Let's Make a Deal (concluded)
What will it cost the US to learn the lessons (or just undergo the inevitable trauma) of Trump 2.0?
Let's make a deal
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Continuing from yesterday’s post …
Think ahead to January 2029, when odds are strong (I will argue) that a third Trump term (embodied either by Vance or somebody else) proves a bridge too far. There’s a decent chance Trump dies in office, given his age, but, even if Vance were to step up to the presidency, my sense is that he will not be popular — either personally or in terms of his association with whatever tumult unfolds over the next four years.
It’s not that I assume the economy will go bad, because I don’t, but rather that I think the government will go bad, so to speak, first and foremost in terms of ballooning deficits and reduced services and payments and performance. Federal tax-and-spend processes essentially see Blue states (which get $1.14 for every dollar they send to DC) underwrite Red states (which get $1.24). That average hides a lot of variation: to wit, Kentucky’s percentage of total revenues funded by federal aid sits at about 30%, or twice California’s share (14%).
So, either the Trump administration gets serious about inflicting some economic pain or the national debt skyrockets — as predicted by all experts who’ve studied the GOP agenda of tax cuts.
The idea that tariffs are going to make up the difference is … of course, complete nonsense — almost childlike in its innocent stupidity.
Trump will crave popularity and so I’m betting on a fiscal disaster that either triggers some political resistance here or some sovereign resistance abroad (or both). Either way, some discipline will eventually come to the fore, no matter how much the government schemes to fool itself, the public, and the world (who needs to keep buying our sovereign debt — otherwise we go bye-bye in terms of global standing/power).
So, let’s say America’s strategic attention with regard to the outside world is dramatically curtailed under the second Trump administration, as it busies itself with destroying the “deep state” and the “administrative state” and so on. Let’s assume the same weird dynamics unfold across the military, where the primary goal is to eradicate “wokeness” and other ideological bogeymen.
In sum, let’s project a significant pause in America’s diplomatic and defense ambitions/capabilities around the world — far more so than even under the unusually careful (even timid) Biden administration, meaning America’s period of strategic detachment extends to two full decades (2008-2028) — even longer than the previous “Vietnam syndrome” (let’s say, 1975-1991 Gulf War).
Let’s also say that this is the period wasted by our Boomer political class (certainly Trump is the last Boomer prez! Please God!) on all manner of internal culture wars Left and Right while the world “burned” or was transformed into a frighteningly even multipolarity where we end up being but one of a half-dozen or so truly great powers running the world through various fiefdoms (spheres of influence). Per my book, I’m thinking about the US, the EU, Russia (still), India, and China. But let’s toss in the Persian Gulf monarchies (basically, UAE and Saudi Arabia), whose ambitions to steer global developments expand year by year.
So, thinking perhaps from some mid-century vantage point where historians have seriously chronicled and analyzed the period of America’s great retreat from global leadership (2008-2028) — or my Era of Bad Feelings, what will be the costs of that period, that trajectory? How bad could it get? How not-so-bad might it get?
But more to the point: if that’s what it takes for America to finally right itself back into a more balanced leadership role within this world system of our creating (i.e., less the obsessed, control-freak market-maker and more the reasonable, one-of-several market-players who dominate and thus shape the system in a co-evolutionary sort of way), would we take that deal? Is it a decent trade?
Let’s start in the West: It’s not hard to imagine a 2028-and-beyond world where China is THE dominant integrating power across all of Latin America, with America having figuratively and literally walled itself off from that source of so many of our problems!
Jumping northward, it’s also not hard to imagine an Arctic that is far more dominated by the combined efforts of China and Russia than by a Moscow-cowed Europe, a Canada that feels increasingly on its own, and a suitably distracted America that satisfies itself with drill, baby, drill(!) at home.
Neither of those two outcomes are disastrous — just quite limiting when it comes to America trying to get its way on things in both arenas. But maybe, since all US consumption will be met by almost exclusively US-based manufacturing and production (H/T JD Vance), we just won’t care about those now-seemingly distant lands and their problems.
Sigh! I can feel the Kool-Aid rushing through my veins!
Leaping the Atlantic to Europe, I can see an EU and US-less NATO having stepped up considerably to defend themselves — comprehensively — from Russia’s ongoing efforts to destabilize the continent while slowly recapturing former vassal states — not so much invading them but the old concept of Finlandization, or getting them sufficiently cowed that you, the bullying power, exert decisive control over that state’s foreign policy.
Finlandization describes the foreign policy strategy of a smaller country that maintains its nominal independence while being significantly influenced by a larger neighboring power. It derives from then-completely neutral Finland's approach to the Soviet Union. (This sort of accommodating relationship by the bullied vis-a-vis the bully was the subject of my PhD diss, where I focused on East Germany and Romania).
See! I don’t just hate bullies in the real world. I hate them in the academic world too!
So, imagining a Finlandized EU/NATO, you’d have to imagine much less European presence and influence outside of Europe itself — in effect, an increasingly insecure, walled-off-garden of a great power whose biggest threats are those of a cranky grandpa from his front porch (Stay off my lawn!).
Needless to say, Ukraine, reduced in territory and subjected to unrelenting one-sided pressures from Moscow (now blessed by America), is lost to Russia’s firm orbit. While Moscow eventually gets back around to doing more of the same across the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia), Putin’s reach doesn’t extend back into the Stans of Central Asia, because there Beijing increasingly rules the roost. Call him Peter the Almost Great.
Are these big losses to world order? The realist in me says, not really.
That situation of Europe’s hunkering down, plus America’s disinterest, would continue the Middle East on its current trajectory of Israel eliminating Gaza and the West Bank — completely, thus finally achieving Greater Israel, with the PG monarchies stomaching that outcome because the Abraham Accords are finally consummated by America’s defense treaty with the Saudis and Emiratis, those two regimes’ diplomatic and military alliance with Israel, and those three power’s enduring anti-Iran alliance — a development that sees both Riyadh and Tehran getting small, but crucial nuclear arsenals.
Honestly … not that bad and not that far off from what I’ve long predicted anyway.
Heading next out to Asia where China, feeling suitably emboldened by America’s long bout of internal strife, Trump’s weird purging of the US military, his casual disregard for military alliances, and — most of all — the incredibly disruptive and painful-for-both-sides trade war that the Trump administration determinedly prosecutes vis-a-vish Beijing, successfully executes a military takedown of Taiwan … on schedule … in the year 2027.
Trump’s America ends up making a lot of noise but doing close to nothing other than taking it without tears, with Trump bravely (or cravenly, depending on your perspective) holding off WWIII with his let’s-cut-a-deal negotiating , thus finally winning that Nobel Peace Prize he wants so bad.
Does this alter world order to any huge degree?
Again, I gotta say, not all that much. China will be more emboldened around the world, sure, but I expect that anyway. So long as Beijing and New Delhi keep things cool on their own border, I don’t see the Indians going to any mattresses over this (pardon my Boomer [or is it just Ken?] deep cut reference to The Godfather film). And if that give were reciprocated by Beijing’s siding more with India over its long-standing issues with Pakistan (China’s one true ally in the world — thus the leverage), then I could see all sorts of collaborative possibilities between those two superpowers when it comes to integrating Central Asia, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa over time.
Again, not so bad at all.
What I am realizing with this casual analytic drill is this: the delta between America staying engaged and out there and decisive in its military actions here and there and … not doing any of those things … is not all that great.
When I imagine how things should logically unfold with an engaged America, and calculate — realistically — which powers will step up and which will back off, the differences between that master narrative and the one just laid out above, featuring an America lost to its own internal struggles … are, again, not all that profound.
So what am I arguing here?
Have I cleared the strategic table for Trump to go bat-shit crazy on the US Government, America’s trade relations with the world, and culturally war-torn domestic landscape?
Somewhat, yeah.
I’m just saying that I don’t expect things to fall apart globally, even under these seeming (from the US perspective) “disastrous” outcomes (Russia wins! Israel goes wild! Taiwan gets swallowed! Iran gets nukes! [insert Kim Jong Un stupidity here]).
I have no doubt that establishment foreign-policy types would view all this as the end of just about everything they hold dear, when, in objective truth, it wouldn’t be all that bad and not that far off from what should logically and realistically unfold anyhow — meaning whether or not Trump won back office in 2024.
In that cynical (or brutally objective) manner, maybe Trump is the break from US power that the world system has so long longed for, so as to finally accept and accommodate the multipolarity enabled by US-style globalization’s spread these past several decades.
So, dare I say it? Maybe it’s not just America that’s getting the leadership it deserves.
Maybe it’s the rest of the world getting the American non-leadership that it deserves.
Hmm.
I think we’ll all be chewing on that one across the next several years. I know I will.
welp that was a depressing take, sheesh.