Geopolitics

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Fyodor Lukyanov: Here’s what Trump really wants from his trade war (www.rt.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The US president believes the EU will obey — and he may be right

US President Donald Trump wasn’t joking. As promised, he has launched a dramatic overhaul of his country’s trade policy, introducing sweeping tariffs to force what he calls a rebalancing of imports and exports with key partners.

[...]

Economists are largely in agreement: any gains from this approach, if they come, will be long-term. In the short term, Americans can expect higher inflation, struggling manufacturers, weakened consumer power, and declining market capitalization. But Trump is not concerned with consensus. He is a political brawler, and his goal is not simply economic reform, but to fundamentally reshape the global system that, in his view, is dragging America toward decline.

To understand Trump’s mindset, it is worth recalling the now-infamous 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” written by conservative thinker Michael Anton. In it, Anton compared Trump voters to the passengers of the hijacked plane on 9/11 who charged the cockpit, sacrificing their lives to stop disaster. The metaphor was stark: America, hijacked by liberal globalists, was on a suicidal course. Trump, in this framing, was the last-ditch response to avert collapse.

[...]

[...] It is as if the logic of Flight 93, once applied to US domestic politics, has now expanded to the entire world. The Trump administration sees the current global order as unsustainable and even dangerous to American power. In their view, if the system isn’t smashed now, the US will soon be unable to fix it at all.

Trump believes he can strongarm countries into renegotiating trade deals by leveraging America’s market power. For some, this may work. Many nations simply cannot afford a full-blown trade war with the US. But the two key targets of Trump’s economic offensive – China and the European Union – are not so easily bullied.

[...]

Trump seems to expect full capitulation from Brussels, and soon.

This expectation may be misguided. Western European governments are under internal economic pressure, especially with growing protests from industry and agriculture, which bear the brunt of rising costs and lost export markets. Yet Brussels remains ideologically committed to the transatlantic alliance and the liberal economic order, even as that order is being rewritten from Washington.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'd argue it's rational for Trump to think the EU will come around. After all they heeled to Biden and imploded their industry and cost of living and very ability to keep warm over Ukraine to uphold "liberal values".

Too many on the left have wish-cast liberal leadership as rational self-interested actors without considering the level of discipline that these liberals who fully believed only 20 years ago that they'd won the cold war and won the entire world and history may have. We understand party discipline, we understand ideological discipline but whereas it's easy to mock and make fun of Europeans as saps and in a certain way they are, they're also showing remarkable discipline and control, a willingness to sacrifice greatly for the greater good of liberalism as they understand it, for the greater good of liberal capitalism as they understand it.

Now maybe Trump does too many things that violate "EU democratic norms" and that's enough to break such discipline, maybe the EU bourgeoisie put their weight on the scale and push back. But maybe, maybe the leadership accept each new transgression of Trump against "law and liberal values" with criticism but a belief that the US is still in the long-run the lesser evil to stick with, maybe their bourgeoisie understand if they don't crush China they'll never survive, that with the collapse of even neo-colonialism that China is aiding the living conditions for their proles and the super-profits enabling higher conditions to placate them are going to vanish and with that they'll be hopelessly under threat. That their only chance is to risk it all with the US now to crush China in the hopes that the US allows them to join them as a junior partner and enjoy some of the spoils which can be used to placate their workers and keep capitalism running. That otherwise the US is not only willing but able to forcibly drain them further, to crush their industry, to brain drain them, etc. More than that many of the leadership are true believers and truly deranged about Russia gaining power over them and without the US around they may fear that sphere of influence beginning to overlap.

I hope they buck the US, I hope they join with China but I don't think they will. I think they'll throw themselves on the pyre like fanatics to save the project of white supremacy and hegemony over the world which the US represents and the continuation of power of the European bourgeoisie of which many have an unbroken line back to the days of aristocracy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

From everything folks have been posting about what Europe's leaders think, this is probably true.

I think they'll throw themselves on the pyre like fanatics to save the project of white supremacy and hegemony over the world

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

nobody knows what's inside the orange's peel