
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.
It’s been our turn for a hot minute. Republicans have been blowing up the status quo since Reagan, and the Democrats enforcing austerity since Clinton. American corporate leadership is excellent at hitting quarter-after-quarter KPIs for bonuses and share price growth, but there’s ample data it has all come at the expense of workers - increased precarity, decreased wages, increased costs of everything, as the country is plundered down to its core and sold off piecemeal.
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).
Clinton was the last fiscally responsible President, using a strong real economy to pay down some of the debt which had service costs equal to the costs of US federal debt today. You can't criticize that given how high the debt was in the 1990s.
> Clinton was the last fiscally responsible President, using a strong real economy to pay down some of the debt
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.
I can when he did so not through raising revenue, but by gutting social safety net programs.
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.
> What still baffles me is how people act like this was some kind of thoughtful decision.
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.
It seems thoughtful if you or your children or your friends are heavily invested in crypto and think removing the USD as the primary currency of trade is a good idea.
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.
In this case it's much much worse than just incompetent. You're looking at someone who takes an evil delight it doing the opposite of what smart people say to do, and destroying stuff.
This is what forced me vastly curtail my news consumption for the most part. I can only take so much breathless reporting about the "strategy" of the Trump administration, when it's plainly sheer incompetence with the winds of malice in the background. There is no actual plan to "make America great again", it's non-stop incompetent pandering to a base that just wants others to suffer.
This has been termed "sane washing" and is extremely irritating: smart media people reverse engineering a vaguely plausible logic from the regime's actions when on closer inspection they never gave said logic as their reasoning.
Also you were outvoted because the Dems didn't have a reasonable alternative. Mrs Harris was incompetent. She was a poor public speaker, which further made her look incompetent given her previous role as a prosecutor. Further, the Dems didn't offer her as part of an open primary. They forced her on everyone.
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.
I'm really do appreciate all those on HN who comment either for or against these tariff measures by including cogent arguments and relevant facts. As against ...
There’s been many people opposed to free trade for decades, on both sides like Pat Buchanan and Bernie Sanders. You can think those guys are incorrect in their analysis, but calling it “mindless” is just ridiculous.
This tariff regime is simply a “minimal viable product” aimed at the idea of reducing structural trade deficits.
My theory is that it actually has nothing to do with trade at all--why else would the story changes so much when they are asked to describe the methodology or rationale?
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).
Yes and: IIRC, their intent is to bolster the US dollar as the reserve currency.
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.
Sanders might impose tariffs, but he would be smart enough to realize that if trade deficits need to be reduced what matters is reducing the deficit on the aggregate trade, not reducing the deficits individually with each trade partner.
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.
The whole freaking point of money is to make it so you can trade for goods without having to have goods of your own that the other party wants.
Just posting something doesn't make it true. Don't be disingenuous by making it seems like Sanders supports this idiotic "plan" just because he spoke out in favor of certain tariffs or against parts of free trade in the past.
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.
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.
Again, just because Sanders would support some protectionist policies doesn't mean he supports the tariffs going on now. He's on the record saying they're a regressive sales tax benefiting the wealthy.
Which is why I was pointing out your comment is disingenuous by insinuating Sanders would support the tariffs because it's anti-free trade.
You're really driving home this "Hey everyone, Trump is just doing exactly what Pat Buchanan and Bernie Sanders agreed to do".
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.
You could not have designed a more effective version of a “Manchurian Candidate” in my opinion.
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.
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.
The best thing about your comment is you could be referring to Trump, or the GP. 9 out of 10 people who read your comment will say "hell yeah" and think you agree with them whether you do or not.
He didn't add sanctions on Russia, but on people dealing with Russia - that's a different thing.
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.
I am not sure why you are calling this out seeing how many people are hypothesising what is going to happen in this thread (economy destroyed, USD no longer reserve currency, etc). At least we have actual words to base what I wrote unlike all the other theories being thrown out in this thread.
You're using "whataboutism" to point fingers and say one side is worse because of this or that. I could do the same thing and say Hillary's emails don't matter because Mike Waltz is out there using Gmail to conduct official business. https://www.axios.com/2025/04/01/mike-waltz-signal-gmail-sec...
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.
> 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.
I'm guessing you're cool with the current regime's handling of sensitive information, yeah?
> But lets focus on someone trying to avoid war with Russia at all costs and attempting to make peace.
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.
See, that's what a 2-parties system does to one's brain. Trump can be bad, and many other things can be bad at the same time, without causation. If that's enough to distract from the bigger picture, you do not qualify as a voter.
You are spreading disinformation. The FBI investigations into Russia collusion were separate from Mueller's special counsel investigations, Mueller's work did not refer to the Steele Dossier at all.
- 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.
Wait, all you have to support the extraordinary claim that "Trump is a KGB agent" is that... Russian bots with 50 followers retweeted some pro-Trump posts ? Seriously ? That's ALL that the anti-Trump administration could find after years of trying to nail him ?
It's not bizarre, it's pretty much in line with the stance that the West has had with Russia since the 90s, even with Bush junior in the early 2000s, before the rise of the neocons.
On the Sam Harris podcast you can listen to a great interview with Anne Applebaum that goes in to some detail about the relationship between various US and RU politicians. There's a lot more to it than the Steele dossier.
I can fully understand how people on both the left and the right could have ideological differences with Trump, how they can hate the way he interacts with people, think he's picking unqualified cronies for high level jobs, etc. I disagree with the last one but I can at least see how a reasonable person would get to that conclusion.
"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.
If Trump were a Russian asset, what could he possibly do to advance their interests more than what he is already doing? Hell, he is running Putin's playbook on Canada and Greenland. Did you vote for that?
NATO is already over because none of our allies can expect Trump to honor our treaty obligations.
Regardless of what his intentions might be which are all speculations as far as I'm concerned, he managed to convince Europe to rearm in 1 month, which is a net positive for Europe and America (assuming America still sees that as a positive) and a massive blow for Russia.
By that I mean he did it, briefly, then probably got a lot of push back internally and rolled it back. The whole event seemed like a chance to drum up an excuse to drop support for Ukraine, but ultimately wasn't enough of a reason to present.
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.
> If Trump were a Russian asset, what could he possibly do to advance their interests more than what he is already doing?
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.
Trump and his administration do spread Kremlin falsehoods and talking points. This was a major sticking point in Gabbard's confirmation. For instance, she spread the false claim that Ukraine was developing bioweapons that are a threat to Russia. Trump himself repeated the false claim that Zelensky has a poor approval numbers and is preventing elections because he's a dictator. Trump also said Ukraine started the conflict. In his last admin he said that "Crimeans want to be Russian".
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.
> But seeing as Zelensky has the power to end martial law at any time, he is single-handedly preventing Ukranian elections
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 8
He is preserving power by delaying elections, and his party (who control the parliament) is preserving their majority by delaying elections. Many a dictatorship has been kicked off and maintained by strictly legal means with the help of a complicit legislature.
Ukraine 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.
> Holding mass gatherings under such conditions is utterly irresponsible
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?
> What still baffles me is how people act like this was some kind of thoughtful decision.
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.
The next step is to cut income tax for under $150k/yr earners. Tariffs raise prices by 20%, tax cuts let you keep 20% more earnings.
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.
Trump has explicitly stated he wants to eliminate income taxes for people earning under $150k.
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.
While you're not wrong, the two sides (Trump vs Sanders) do have entirely different approaches to reforming the system. The latter would (probably) like more control over production means in the hands of laborers, and sees progressive taxes as a way to support a social state. The former wants top-down control through laissez-faire, and sees reducing taxes as a way to get rid of the state.
Trump has explicitly stated a lot of things he has no intention of doing. Look at what is _actually_ in the bill the republicans are pushing through congress. Where is "no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no income tax on earners under 150k". It's not there.
This is a very strange view of it. Anarchism is extremely far from liberalism. "Anarcho-capitalists" are more or less just extreme libertarians, they share no history or ideology with any other anarchist movements, no other anarchist movements recognize them as anarchists.
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.
"no other anarchist movements recognize them as anarchists."
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..
> Once you go down the rabbit whole of trying to define 'anarchist' , there are actually dozens of definitions
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.
Peter Thiel most definitely wants a form of kingship though he professes to be a libertarian
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.
Anarchism is not just “no government”, but rather “no rulers”.
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.
> 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.
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 opposed to private capital such as the private ownership of the means of production, eg land and infrastructure.
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.
How do you get libertarians mixed in there? Libertarians want freedom from government, not the consolidation of power nor levy of new taxes (which tariffs are). Apart from downsizing select government organizations, what the current administration is doing is the exact opposite of what libertarians would want.
Tariffs are only part 1 of the plan. The next step is cutting income tax entirely for most people. Trump has said this, and even yesterday called on congress to pass his "Big Beautiful Bill".
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))
Reagan’s administration was very corrupt. So that law and order evidently didn’t apply to them. It was also very profligate. So that fiscal conservatism didn’t apply to them. I don’t see a lot of difference between the actor Ronald Reagan and the actor Donald Trump. Maybe in degree but not in kind.
I’ve been a left liberal my whole life. We haven’t gone anywhere.
It’s not “anarchism” it’s simply rolling back the bad parts of Reagan’s legacy: free trade, immigration/amnesty, and foreign empire.
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.
No but the point is valid. Say country A decides to protect its environment and hence imposes costly pollution control measures on its manufacturers. Country B meanwhile pollutes to the max. Country B's products are going to be cheaper than country A's. Therefore country A imposing a balancing tarrif on Country B (until they stop polluting) seems at least potentially reasonable.
No, I agree with you. My point is that Democrats embraced it in the 1990s as well. So the Republicans who were otherwise liberals but just in the GOP for the cheap foreign labor switched sides.
> What MAGA is today is what the bulk of the GOP has always been: a coalition of social conservatives and business owners.
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 two major political parties fundamentally realigned during the civil rights era of the 1960s.
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.
> Even in 1976, Carter did great in the deep south.
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.
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.
>> The two major political parties fundamentally realigned during the civil rights era of the 1960s.
> 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.
It's because the far left and the far right are both made of up of people deeply disaffected by the status quo, and when those people talk they often find that at the very least many of their grievances 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.)
Correct. The left and right seem like a circle because Pat Buchanan and Bernie Sanders long had a large overlap on issues that have become highly salient today: immigration and free trade.
Capitalist-anarchists are certainly opposed to tariffs - after all, tariffs are just taxes that expand government influence. Protectionism is a left-wing, big-government policy.
The goal would be dismantling the state, and hence (national) tariffs, for good. The people behind it are quite well off, and can bear the tariffs for now. And it's not just capitalist-anarchists. This is a cabal of spiteful people with different goals, but some shared ideas about the scale of government, prepared to use as much force as necessary.
> 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?
Fair point, but America is getting rid of the parts of government that provide stability across the country and world. I don't see any major changes to the US war machine.
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.
A front for destabilization operations by whom? By the NSA, FBI and CIA is who. And no, none of those organizations will be held accountable for their abuses of international aid. Instead, we'll throw the baby out with the bathwater and blame the second-degree manslaughter on "state department" operations.
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.
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?
And that was after the US supported Pakistan against Bangladesh. Now you know why my Bangladeshi family isn’t torn up about USAID closing even though we immigrated to America thanks to USAID. India doesn’t seem upset either.
Don’t accuse me of “not arguing in good faith.” My family has vastly more investment in and knowledge of USAID than most of the people reflexively defending “the institutions.” And finding out about its political activities has been red pilling.
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 think we can clean out the NSA, FBI, and CIA.
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.
That's why the public should demand their politicians to choose a better path for them and not fall for “we need to destroy the enemy”. When you close your eyes to your country's foreign “misbehaviours” (put it lightly) don't feel shocked when that comes back to you.
When you dismantle a government, which does include judiciary/legislative powers, who is gonna counterweight the executive branch?
The clearest evidence of incompetence for all to see is Trump's cabinet from his first term. If they're actively speaking out against him, something is seriously wrong.
> 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.
> So many are quick to accept media narratives without questioning or verifying the facts for themselves.
> 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.
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.
Sri Lankan here. They just slapped 44% on us (higher than on China). The country is just trying to recover from the economic crisis and the sovereign debt default of 2022, so we have very high import duties on certain items (e.g. vehicles) to discourage dollar outflow. Looks like the US just saw that as hostile and decided to strike back.
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.
All countries tested against this theory are correct within 1-2 percent.
This is interesting. I don't know the details of Trump's tariff policy, but if this is correct, it would follow that the policy should have some mechanism to reduce the tariffs as the trade imbalance is reduced.
Not sure why? It’s an irrational policy not based on any kind of sense. I don’t think I’d expect it to be logically consistent. Besides, what do you do with a country where US is a net exporter? Provide subsidies for imports?
It’s all drunk monkeys driving a train… there is no economic theory to expect consistency from.
Unless they think that because it came out of an Excel formula, there's a logic behind it - and honestly, I wouldn't be shocked if these folks have that insight.
> 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".
I'll be damned, I had no idea and I still got it right.
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.
It’s not “irrational.” It’s crude, but it’s based on a logic that, on average, trade deficits should generally reduce to zero. And I strongly suspect this is about our large, diversified trade partners (EU, China) and is simply being imposed across the board for appearances.
There is no “logic” that any two country pairs should have an equal trade balance.
“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.
Imagine the classical triangular trade. Three countries can have entirely balanced trade, yet each country has a 100% trade deficit with another country. Everyone benefits, and no one runs a trade deficit. Throw a huge tariff in and a country’s trade, imports and exports, will collapse.
It does nothing with "hostile". For China, yes, but for most other countries tariff is simply ($USA-import - $USA-export)/$USA-import. That simply, numbers are check for many many countries. I'm sure, USA imports a lot of tea from Sri Lanka and some fruits and wood/furniture.
(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).
Unfortunately, no, as I've changed country of living year ago and still can not find way to good tea in new place. Also, I'm not sure, that recommendations from Europe is actual for you even if I have one.
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) :-)
As a local, the brand called Dilmah is just a regular supermarket brand for us, but I hear it's quite popular in places like Australia and New Zealand.
Yeah, they are the poshest tea shop in London, of course they're expensive. If you know of a more affordable place with shipping and high quality, I'm all ears.
It is THE problem for me: tea become "posh" in Europe. You have tea dust from Lipton in bags on one end of the spectrum, posh tea which costs about 100x to its origin (26€/$ per 50g! 520€ for a kilo! It is insane, it is lifestyle price, not food/grocery price!) on the other end of the spectrum and nothing in-between.
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?
Do we speak about "black" ("red" in Chinese classification) tea?
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.
> it feels like a good opportunity for China to increase their trade/influence in the region as well
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.
China has been trying to build up domestic markets for the past several years. With the US imposing high tariffs on Chinese goods it stands to reason that they’re not in a position to import from Vietnam, etc. because there will be domestic overproduction.
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.
My interpretation is: it’s domestic overproduction because China isn’t exporting as much to US so it will consume domestically and then not have need for imports from the other SE Asia countries.
My question is more about where the US is then importing from. I assume some goods are more elastic than others. So will the US simply stop buying, or will it shift to buying elsewhere with lower tarrifs?
Could be, but China's imports from the US where not much (6% of their total) and cannot be easily substituted from SEA countries, as they were mostly importing
a ton of agricultural stuff (soybeans, corn) plus fossils.
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.
Would it reduce the share of exports that US sells? If they decide to buy directly from China over the US given the higher price of everything in the US (keep in mind the raw components dont all appear out of nowhere).
Non-monetary tariffs:
- Regulatory hurdles that prevent import (eg. CE requirements)
- Currency manipulation (eg. RMB)
- Domestic industrial subsidies (eg. export tax credits).
... you have a lot to learn about international trade.
For most things, they already produce better and cheaper products. And they can buy from obter countries, It is just in US that Trump tarifs are applied.
> 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?
Bizarre, tax/tariff evasion or "Mistake" does seem like the most likely explanation - yet US$1.4m is too little to bother evading tax on really. I mean that could be a refit on a boat or something -- $1.4Mn is literally nothing.
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.
Now it is 1.4 mln, in future this could be 1000 more, if this will help with overcoming tariffs. Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022.
> Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022
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.
Of course, several of these islands with 10% tarrifs are ex-colonies of various EU countries. Of course any french manufacturer will send goods to the islands (0%) then from there to the US (10%) rather than pay 20%. It's obvious, then the US will notice and the island will go to 20% and so on. It's all completely hateful.
I saw a post on X which said it was "vibe tariffing" and I think the person was speculating that the tariffs were probably generated using an LLM and saying "make me a tariff chart with ALL the countries and each one about 25% but randomize them."
That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins.
I think it's basically reciprocal adjusted for trade deficit, with a floor of 10%.
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.
> these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.
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%.
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.
If you look at the full list (available e.g. here https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-20545...), some countries (most prominently Russia) are not on it. Whether that means anything is debatable, but Mexico and Canada, who were explicitly "spared" from these tariffs (but have other tariffs "tailor-made" especially for them), are also not on the list.
Then that list is wildly inaccurate. Norfolk Island hasn’t been an external territory of Australia for some time (about a decade) - it is literally part of the Australian Capital Territory and they vote in the electorate of Bean.
The Trump admin couldn’t arrange a pissup in a brewery.
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.
It's what you get if you let people which don't know what they are doing make decision about things they don't really understand without being open for consulting because they know better using only oversimplified statistics which often don't tell even half the story.
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.
Isn't this just common sense? I mean, if there are no people/production/imports in a certain territory, it doesn't mean that all of this won't appear there literally tomorrow, especially when tariffs on goods from these territories are zero.
That doesn't seem likely, because they separately listed parts of France that are wholly in the EU (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana, separate tariffs there are as meaningless as having separate tariffs for Berlin and Munich) but they also did not list those that are NOT part of the EU (EDIT one list I found does list French Polynesia, but not New Caledonia[0]) even though they are the ones where a separate rate would make the "most" sense (if any of this makes sense anyway).
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.
If that’s the thinking, they forgot Antarctica, the Marianas trench, and the Moon. Someone could, theoretically, take advantage of the lack of tariffs.
I’m all for being charitable but at some point Occam’s razor says it’s just ChatGPT mistakenly including these places.
If there are no people there is no government to trade with, no customs, no regulations.
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)?
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.
If this made any sense to begin with, then not excluding any region at all would make sense. Why leave some area which would become a theoretical middleman in trade just for purpose of tariff evasion? At least they'd be covered from the simple workarounds.
Is that commonly done on uninhabited islands? Wouldn’t the shipping cost offset any gains? Where do you even make these small changes if there’s nobody there? And what does the export paperwork look like?
The problem is that the truth, that this was some haphazard nonsense thrown together at the last second using some ChatGPT prompts, is hard to believe, so people try to insert rationality where it doesn’t exist.
It probably already exists and I just can’t find it, but there’s some kind of law here about how some actions are so insane that they compel people to invent elaborate explanations to avoid the discomfort of recognizing insanity.
To add to the comment: If you want to be the capital of an empire, you have to act like it—like Troy, Rome, or Constantinople—meaning you run deficits and play buyer of last resort. When you are no longer that, the empire has indeed collapsed.
You could have picked up any poli sci book or audited any international-focused poli sci class any time in the last... I dunno, a bunch of decades, and there'd have been a lot of talk about American hegemony, how maintaining that drives a ton of her actions, and what benefits that hegemony brings to the US or others (and the costs). It's, like, a central topic of the whole field, and unipolar hegemony has been the basic framework of contemporary international relations study since the USSR collapsed (with a side-topic of "what about China?" rising in prominence over the years, and their struggle to bring a return to a dual-power system becoming a major topic in the last couple decades)
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.
I believe this poster is viewing this statement by another Hn poster as official confirmation that US foreign policy has been driven a single mission of subjugating other countries. I disagree with this view.
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."
Care to provide any evidence for your claim? At the very least put in the work to redefine the word empire to have such a broad and expansive definition that the US would qualify
Multiple definitions I guess. NATO countries are very much part of the US empire but pretty much all the countries that we have military bases in would be part of a looser definition of the US empire.
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.
Maintaining an empire will destroy your society in the long run. What’s good for America in the long run is a country populated by americans, producing and consuming goods and services made by other americans within the umbrella of the same democratic polity.
“ a country populated by americans, producing and consuming goods and services made by other americans within the umbrella of the same democratic polity.”
Which is a fine vision. Of course, Americans will have to consider why the goods on our shelves are so plentiful and so cheap.
All we are doing is making America weaker on the global scale while you cling to this fantasy.
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?
What's good for Americans (everyone really) is easy, open access to huge global markets, where economies of scale and differentiation can bring the most prosperity. There's no reason Americans, Brits, Swedes, Italians, Singaporeans and so on can't do this. The handful of bad (albeit powerful) actors shouldn't stop this.
The premise is the leaders of America since WW2 have been focused on things outside America for too long, hence "America First" and "Make America Great Again."
Few people use “globalist” in the 1940s sense these days, but it is widespread among far-right conspiracy theorists, many of whom use it to refer to Jews while leaving room to claim they weren’t - similar to how often Soros is mentioned in contexts he has no other connection to. That doesn’t mean that anyone who uses it is definitely engaged in anti-semitism but it forces the reader to have to question whether it’s being used for multiple reasons.
In all current discourse, unironic use of the term "globalist" means jew. That's not a supposition or an overreaction. The terms are used interchangeably by the only group of people who actually says "globalist" with any regularity.
"The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency."
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.
Europeans have a lot of alternatives to American services, including building out their own.
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.
Between three and five members of the EU could become nuclear powers complete with delivery systems within a year if there was political will. A couple of them in significantly less than a year. If the EU is truly responsible for its own defense, then it gets to choose how to go about that. There is only one way to do that in the time frame in which it will become necessary.
Nuclear is a bragging tool, but only useful in real war if things are going bad enough that you decide to end the world.
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)
> Nuclear is a bragging tool, but only useful in real war if things are going bad enough that you decide to end the world.
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.
You don't need a huge navy to battle Russia. It's navy is pretty small (they don't even have a functioning aircraft carrier) and there is anyway a land connection between Europe and Russia.
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.
Most of the Iowa class battleships took less than four years from launch to commissioning, so in WW2 your last statement would have been challengeable had the USN not realized the folly of building more BBs.
They were all started before WW2. The Montana class was abandoned - maybe it could have seen service if it was continued but it wasn't. In WW2 battle ships were still king of the ocean - airplanes were showing promise but not yet good enough to replace them (though if the war had gone one just a couple more years they would have)
You mean started before the US involvement in WW2.
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.
The TikTok case in US might be a good playbook for the future. Require markets that US based companies have a near monopoly and require them to divest on EU and onshore operations. You solve tech hegemony and tax evasion in no time.
China has goods and services, but don't underestimate the language barrier for services. Language is a barrier between EU member nations providing each other services, even though machine translation is OK between those languages and most of us learned one of the other nation's languages in school; The gap between Chinese and Latin-Germanic languages is much larger.
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.
> Right now Europe's own companies just ignore the statutes to keep their US trade.
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?
If its like last time, European strategy (ex France maybe) will rise no higher than "let's just try ride out the next four years, then things will go back to normal".
It's more likely to be related to culture and political structure than education is my guess. Unless, maybe, we want to use a different definition for education than just degree attainment. For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.
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.
> For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.
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.
Even if we look at just masters, Finland is only slightly ahead a 16% vs the US 12%. But using this sort or logic, then why not compare doctorate degrees, for which the US has 2% attainment vs Finland's 1%? To me it seems like drawing random line to fit the narrative when I don't see anything in the degree metrics that points to Finland being more educated. We could use different metrics, such as some sort of test, or test scores at the secondary level to say Finland has a better education or education system (we'd have to see the numbers to verify, but I wouldn't be surprised).
I have no interest in a one country vs. another country pissing match, just pointing out that (arbitrarily) selecting the bachelor degree as some kind of metric might be highly misleading, at least in the case of Finland.
Except we just looked at the numbers and showed it doesn't appear to be misleading. I was merely responding to the person stating they would bet that Finland would be the last democracy to decay due to education. But it seems the educational attainment is roughly equal. I also called out that other metrics might be better indicators, both if we were using education and if we were looking at other factors like culture.
My only issue with your comment is it seems to blame a two-party system. It is my understanding/belief though that a two-party system is just inevitable in the U.S. When a 3rd party has risen it acts only as a spoiler to the party it is most aligned with.
With increased granularity of representation, you can have more parties. Breaking The Two Party Doom Loop discussed details.
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.
Most local issues shouldn't be handled nationally due to the diverse perspectives. That's pretty much the whole point of the (largely ignored) 10th amendment.
A third party has never had enough support to really be viable. Nor have we had multiple alternative parties with viable support. Right now it's all or nothing. If you had multiple new options with nuanced positions (even just filling the quadrants of social/fiscal conservative/liberal), then people could have real options. I admit this is unlikely under the current structure. However, it could take shape with structural changes to the voting process. Yes, even with some of its negatives, ranked choice might be one possible road to multiple mainstream parties.
> A third party has never had enough support to really be viable
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.
Sure, I should have qualified in the past 100 years, or modern times, or whatever. The political environment, the modes of information, types of issues, and even the culture has drastically changed since the Republicans surpassed the Whigs. It's not really an applicable example to the modern scenarios.
Why does that make it inaccurate to blame the two party system? The two party system causes the problem, but that doesn't mean something else can't cause the two party system.
Yeah, not inaccurate ... maybe loaded? I wasn't really refuting the point, merely responding to why OP may have been getting downvotes. Sometimes words can suggest a bias and people may respond to that.
Don't know why the disagree, but this is a real problem and plagues the House of Representatives which then allows actually incompetent but loud candidates like Greene and Boebert to vote on important and serious legislation.
If these individuals are exceptions and the rest are competent, then there should be minimal impact beyond creating a side show. As a tiny minority, they wouldn't have any real sway in the bill construction within their party, especially if it has any chance of passing. The split between the parties is usually narrow, so the representatives with the most potential to influence passing legislation are the ones near the center margins as they may vote against party lines and provide a bigger base of support. The reps near the outside margins tend to have less influence. Even if they sway some stuff during the creation of the bill, it's stuff that likely has to get ripped out to find enough support to pass into a law.
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.
How do you think that would work out? I would guess the less populated states would leave if they feel disregarded. I mean, that lack of representation was the basis for the revolution.
> It's more likely to be related to culture and political structure than education is my guess. Unless, maybe, we want to use a different definition for education than just degree attainment. For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.
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.
Overall, I believe the number was something like 46%+ had a college degree of an associate or higher. So it's not just the top few percent. But I do agree that many areas of the US, especially in specific subjects, are lacking. But that sort of ties back to my comment on culture since the voters and locals have some influence on what is taught or what is not.
Switzerland. Power is extremelly distributed between municipalities, cantons and, in the Federal Government, there are 7 equal ministers. The system is not only robust by definition, but encourage dialogue and citizens participation in politics at every level through popular vote, educating people during centuries.
Germany.
The country was designed to be incredibly hard to takeover from the inside.
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.
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.
Doesn't matter how intelligent or educated or homogenous culturally the Finns are...if Russia were to decide to invade.
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.
Our diversity is not fragility. It makes things harder to arrange but it also keeps them fair. There is no chance of some president/party getting voted into office and making unilateral decisions that screw everybody. Like you know, the US. Or the UK with Brexit. In Europe the diversity keeps that from happening.
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.
“Diversity” is a nice positive spin on what is an extremely fragmented/disjointed/nonexistent energy policy, military strategy, technological cooperation, consumer markets, etc. Like I said, the average European cannot converse with his/her neighbor even at a 1st grade level in a common language. These are obviously not strengths in the context of the current international order, and to try to brush that away with platitudes is to live outside of reality.
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.
> “Diversity” is a nice positive spin on what is an extremely fragmented/disjointed/nonexistent energy policy, military strategy, technological cooperation, consumer markets, etc. Like I said, the average European cannot converse with his/her neighbor even at a 1st grade level in a common language. These are obviously not strengths in the context of the current international order, and to try to brush that away with platitudes is to live outside of reality.
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.
You are right, but the problem with turning the EU into a real union is that it is very difficult and risky. The creation of new nations and new identities more often than not leads to violence - and they are often formed by war.
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.
I would argue everything else sits downstream from those things. It would be quite an understatement to say they are...somewhat important...in the continued existence of a country.
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.
You can look at countries that have remained democratically stable for a long time. The UK and Switzerland come to mind. I live in the UK and we have an odd system that I used to consider a bit of a gimmick for the tourists to take photos of but appreciate more these days. Basically the fact that we have a king but with severely curtailed powers delegated to the elected folk makes it very hard for one of them to appoint themselves effectively king, especially as the military all swear allegiance to the actual king (or queen).
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]
With Brexit and now this I've been thinking that if someone out there is intentionally trying to dismantle the 5 Eyes they're doing a bang up job of it. Step 1 appeal to their nationalistic or even imperial senses to make sure they piss everyone else off, step 2 stoke some internal grievance politics, step 3 get them to unload an entire AR15 magazine into their leg (to paraphrase Dril).
It’s been known since the 2000s that it is in Russia’s best interests to weaken the UK-EU link. Russia was a major contributor to the Brexit cause, but it seems this topic quickly gets swept under the rug by British parties, red or blue.
That is because both were manipulated and ashamed of it. Russia is too sophisticated to play just one side. They have centuries of experience playing various ethnicities within russia against each other to maintain control. In the 2016 US election, Russia would have had a strong plan either way, what the alternative would have been and if would have succeeded, who knows, but it is note worthy how many members of the US administration, including its head, were formerly democrats.
Brexit and Trump are both proxy wars of subversion, with traitorous support from a cadre of extreme reactionaries in both countries spending huge sums on social and trad media to manipulate public opinion in a self-harming direction.
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.
Yes, extreme reactionaries like the United Auto Workers union who showed up in some quantity at the tariff show last night.
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.
While there is a lot of good thoughts about what the democrat party did wrong to lose the last election. I feel your comment places all the blame on them. They did not force republicans to go down this road. This is not the inevitable outcome of a broken democrat party. The republicans went down this road, and so did their voters. They chose this, many times. There were many opportunities for the republican party to rid itself of this ideology but they chose power.
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 UK has a monarchy with severely curtailed official powers. But it's a front. The UK is effectively run by the Crown, and the aristocrats have huge land, property, and investment/financial empires, own all the main media outlets, and set policy through their clients in the political system.
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.
It would also help to have a population without a deep-seated beef going back to the civil war. You arguably have two separate 'America's split down that historical line that might not ever see eye-to-eye and, just like the US itself has installed dictators or favourable governments by funding disruption abroad, it is open to be exploited the same way.
It's not really split down the historical line of north and south. What you are actually seeing are urbanization rates, with more urbanization in the north east (this was true and a factor during the civil war too). You can look at the county level voting maps to see this exists in the north too. If you look at only state level maps, then you lose that precision. It's not a north vs south thing, it's and urban vs rural thing.
I think there might be something to it: if you look at the correlation between commitment to maga beliefs and affection for the confederate flag, my guess is it would be fairly high
You might be surprised how many confederate flags are flown in rural Union states. You'd probably have an even higher correlation with the Gadsen. Weak correlations are everywhere, we're looking for the strongest, which appears to be urban vs rural.
Albion's rotten seed was never unified as one. Seeing the civil war as some unique historical genesis of the split-- instead of a national shotgun-wedding of sorts is completely backwards.
It wasn't much of a shotgun wedding. Yes, it was a common enemy/cause during the revolution, but then took years of debate for the constitution and years more for the bill of rights. Over time, we've forced more and more homogeneous (federal) laws. The more laws you pass, the more likely people are affected in the outgroups under the splits you mentioned and it compounds. All the concerns about states rights and small states being less powerful are still concerns for some groups of people today. We've essentially been eroding the initial status quo that had been agreed upon.
Personally I think calling it a shotgun wedding is one of my best metaphors of the week and perfectly evokes what I was going for. Contemporaries from like Lincoln's 2nd inaugural of course would call it finer things, like a national baptism etc. but shotgun wedding captures the borderer element, too. I like it and stand by it.
> Since trade is conducted largely in USD, that means other governments must purchase USD to trade.
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.
I was just thinking about this and I'll bet you anything that Trump is 100% hung up on the word "deficit" and that's about it. If we said "net importer" or "goods taker" or something like that we would not be in this situation.
To be fair this strategy will work if other countries cannot tolerate tariffs for long enough to come up with non-USD trade that is accepted by everyone. Which to be fair may take them a very long time.
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.
It's not really only about tariffs. It's about the net effect on all barriers of trade, such as currency manipulation, subsidies, regulations, etc. The formula (trade deficit / (imports * 2)) means that countries actually have to address the root of the problem and prove it before the US reduces their tariffs.
Having a trade surplus doesn’t mean you’re cheating.
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.
I agree that a deficit could be healthy and fine and doesn't mean that the other country is cheating. The problem is how some countries have ruined it for everyone else by exploiting the current system. For example, after the first round of Trump tariffs, Chinese companies began moving factories to Mexico in order to take advantage of USMCA.
A thought experiment. Imagine a small poor country far from the US, of 1 million people, where the average income is $3000 annually ($3 billion total household income). Imagine a factory in that country that produces shoes beloved in America.
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.
If you make an exception for this hypothetical country, then countries such as China would come in and build factories there and bypass their own tariffs. You're back to playing whack-a-mole.
I’m not talking about making an exception. I’m suggesting that a trade deficit can arise for reasons that have nothing to do with manipulation.
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.
Except that because the rule is clear, China will anticipate that doing this in another country will result in eventual increased tariffs. They will be able to see ahead that it's not worth making a big investment for that purpose. The optimal strategy changes to do more business with the US and/or build factories in the US.
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?
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.
> Since trade is conducted largely in USD, that means other governments must purchase USD to trade.
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.
Foreign countries buy USD through trade. Japan needs dollars for international trade so the US Treasury prints dollars and gives them to Japan and in return Japan gives the US Nintendo Switches or whatever. Those dollars go into the international trade system and some of those dollars will just circulate internationally indefinitely and won't ever make their way back to the US, hence the perpetual trade deficit. This is a great deal for the US because at the national level they effectively got those Nintendo Switches for free.
That’s not how that works. If Japan needs USD it goes to the forex market. That market represents a massive trade flow.
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.
The umbrella could already be gone. There are big question marks over how much the in-practice umbrella looks like the Ukraine war where the US State Department provokes something then Japan gets flattened in the crossfire. How much should they be paying for that?
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.
This is "broken window fallacy"[1] territory. In economic terms defense spending is mostly waste because a lot of it doesn't get used (hopefully) or gets used to blow other stuff up causing net damage. The fact that it creates jobs is better than nothing, but spending the same money on infrastructure would increase the future productivity of the country.
The defense budget is a social support program that conservatives will agree to. Rather than just providing people a basic income and healthcare directly, they add the hoop of holding down a job to access it.
It also is meant to keep American industry active (to some degree) in case it is needed.
No one else can project conventional military force anywhere on the global like the US. China is getting there but not quite yet. India and Russia are still regional.
The Europeans couldn't deal with a few land pirates practically in their backyard.
If the US has convinced itself that able-bodied young men who are good at following orders are the people who need social support then it is quite a bit worse than mere waste. That is $800 billion spent keeping the US's best labour out of the labour force.
The US isn't sending sad cases over to Japan to cash welfare checks.
People trade in USD because the US is the largest of large economies. Everyone trading in USD understands already that the US can manipulate its own currency. But they take a low-risk bet that it probably would have far less incentive or inclination to do so than an authoritarian state like China or a small economy like Argentina. Capital flows to the US because the dollar has been "safe"... it inflates, but predictably slower. The Chinese regime is more than capable of opening the illusion of free markets and making 50-year promises not to interfere with free trade and capital, tempting foreign investment, only to break those promises with an iron fist.
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.
That doesn’t matter. In modern forex markets you can convert 50 million yen to USD. Do a trade with another country for EUR or whatever. Then convert it back to USD the same day.
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.
I think you’re somewhat missing the point, which is that the collapse of the dollar as the reserve currency around the world will eventually lead to default of US debt, which has cascading consequences domestically and internationally. This is the direction the US is heading if it really continues to alienate its allies and try to “fix” its trade deficit.
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.
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.
> Foreign countries buy US dollars so they can trade with other people
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.
In simple terms, if you're the Philippines and you're selling fish to Russia, would you rather have Rubles or US dollars? Way back in time, US Dollars were one to one based on gold in fort knox. Right? But no country has a gold reserve now. Most countries have a dollar reserve to back the paper money they print themselves. This is the main reason the dollar hasn't collapsed already.
[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.
It seems that other currencies have their own peculiarities; for example, when Russia sold oil to India for Indian rupees (to show that they don't want dirty American currency), they found out that you cannot transfer them outside of India or convert; you need to spend them locally.
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?
China maintains a soft peg on the yuan in order to keep their industrial output cheap.
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.
It's likely not beneficial to them, for a couple reasons.
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 wonder can China use this to make Yuan a new world currency
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.
don't get me wrong. I'm writing everything I'm saying because I desperately do not want America to go on a trajectory where it loses all credibility and becomes as bad as all the other human rights abusers.
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.
The fishermen will get paid in pesos but the company will be paid in dollars. And the company will probably put their dollars in a bank outside the Philippines, which only accepts dollars, euros or swiss francs.
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.
Where does the Russian company get its Philippine Peso from?
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.
but it's not easy to come by large amounts of Philippine pesos in Russia, cause no-one wants to hold significant amount of foreign currency they can't use for anything else. In some cases it may even be legally problematic.
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
For this the Russian buyer would have to previously sell something to the Philippines and accept pesos. Why would they accept those pesos if they are not generally accepted elsewhere?
> 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.
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.
> In simple terms, if you're the Philippines and you're selling fish to Russia, would you rather have Rubles or US dollars?
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?
The challenge is that for a lot of countries, the forex markets for their own currency aren’t deep enough to settle all of their international trade.
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...
Power abhors a vacuum. No such thing can exist without some state eventually dominating 51% of it. We've just tested this out since 2009 and it's already obvious that no crypto can escape state control, because the ingress and egress points are already under state control. Short of establishing your own colony on the moon or Mars, this ain't gonna happen.
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.
This is a gross misunderstanding of what a currency actually is.
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.
A currency is a social construct but it doesn't just come down to people who trade in the currency in a decentralized sense: the US govt imposes taxes on economic activity, and demands those taxes be paid in dollars (as other states do in their respective currencies), and this is enforced by the coercive power of the state, which is ultimately based on its military strength, since that's the ultimate guarantor of the continued existence of all the other institutions of the state.
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.
This is easy. We're sitting here texting on an American platform and both willing to say that the imprisonment rate in America is abysmal, that in its history America has supported awful dictatorships and racist regimes.
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.
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.
Right. Next question being, of the current contenders for crown in a unipolar world, which one would you want to live in - and which would you think your children and their children had a chance of improving and being free in, rather than being slaves? Because if there's a better option than America, I'll move there.
Everything changes. The America of 20 years ago is different from the America of today, and will be different in 20 years again (I have no idea how). Likewise for Europe (either individual countries or the EU). Will Argentina finally get of the constant ruin from decades of unchecked leftism and become a world power in 20 years - who knows. Some of the changes will be good and some bad. There are things to like and dislike about every option. So far I'm holding out hope that the US and Europe both overall remain good choices. 20 years ago I was expecting China to become a good choice, but now they are not. I didn't even think of Vietnam 20 years ago, but they have some good signs (I'm not sure if there are enough). There are a few countries in Africa that are doing good things even though the continent as a whole is a string of one bad thing after another.
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.
>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.
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.
I'm sorry, but going back to my very first post on here, staying in living memory, the US has a vast litany of egregious human rights offences to its name. This is an objective fact of record.
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.
> going back to my very first post on here…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.
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.
FYI I'm writing from a former Soviet state and need no lectures and whatifs on matters of the USSR.
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.
> 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.
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.
Unfortunately the world bodies like the UN are overwhelmingly stocked with dictatorships ranging from Angola to Russia which have no interest in civil liberties or human rights. While they frequently claim the US to be the world's greatest human rights abuser, as you have, they perpetrate mass murder on their own citizens. The living memory of my family from Odesa, who survived the holocaust, who survived the famine, to see the invasion of Ukraine and the butchery of Hamas, while the culprits and murderers themselves run the United Nations and ICJ, and while people trying to survive are told they are the worst war criminals in history by the people whose history is one of ceaseless murder tells me that it's better to be American and, if necessary, spit out all those organizations for their lies.
Ok. Name a country 249 years ago that wasn't a conquering power, that didn't commit atrocities and that didn't have slavery.
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.
The US's atrocities and slavery happened much more recently. And kept happening while other countries moved on to modern social democracy.
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
I'm pretty sure that Brazillians would raise their hand here.
> most importantly, name a single country that has had a peaceful democratic transition of power for more than half that time.
Does Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and UK count? Probably we can include France, Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. I'm sure other people here can name others.
Comparing that last list of countries, I do not think any has as strong protection of free speech as the US has. On the other hand the UK seems to be a LOT less racist - I think the other countries are some where in between the US and the UK.
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.
Looked at it. It is really an index of press/journalistic freedom, not free speech in general with is far broader (private individuals, right to protest, etc.)
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.
Well, given that countries are a relatively new thing, that's a question that's complex to answer.
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.
whew. Well, I and almost everyone I know are the sons and daughters of legal (and some illegal) immigrants to the US. Among us, a small group: Irish, Austrian, Persian, Jewish, Russian, Mexican, Filipina and Haitian. I've actually only met a few people in my life who claimed their family had been here more than 3 generations. My grandparents were illegal aliens who were granted amnesty. As such, almost everyone I know is very pro-immigration. We're all aware that there are nativist forces out there who think America is just a white christian nation, but I don't run into them much.
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.
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?
Why do you believe everything the western media tells you as they lie about everything relating to Israel and Palestine?
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).
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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.
It's scale. North Korea is mainly abusing North Korean human rights, the US has brutalised many more countries, not incidentally including Korea.
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.
This sounds obvious: No country extends civil rights abroad that they don't extend to their own citizens. If Russia or China can't even give their own citizens a fair hearing for exercising their opinions against the government, what hope have their colonial subjects?
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.
> One can easily imagine a counter-history in which any of the forces America fought against had run over neutral countries without opposition
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)
South Korea was torn apart by a brutal US-led war; Japan nuked, twice, by the US. For every country where US barbarism has led to stable, peaceful societies, there are countless ruined shells: see Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya for recent examples.
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.
What rights does Russia give its citizens? Any? I suppose they're allowed to live as long as they speak not a single word against their boss, and are perfectly obedient slaves...
What rights does Russia give to Ukrainian civilians? Not even a right to live.
Absolutely crazy when we see countries like China not be close to as bad as the most evil empire ever, the US. And yet somehow the thought is the US isn’t the worst with human rights.
When I was in my early 20s in Thailand I hated America under George W Bush. I had a conversation with a Tibetan guy who was on his way to sneak into China to help his village in Tibet which had been invaded back in the 50s, then colonized. He was going to help dig wells.
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.
Tibet was a slave society. What are you talking about? Tibet was also a part of China for many many years.
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.
Because you can easily and cheaply convert USD to any other currency, and because it is the usual currency for international trade you can use it to pay someone else.
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.
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
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.
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.
Trading in USD means that all your transactions become known by a third party (US). That is why everyone should be interested in cutting out the middle man.
Other currencies are not always great: for example, being under sanctions Russia sold oil to India for Indian rupees; then it found out that you cannot simply take rupees abroad or exchange and you need to invest them locally [1].
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.
>But I also wonder what's wrong with other currencies and why they are not used more often.
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.
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.
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 :) )
> 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.
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.
If India buys a widget off Brazil it will probably be paid in dollars. Therefore, people need to own dollars. Thus a demand for US debt. This lowers the potential interest rate. Other countries who's currency is not a need for people to buy, their debt is purchased by the attractiveness of its offering (i.e interest rate). If US dollar is no longer required than government bonds have to be attractive. Also, not all sovereign debt is issued in the home countries currency, which means that the printing press doesn't help. US debt is very large, interest repayment are close to military spending. Without the reserve currency that would get worse. Something like 68% of world holding is dollar 17% Euro, nothing else of note.
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.
It's typical Empire Hubris: thinking you can get away with anything because you are special.
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.
I agree, losing reserve currency status would make American gdp / living standards to come way closer to Europe for the simple fact it won't be able to permanently increase its debt deficits.
However its far from clear losing reserve status is going to happen, sure some countries will try to diversify but others are probably too tight inside the American umbrella (for defense for example).
But yeah, surprises can happen so interesting times.
> would make American gdp / living standards to come way closer to Europe
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?
> 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.
No. They’re not, anywhere in Europe. This is a mystifying talking point based on wishful thinking and vastly overestimating the non-monetary value of a larger social safety net. The median US citizen is much, much richer. The first quintile US citizen is fairly comparable to first quintile Europeans in income and in-kind transfers.
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.
> others are probably too tight inside the American umbrella (for defense for example).
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.
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.
> which is the kind of opportunity that doesn't usually come around twice.
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.
I could say the same about the period of peace in the USA which is only from 1865 (Edit: 1865 is the civil war, but thought hey let's look, and it seems there were conflicts with Indians up to 1924!) . It is an exception, because before that it was "the wild west", with various conflicts around.
And not sure how this will play out long term, I don't get an impression that USA states are so aligned on everything.
> I could say the same about the period of peace in the USA which is only from 1865
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?
> Europe had been on fire off and on for hundreds of years.
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 ...
> 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.
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.
> But... it's not. 160 years of straight uninterrupted time without total war out of 250 makes no-total-war the norm,
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.
Since you edited to reply to my comment I'm stuck leaving a second reply: the conflicts with Indians were not at all the same as the kind of total war we're talking about with the wars of religion, Napoleonic Wars, and the World Wars. The subject of this thread is wars that lead to mass destruction of national power and lead to other countries taking the lead.
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.
>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.
By BRICS I've mean China and the Yuan. And in China there is exactly one person, who is deciding how reasonable or unreasonable any policy will be tomorrow.
Although it now seems as if that was massively inaccurate, things were very near to turning out completely differently in the first days of the war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlttS0N7uVA
And they're backing down on just enough woke stuff due to the concern about the lack of participation of checked-out-of-society White men in said (world) war.
Everyone puts taxes on some sectors. It's economic policy. Trump is not doing economic policy. He's using a simple formula to ideologically reduce trade deficit. No matter the consequences!
Trust the experts: America will be poorer because of these tariffs.
Why don’t you show some data supporting a more clearly-stated theory? All countries use economic policy, but there’s usually some kind of strategy involved - for example, the EU has a tariff on American steel and aluminum because that was retaliation from Trump’s earlier tariffs. Similarly, a lot of the EU agricultural duties are both protecting local industries but also enforcing quality or safety standards (this is also the reason for the Australian beef imbalance the President mentioned: they have a strict mad cow containment plan American producers dont follow).
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.
God damn you nailed it. All the stupid wars for nothing. Rarely do I see anyone talk about these shenanigans as the mechanism to end the reserve status of the $ and the end for influence and affluence. It will breed a lot of resentment from some Americans thinking the world is against them. They could be used for war.
> 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
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.
The entirety of this scheme, in its soft and hard power forms, was financed by the parasitic impoverishment of the US populace. Everything the commenters on this site complain about: Runaway inflation, unaffordable housing, extreme financialization, excessive military budget, enrichment of the top, unaffordable healthcare, unjustifiable wars, all of it has partial or total roots in the money printing, artificially low interest rates, colossal trade deficits, and military adventurism that underpin the global US dollar reserve scheme.
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.
Why is it a binary choice? This is just reductive. The idea that we couldn't maintain American hegemony and return more of the benefits of it to the middle/lower classes seems silly.
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.
A wild claim, and then zero explanation as to how it would work, plus the same old tired talking points. If you're trying to convince the populace NOT to democratically give up the global empire, this is a poor attempt.
My on-the-ground experience visiting Portland, Seattle, and LA in just the last few years showed me all I needed to know. I'm not being hyperbolic. Compared to the rest of the country, it's not even a contest.
The Pax Americana died during the first week of the Trump administration when he proceeded to turn on practically every single one of US' long standing allies and dissolve NATO for all intents and purposes. All the soft power disappeared right there.
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.
I'd feel a lot better about it if more countries held values of free speech and democracy. If mainland China were like Taiwan, great. Unfortunately I fear those might just end up being viewed as instruments of America's decline.
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.
"because inflating our currency to pay for them could result in functionally not being able to import goods required to run our economy."
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.
The US issues debt in dollars and repays those debts in dollars. The purchasing power of dollars can change due to inflation. If you suddenly increase the global supply of dollars by 2x, dollars that existed prior to the increased supply will be able to purchase less.
That's true for domestic public debt. But in the scenario given by the parent where the dollar falls out of favor, it is assumed that we could be issuing public foreign debt in foreign currency. Even if it was still domestic currency, the FX rate would matter to the foreign investors. Interest rates matter. So does inflation. Money supply is less relevant than the actual inflation it generates. Most debt instruments rely on the interest rates that fluctuate based on monetary policy to combat inflation. Eg your interest on debt will increase as your inflation rate does. Even the world bank will jack up your interest if your currency has issues, such as rampant inflation.
> it is assumed that we could be issuing public foreign debt in foreign currency.
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.
There are multiple structures for foreign debt instruments, of which your definition is one. Even using your example, the "(in USD)" is the part that might change if USD falls out of favor as the context of this chain is discussing.
> If you suddenly increase the global supply of dollars by 2x, dollars that existed prior to the increased supply will be able to purchase less.
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.
> The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency.
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.
One thing I don’t understand here, genuine question: If, hypothetically, US manufacturing was to become so competitive that the trade deficit would go away, would that have the same disastrous effects for the US dollar as a trade/reserve currency? Or how would that work?
It's impossible for both things to be true. For the dollar to be the reserve currency countries need to accumulate dollars. They can't do that unless more dollars leave the US than come back.
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.
US manufacturing is better than it ever has been by all measures except number of people working in them. This means that there isn't much need for someone to get good at putting a nut on a bolt and other such mindless work that is skilled only in that with a lot of practice you can get really fast as doing it. People who don't want to spend a lot of years in school are thus not doing very well because there isn't much need for people who don't want to use their brain.
When the history is written I think the Citizens United decision might be pegged as the end of the American republic. It allowed endless amounts of dark money including foreign money to pour into US elections.
In any case, I think we're seeing the beginning of the Chinese century.
1) Chicago-school interest groups successfully putting people on courts and in the legislature to all but completely eliminate anti-trust enforcement, starting in the '70s. TL;DR policy used to be that a company holding too much market share was per se bad for the country and that the government could act on it, the shift added more tests making it slower (so, also more expensive) and harder to successfully enforce anti-trust, so much so that we all but stopped doing it.
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.
A lot of people fundamentally misunderstand why trade happens in USD and what creates demand for USD.
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.
> 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
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?
>> 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.
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.
This comment is good, yet it also reflects a lot of what I dislike about political discourse online.
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.
Yeah, the whole "decapitation strike" talking point betrays a serious bias. It also implies something which no evidence is provided for. The idea that foreign actors got someone elected, then managed to get that person to implement a specific strategy that rapidly destroys the dollar as a reserve currency, all for the benefit of the foreign actor, is quite the stretch.
>The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency.
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.
I certainly wont disagree with the US not representing any moral heights especially now, however do you have sources for the US being particularly egregious in relation to its peers in its actions?
Anyone who has been paying attention to the body count since the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 can tell you that the rest of the world has a long, long way to go to catch up with the atrocities committed by the American people across the globe, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria and Libya, Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen (which the USA and its partners were mass-murdering for 15 years already before the current conflict), and now .. Gaza .. for which the American people are very definitely responsible as major funders and supporters of that particularly vile act of mass murder.
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:
Anyone paying attention may have been mislead as you have been, but your own sources highest estimates aggregated (which is likely 1.5-2x higher than reality) put the US around 1/5 of all deaths combatant and civilian in this cherry picked time period. The reality is that there is a LOT of war happening and death happening and the US is only one of the players.
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.
Have you actually looked at the numbers or are you just bound and determined to stick to your opinion regardless of facts or reality?
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.
I have looked at the numbers, almost every day since March 2003.
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?
>You seem to want to finish this argument without actually looking at any statistics.
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.
Russia is the number one war criminal in the world. Of course now that Russia owns American leadership, we can partially blame them for American human rights abuses.
That is correct, and this is a terrifying fact to any American nationalist who believes their country can do no wrong, as evidenced by the downvotes of an absolute truth.
>Russia is the number one war criminal in the world.
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.
I agree that the US bears significant responsibility for the ~5% civilian deaths in Iraq. These were through:
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 Euro is already a reserve currency and makes up about 20% of worldwide reserves. Which is of course not as much as the dollar which is about 60%, but these numbers could of course shift.
The new reserve currency won't be a single country's currency but a basket of currencies, where the ratio contribution of component currencies gets adjusted every once in a while.
BRICS has been proposing a sort of basket mechanism. Bitcoin is not yet thickly enough capitalized. The historical standard was gold for 3000 years, and that's what backed the dollar until that was "temporarily suspended" in 01971. That's the default.
The Chinese yuan is not a viable reserve currency. Why? Because it's pegged to a basket of other currencies. It should really inflate in value but Chinese government policy is to undervalue it to aid exports. Exports are ~20% of China's economy. It would devastate the economy if the yuan was allowed to freely float, or at least float with the level of central bank management that other developed nations' fiat currencies have.
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.
>It's just a group of randomly selected countries meant to sound nice
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.
Bitcoin would be the most fair choice for a new reserve currency. It has equivalent properties as gold but is more practical to use, and there's no geographic inequality to mining it.
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.
Gold was the reserve asset for most part of human history and was less spendable than bitcoins (harder to divide some gold than to send a fraction of a bitcoin).
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.
I don’t get why it matters what currency people use - all currency is exchangeable, isn’t it? What does it matter if you buy something for dollars or pounds or euros or yen?
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?
My long term wish is in 40 years, after civil wars/world war and rebuilding efforts, that we discover a better alternative to democracy; we have gone all in on it the past 200+ years and is utterly exploitable in the information age, as the populace gets less informed and more malleable to any malicious actor. It is a pretty fatal problem if the success of your government model depends on citizens not being total idiots.
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’m past the point of thinking people are just being crazy or paranoid. Any baffling move this administration makes, I just ask myself: what would Russia want?
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.
It is not correct that an Asian business doing business with a Italian company first exchanges their currency to USD by selling the US goods then using that USD to complete the transaction.
I agree with you that the current situation in the world really benefits the US and the current policies seem to undermine that.
> It is not correct that an Asian business doing business with a Italian company first exchanges their currency to USD by selling the US goods then using that USD to complete the transaction.
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.
Yes... and no. Having own currency as a global reserve currency has its disadvantages too. For instance it keeps value of the currency high, what makes whole USA production noncompetitive. USA exports two things: internet services (all those Googles, Facebooks, etc.) and military equipment.
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.
>Another thing is that for years USA was in a sense donating European industry,
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.
Tech giants have no competition in Europe and no capital to do so. In some ways, what Trump is doing is a call to arms for the EU to kick their economies into shape.
We've been stuck in 0 growth for years, the UK is in a 0 growth trap since the GFC.
> For instance it keeps value of the currency high, what makes whole USA production noncompetitive.
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.
More people are in debt than have savings, the government itself included. Populism (of both left and right varieties) is surely associated with inflation.
I agree tariffs are harmful and counterproductive, even if they're applied by the other side. My only hope is that this is part of some grand bargain where other countries reduce theirs on US goods and things reach a more balanced equilibrium.
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.
> My only hope is that this is part of some grand bargain where other countries reduce theirs on US goods and things reach a more balanced equilibrium.
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.
The average effective tariffs on US imports to the EU are 2.7%, whereas for EU imports to the US they are 2.2% (i.e. weighting the various tariff rates by their respective trade volume). So there is a minor imbalance, but imposing 20% (and claiming 39%) is ridiculous.
I agree that if it was part of a grand bargain it wouldn't be so large, which makes me think its either just an insane opening play or it's being used to change how the US funds itself (the second part of my response)
That's an over-simplified answer. There are many people who share in the blame. Him for doing it as a visible catalyst, everyone who voted for him, presidential advisers who recommended these disastrous policies, and those who sat idly by and let the country be destroyed without acting to prevent it, especially those with greater-than-ordinary power who failed to act.
Software is easily pirated. It is official policy in Russia now to pirate the software used by enterprises (like SAP, Autocad etc), to own the western libs.
> It is the definitive end to it, and the birth of Chinese hegemony.
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.
Something tells me that both China and Russia know all this and yet, the US administration is completely blind to it or are naively playing into their hands.
I'm convinced Trump is 100% sincere in his belief that his economic ideas are brilliant and will lead the US to a golden age.
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).
He’s a spoilt brat who’s never been told no. That’s all it is. He grew up rich. He’s never had to develop himself or face adversity. He’s even been able to fail, over and over again, and still come out on top.
That only explains part of his behavior. Something peculiar to Trump's mindset is the pervasiveness of zero-sum thinking. There is nothing about growing up spoiled that necessarily creates this mindset; in fact I'd expect the opposite (by which I mean, I wouldn't expect people who are never forcibly confronted with scarcity and zero-sum competition, to be obsessed by scarcity and zero-sum competition).
That may be true, but I’d argue that’s just plain stupidity. Animals and toddlers exhibit similar behaviour - not understanding that collaboration and sharing can lead to overall better outcomes.
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.
Stupidity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for believing in Trump's particular delusions. You can be stupid and not delude yourself into thinking that others must lose for you to win.
What this analysis is missing is Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation and a hundred other conservative thinktanks, as well as half of Congress are all in on a singular plan to transform America into a backwater shit hole. Trump might earnestly believe these things, but he is not the source of most of his ideas. They are spoonfed to him.
I agree that Project 2025 broadly sets the agenda, but when it comes to tariffs specifically, I'm under the impression that Trump is singularly obsessed with them and the conservative think tanks are, even if they're pro-tariff, uneasy with how far he's going with it.
Don’t forget Curtis Yarvin and his band of billionaire Silicon Valley VC adherents.
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
There are those in the States who want to devalue the dollar as a pathway to greater industrialization and domestic productive capacity. The idea is to make the US labor force competitive with the rest of the world.
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.
> There are those in the States who want to devalue the dollar as a pathway to greater industrialization and domestic productive capacity. The idea is to make the US labor force competitive with the rest of the world.
> 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.
I’ve mentioned this on HN before and I agree. Going backwards will not result in the US going upwards, doing the things that made the US successful until are not the same things that will make the US successful in the future.
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.
Maybe Russia, that's the only country which has not been slapped with tariffs. Apart from Russia, there are nuances. There are peaceful enemies like the EU, Canada, Australia etc. and there are threatening enemies like the Houthis or Iran.
> This is a decapitation strike (Timothy Snyder: Decapitation Strike -- https://archive.is/1xkxK) on America by our enemies
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.
"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.
I assure you that the fantasy of this being a band-aid rip-off moment will turn sour when the sore becomes infected and you're living through a depression.
I believe that's Trump's plan. According to the Triffin Dilemma, the source of US budgetary deficits are due to the USD being the world's reserve currency. Once that's not the case, trade should rebalance to a healthy surplus.
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.
It's not "dumping the dollar" that would be a concern. It's bumping US federal treasury bills (the US debt) which are mostly held by China, the UK, Luxembourg, and Canada. If the latter three just dump their T-bills in retaliation (and do nothing else) the dollar will bottom out. Also, the likely buyer is China. End result: China owns the US and the RMB becomes the new reserve currency.
> 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.
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.
> Europe already has the mindset US military support is no longer a given. Europe is already re-arming.
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.
The Trump admin wants to devalue the dollar substantially, enact protectionism and maintain its reserve status. I can see them succeed with the latter two, but with these actions, the world has no choice but to move away from the USD as the reserve currency. It will take many years, but whatever replaces it certainly won't be to the US's advantage.
My take on all this is that everyone seems focused on the U.S. dollar’s dominance, the empire, trade deficits, and exchange rates. And sure, there’s some validity to that, but the real issue, or really the real goal, is getting people back to work.
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.
Not one single job was moved offshore by a foreign country. Every single one was moved offshore by an American business looking to reduce costs and increase the quarterly bottom line.
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.
> Not one single job was moved offshore by a foreign country. Every single one was moved offshore by an American business looking to reduce costs and increase the quarterly bottom line.
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.
> Every single one was moved offshore by an American business looking to reduce costs and increase the quarterly bottom line.
> 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.
Yes, this is the theory. Also to return manufacturing to the US, for jobs but also for national security. If a major war breaks out, which is more likely than in the past 2 decades, we can't effectively fight without a strong manufacturing base.
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.
"A nation that can’t produce [physical goods] can’t stand."
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.
> 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.
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.
That all seems built on some romantic notion that a job making physical objects ("working with their hands") is fundamentally better than a job providing a service ("staring at screens"). But it's not obvious there is a lot of factual support for the idea, either on the level of individual jobs or the economy as a whole. You could certainly use protectionist barriers or subsidies to try to force industries like ship building back to the US, but would the US really be economically better off overall if you did so?
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.
The US can use internal policies to support the industries and skills you mentioned. Tariffs as implemented, and greatly damaging longstanding relationships with allies, will have the opposite effect. The existing lead in services will be lost, consumption will drop, and the increase in production of goods due to tariffs won't offset it. I would recommend you read the outcome of the Smoot Hawley tariffs.
I hate this mindset that Americans are lazy, they are usually some of the hardest working people in the globe. The wealthy are greedy, and wealth and power continue to concentrate at the top while infrastructure, working conditions and public services crumble. I don't fault anyone for not wanting to contribute to that, quite the opposite. I don't see how the jobs you mentioned are going to start commanding better wages when everyone has to rush to do them because there are no more options.
There is no American hegemony in this current day and age. Probably dead like 15 years ago.
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.
If he isn't a smart man, he can't be US president TWICE. Or being book smart is irrelevant. He didn't talk the way the political class prefers for sure, but it doesn't matter.
I judge things by outcomes, even Trump doesn't lack any credentials.
> If he isn't a smart man, he can't be US president TWICE.
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 :-)
The real traitor is Biden who handed the presidency to Trump and only cared about covering himself and his family asses. I think that was the point where you realize the democrats have just given up and did their part of selling the country. Some people must be now moving Bitcoin, Gold and other valuables out of the country before the big unveiling kinda like what happened with the soviet union.
This is why I don't get why my EU people are attacking Trump - he singlehandedly gave Europe political capital to rebuild itself as an independent player on the international stage. He created an environment where tighter EU integration might take precedence over petty interest squabbles. For example in what other scenario would Germany making massive investments in military be politically acceptable ? Even talking about military on EU level ?
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.
Because they would prefer functional pro democratic world rather then constant struggle for domination with fascists from Russia and USA at the same time. EU people don't want to become poorer or suffer, not even to "own the USA".
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 ?
Probably to give Russia concessions in the Ukraine negotiations.
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.
Well, EU did paid and supported Ukraine. EU are not the ones who allied themselves with Russia and tried to bully Ukraine into giving them minerals for nothing in return. America is the only country that took others in NATO into war under article 5. Ukraine was also left out of that conversation, this was just Trump being openly pro-Russia.
>EU are not the ones who allied themselves with Russia
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.
I did not said they are perfect and prescient and saint. They are not like Trump.
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.
I don't think anyone has a problem with europe being a more independent player, it becoming a necessity is what people are upset about. I'd rather have germany make massive investments in infrastructure and health reform than its military.
This line of thinking is exactly what got us into this situation. If you want to outsource your defense how can you be surprised when you get ignored in the Ukraine discussions and when the US feels free to just annex parts of your territory. What's your recourse ?
The 'outsourcing' has always been for the benefit of US defence corporations.
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.
>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.
Exactly, and with the recent moves Trump administration is directly calling out EU to arm - so a good development in my book.
It’s weirder than this though. Why would Europe need to rearm? If it’s to defend against potential enemies, why is the US cosying up with those same countries?
There is no free trade, EU was tariff heavy and protectionist since forever, in fact that's probably the primary motivator for creating it - a single European market where they get to control the imports. Trump is brash and escalating it suddenly but this game is not new.
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.
> There is no free trade, EU was tariff heavy and protectionist since forever
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 line of thinking is exactly what got us into this situation.
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.
>This is why I don't get why my EU people are attacking Trump - he singlehandedly gave Europe political capital to rebuild itself as an independent player on the international stage.
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.
Because it's a bit like someone telling you that they're going to burn your house down so you can claim on the insurance and you'll be better off.
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.
Some say many EU politicians are compromised by Russia and China...
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)
The UK will need a lot of time to be seen again as a grown-up, after electing a string of buffoons and cutting off its nose to spite its face. Even though Starmer looks more stable, a large part of that look is due to his opposition being in complete chaos and functionally useless.
Both the French and the Poles are urging Germany to rearm. As well as the EU, actually, through both the commission and the parliament. The whole "European countries are afraid of Germany invading" argument is not really a thing.
For context: the French and the German have been alternatively at war and allies since the times of Clovis and Charlemagne, a millenium before Bismark made modern Germany a thing (in occupied Versailles, in what was perfectly calibrated to be a complete French humiliation). And the Poles were on the wrong side of brutal occupation and a genocide during WWII. So both countries would have good reasons to be very skeptical of a powerful Germany.
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.
Last century there was the big two, World War One and World War Two. If you go back further it’s more complicated, but the short answer is that Germanic states got into wars with their neighbours a lot. The Wikipedia article has categories.
> The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency.
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.
It stops them from having to address their national debt, has allowed for incredible spending and the arguably pushed humanity forward with the wonderful inventions. Without it, it will be interesting to see how the future unfolds.
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