Let's make a deal

What would you be willing to pay for the following?

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America just cut a deal with Donald Trump. Even though he remains unusually unpopular to the majority of Americans, who return the favor by generally disapproving his Project 2025-articulated agenda, Trump clearly drew enough support (as did the GOP in general) — in what was yet another throw-the-bums outcome patterned across the world this year — to earn a mandate for the next two years. Fond popular memories of the early Trump years, which turbocharged and extended the growth trajectory achieved under Obama 2 (primarily through massive tax cuts), provided Trump with sufficient benefit of the doubt among a still largely unhappy and pissed off electorate to easily dispatch a widely perceived non-change candidate in Harris, who carried the burden of representing the undesired type of change (woman of color) for many among our ranks.

To state the obvious, an angry America is a very male America.

Is this a realignment of the electorate? If Trump had approval ratings like Reagan in 1984, I would say yes. But he doesn’t. He has his fervent base (about 45%), an equally fervent opposition (similarly sized), and — for now — just enough of that independent middle (the last 10%) to really run wild for two years before facing the next collective judgment of the people.

Trump’s culture-war and anti-government agenda, articulated mostly by his underlings, is sure to anger a great deal of America with the damage it will cause, but that is part of the deal here: fix the economy and you can do what you want to the government and society. This is the essential deal of all strong men and we’ll see how it goes with Trump.

All the culture war stuff can — and will inevitably — be reversed with time, as they are all merely history-delaying tactics (unless you really believe it is possible to turn back time, which I don’t). America’s multiculturalism isn’t going away; it’s just going to be badgered and belittled and somewhat cowed for a time, with rituals of sacrifice (mass deportations) to both reassure (Whites) and condition (recent and obviously nervous legal immigrants).

Tucker Carlson’s Daddy’s home vibe applies here: big tough White male is going to set everything — and everyone — straight.

Let the purge begin!

Along those lines, a big part of me welcomes a largely un-opposable Republican splurge/purge that clearly reveals the long-term agenda of the party’s most right-wing adherents. Better to get out in the open for all to see, and then we’ll ride the inevitable counter-reaction — more fun all around!

That’s the domestic part of my favored equation right now: America gets the political leadership it deserves for the period in question. There is a political responsiveness in this, no matter the tumult and self-harm that results. Societies, just like people, have to learn. So, we’ll see what large tax cuts and tariffs and axing major portions of the US government will get us in terms of fearing the future less (the constant goal of the middle class). I, naturally, don’t see the long-term fix in any of this, just delaying tactics befitting White Christian nationalism (We must hold off them Demon-crats!).

It’s the rest of the world that interests me more during this two-year experiment, because the rest of the world doesn’t deserve this leadership right now.

Why? Because it plays into the West’s worst political impulses at a time when we should be matching/countering China’s “digital colonialization” of the Global South with suitable integration schemes of our own.

Of course, this is why Beijing welcomes a return to Trumpism, because it leaves that vast field of competition almost exclusively to China. Yes, there will be pain to be suffered from a “chaos president,” but Beijing sees that as an acceptable (even desirable) deal for the next two years. Plus, which Chinese don’t enjoy watching the smug Americans self-destruct?

So, let’s imagine how that deal unfolds globally, asking merely the question of “what is this going to cost me,” with me being world order.

I’ve long liked this backward-looking counterfactual trick of jumping back in time, presenting the deal’s outcome (leveraging that foreknowledge) and then asking the party in question, Would you take that deal?

So, say I come to you in 1985 and tell you that I can get rid of the entire Soviet bloc threat, thanks to the whole thing collapsing in on itself, with zero East-West war, and all it is going to cost you is some nasty blood-letting in the Balkans — that’s it! (Okay, there’d be a massive blood-letting in central Africa but virtually no one would notice, much less care).

Would you take that deal?

Of course you would.

Would you find that pathway plausible?

No, you would not.

But, looking back at it from the year 2000, would you be ecstatic with that deal?

Would you ever.

That’s a fun one because the punchline is so positive (recall the “peace dividend” and the go-go Nineties that set in motion “peak globalization”).

Now, let’s try a less fun one:

An almost three-decade global boom (1990-2008) that lifts hundreds of millions out of poverty globally and all it is going to cost you is a certain amount of radical Islamic terrorism in reply (gotta happen sometime and isn’t it better to unfold while China and Russia are largely dormant?), triggering some nasty and costly US military interventions in southwest Asia (because we [America] don’t do restraint).

That’s a tougher one to swallow from a strictly American perspective, but still … from the perspective of me (world order), that’s a great deal, especially because it diverts the Leviathan’s attention from rising China, allowing that rise to fully flower — and yes, from my (world order) perspective, that’s a good deal because of how China’s rise fuels global growth.

Ah, but here we face the follow-on costs: Now China is a serious equal on many power levels (superpower tensions, “pivot” to Asia, We took our eye off the ball!), and it’s still very Chinese (and not Americanized into strategic subordination as demanded by the truly naive within our ranks).

Yes, Russia has predictably relapsed into authoritarian irredentism (seeking the return of “sacred” lost lands) in its usual split-personality dynamics of Westernization/pan-Slavism, but we (world order) incorporated the vast majority of the old Soviet empire’s states into an expanded and super-empowered EU and NATO (Yay! says world order).

But here we come to the real cost of that success (which I, as world order, totally owe to America’s decades-long effort to build me up on the basis on free trade and collective security enforced by the US military), as we discover, quite unpleasantly in 2008, that globalization is now beyond our (America’s) control. Moreover, its competitive dynamics, driven overwhelmingly by automation and technological advances, have seriously hollowed out our political system’s democratic core — its satisfied and optimistic middle class.

Yes, say I (world order), that’s a tougher one for my Leviathan (America) to swallow, and yet I count on that singular superpower to rebalance itself internally and externally. So, still, I’m loving this deal.

The costs are marginal (yes, I, world order, am, for now, still blowing off climate change — the mother of all externalities triggered by globalization) and the gains are enormous: namely, the rise of a global majority middle class and a clear pathway to the Global South’s future integration at the hands of the Chinese, plus the rising Indians, plus the ambitious Persian Gulf monarchies. In sum, globalization’s integrating dynamics have become self-sustaining — no longer so clearly dependent on America’s pervasively guiding hand (and occasionally clenched fist).

As world order, this is success beyond my wildest dreams. America has done me a huge good and now just needs to get its own house in order for what comes next.

Ah, but what comes next is demographic collapse across the Global North and climate change’s decimation of the Global South.

Damn it all to hell! Says I (world order).

Now I (world order, and, to a certain degree, America too) feel like Michael Corleone in Godfather III:

So, despite my (America’s) sequential electing of a trio of nation-building-at-home presidents (Obama, Trump, Biden), shit still happens. What should be a logical rebalancing at home gets all caught up in culture wars stemming from the reality of America’s ongoing racial makeover, triggering a nativist, isolationist White Christian nationalist response right out of the 1930s.

Paging Father Coughlin!

Whoa! Says world order. I didn’t order this up! You people were supposed to rebalance from your old market-making dominance of me (world order) into something more normal as a superpower, meaning you plus-up your self-interest, embrace a more market-playing role, and trust me (world order) more! That was the logical path forward!

Instead, America went overboard in its correction (Who could have seen that, given our history!). We (America) didn’t re-balance. Instead, we went full-bore nasty to both ourselves and the world, and, by embracing the ethno-nationalist rightwing populism infecting so many medium-sized powers right now, we’ve profoundly destabilized me (world order).

Remember your Benjamin (the truly brilliant) Friedman: the moral consequences of economic growth.

Damnit! I (world order) say: I said G-20, not G-Zero!

Yes, we had our G-20 moment, and it was great and performed quite admirably across the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession (preventing a second Great Depression). The problem is, America took that moment of collective success and basically pissed it away with Trump in 2016, triggering the counter-reaction of Biden in 2020, which changed our (America’s) course trajectory far too little, thus leaving open the door for Trump’s triumphant return.

Oh, says me (world order): I’m not liking this deal any more. Too much crazy stuff is likely to go down this time around. You people (America) are playing with fire and risk destroying me (world order).

Hence, the world’s sense of dread right now about Trump’s return. Not everybody, mind you. Moscow is ecstatic. Beijing is confident. Jerusalem is unhinged but determinedly —even passionately — so. Pyongyang contemplates something truly stupid and dangerous, but what else is new? Tehran is desperate and angry, but — again — what else is new?

As for all our friends and allies and the world’s bystanders (including me, world order), we’re not happy at all. We miss America, and we have no idea when she’s coming back in any sort of form we recognize and admire.

So, how bad does it get for me (world order)?

Let’s save that deal calculation for tomorrow.

I got leaves to mulch!

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