It’s becoming clearer and clearer that we’re looking at a seismic shift in the US’s relationship with the world, between:
- The US dismantling its foreign interference apparatuses (like USAID 👇)
- Marco Rubio stating that we’re now in a multipolar world with “multi-great powers in different parts of the planet” and that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us”
- The tariffs on supposed “allies” like Mexico, Canada or the EU
This is the US effectively saying “our attempt at running the world is over, to each his own, we’re now just another great power, not the ‘indispensable nation’.”
It looks “dumb” (as the WSJ just wrote) if you are still mentally in the old paradigm but it’s always a mistake to think that what the US (or any country) does is dumb.
Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order - brought to you by America itself.
Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of “allies”: they don’t want - or maybe rather can’t afford - vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests.
You can either view it as decline - because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire - or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage.
In any case it is the end of an era and, while the Trump administration looks like chaos to many observers, they’re probably much more attuned to the changing realities of the world and their own country’s predicament than their predecessors. Acknowledging the existence of a multipolar world and choosing to operate within it rather than trying to maintain an increasingly costly global hegemony couldn’t be delayed much further. It looks messy but it is probably better than maintaining the fiction of American primacy until it eventually collapses under its own weight.
This is not to say that the U.S. won’t continue to wreak havoc on the world, and in fact we might be seeing it become even more aggressive than before. Because when it previously was (badly, and very hypocritically) trying to maintain some semblance of self-proclaimed “rules-based order”, it now doesn’t even have to pretend it is under any constraint, not even the constraint of playing nice with allies. It’s the end of the U.S. empire, but definitely not the end of the U.S. as a major disruptive force in world affairs.
All in all this transformation may mark one of the most significant shifts in international relations since the fall of the Soviet Union. And those most unprepared for it, as is already painfully obvious, are America’s vassals caught completely flat-footed by the realization that the patron they’ve relied on for decades is now treating them as just another set of countries to negotiate with.
I will agree with this analysis if and ONLY if the vast network of US bases and military structures abroad are subjected to the same contraction.
If they’re not then I have to disagree with the assessment that this is a deliberate withdrawal of the american empire and acceptance of multipolarity. It looks more like incompetence than an intelligent and deliberate acceptance of a new global paradigm.
If it is deliberate, the incredibly costly military network abroad that only exists to exert pressure and police its global empire would be rolled back. This occurred for the British empire when its caretakers made the choice to contract.
If the USA is going to go the route of retracting empire by dismantling their military network globally to focus more on it’s regional issues then they got a bigger problem. Currently the military and the military Industrial Complex (MIC) are America’s make-work program. They employ roughly 10% of America’s workforce directly and so many of those industries are supported indirectly by the rest of the economy. If you shrink that by 1% you likely will see everything else shrink by twice as much. That’s not even including the military itself.
What you are proposing would be devastating to the economy. Sure, it needs to happen. The American Empire must crumble, inshallah. To say this is some measured, rational plan is as foolish as the actions themselves in the manner they are being done. So we can rest assured that all of this is reactionary, impulsive thrashing and can predict all the harm that causes.
What really puts the nail in the coffin for this is our big boogeyman is China and BRICS. If this guy was right then we would basically be handing them everything they ever wanted. But clearly we aren’t because we are threatening them and kicking and screaming over everything they do, especially China. So as usual its just NGO Thinktank psuedobabble.
If you want to reindustrialise america you’d need a workforce for that. What other industries can they destroy in order to get one? Slowly retract these military holdings then shift newly gained labour into new industry. This assumes competence though, actual investment and success in building that industry up, which I’m not convinced they’re capable of.
Agreed.
This stinks of the ‘he’s playing 5d chess’ argument to make sense of the wrecking ball being applied to the federal government at large. You can also find shapes in the tv static if you look hard enough.
Yeah I’m only going to believe this when overseas American military bases start rapidly shuttering, or when America starts pulling out of defense pacts. The dollar is still the global reserve currency and I’ve seen nothing to indicate the capitalist class want it any other way
lmao I literally just wrote the same comment before scrolling down.
This is a bunch of wishcasting lmao
So long as DoD commitments don’t change, this is not “the end of U.S. Empire”. Soft power always follows hard, not vice-versa.
Now if this leads vassals to say, ‘hey, without the soft power we don’t much care for your military bases’ and try to buck the yolk of empire, that might actually mean the end of U.S. Empire. But that’s not on the terms laid out above lmao.
Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order - brought to you by America itself.
lol. lmao even.
Yeah, changing foreign policy does not mean the end of imperialism lmao. The US economy still relies on the dollar and that has not changed at all nor does change seem to be on the horizon.
i don’t believe trump of all people would have the humility to think the US needs to stop controlling the world. he seems more like he wants to try to control more of the world and take it all for himself. him and his cabinet basically want to collect our taxes and cut literally everything but the cops and military lol
That’s assuming Trump is in control and not a faction of capitalists that latched onto the Trump train.
It seems like he wants to control the world in a more literal conquering and map painting sense rather than with the complicated financial mechanisms that neoliberalism prefers
I don’t think the Trump administration is thinking about this as much as this poster has. The truth is that Musk and co literally don’t know what USAID does or why its useful to American Empire - they are just generally anti foreign aid, so they closed it. That’s it.
I really hate chalking things like this up to pure stupidity and ignorance, but sometimes I can’t see any other reason why they do the things they do. I remember when trump left the tpp. Here was a guy who railed against China constantly, yet pulls out of a deal meant to contain China economically. I loved it, but I can’t see why someone obsessed with the Chinese threat would do something like that except out of pure ignorance as to the tpp’s purpose.
The same with USAID. Do these guys understand what USAID is, or have they really just bought into the liberal lie that it’s a great humanitarian mission, and they oppose that humanitarianism. Like, is there something more nefarious going on here that I can’t see, or is it really just some dumb push to “remove woke” or whatever?
I believe Musk called USAID a criminal organization, so it’s not that they didn’t know what it did.
Did they know how it served American empire? That I’m not sure
He said this after and seemingly in response to usaid refusing doge access to their servers. So I’m not really convinced that’s a political statement over musk just lashing out cause he didn’t get his way
Did they know how it served American empire? That I’m not sure
It’s apparent the rulers of the US Empire now believe in their propaganda, so probably not lmao
He would say that about virtually any government agency I highly highly doubt he said that in reference to usaid being a nefarious wing of us foreign policy because basically the only information that is disseminated on that is on leftist parts of the internet and I really don’t think any of the echo chambers he frequents are sharing much information on usaid actions surrounding Cambodia for example.
Musk is a very stupid person and he doesn’t know about stuff like this he’s literally stupider than your average redditor who also are ignorant about this topic as it is
100% agree on Musk being an idiot. However I think he does have an idea that it was involved in foreign interference
USAID is a criminal organization," Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX who has become the president’s most powerful backer, wrote on his X platform, replying to a video alleging USAID involvement in “rogue CIA work.”
He probably didn’t figure this out himself and probably doesn’t really care about dismantling it because of that. Even later on he said it was used to fund COVID-19 bioweapons. Hes just looking to cut money from the budget, and because he’s so stupid and doesn’t understand american empire hegemony, he’ll do it on anything that doesn’t help the libertarian cause. He can use the “criminal organization” statement as a vague reason that people will warp their justifications around.
Dang I stand corrected. As you said he likely doesn’t have much of an understanding around it and was just looking for any criticism of usaid he could find online (and there really isn’t much criticism of it at all that can be found outside of the anti imperialist perspective)
I think of the ghouls of empire, which the Republicans house just as many of, wanted USAID around, it would be around.
lol
I love the theory that Trump doesn’t know tariffs can go higher than 100%.
I think the current theory on this site is “Trump thinks a Tariff is when you, as the US, instead of paying an invoice and wiring the money to your supplier outside the US, you just declare the payment a tariff, and then you confiscate the money from the supplier, who in this case continues to supply you for whatever reason.”
lol, this makes far too much sense.
And what if all the other countries decide to join a BRICS currency?
How I engaged in capitalism with the power of love
Chapter 1: the power of love
Chapter 2: the power of incredible violence
I was doing a turn of phrase. My assessment is that they’re going to commit atrocities if people try to walk away from the petrodollar. Like when the infinite growth paradigm on a finite planet stops working via a decreasing rate of profit then they’re going to start doing horrible violence. Historically the horrible violence of profiteers was met with incredible violence (based) in WW2
For me I don’t see as a decline, but a shift to a different economic paradigm: the age of globalised neoliberalism brought about by Nixon and Reagan is over, and “Trump tarrif economics” (for lack of a better name) is in, after the ruling class all over the imperial triad of the United States, Western Europe and Japan failed to revive the globalised neoliberal order in a post 2008/2009 economic crash world. Obama, Merkel, Macron, Cameron, and Abe all failed to restore this global neoliberal world order, Trump’s first term happened, Brexit happened, yellow vests happened, German industry never recovered, Abe got assassinated.
I mean just imagine what communists were thinking 40-50 years ago as the US and UK instituted neoliberal reforms with Nixon, and made them permanent, with Reagan and Thatcher. Surely that’s the end of capitalism, there’s no way that they can survive this! But then a decade or two later, the USSR collapsed, and we hit the “end of history”. That’s why I say that this change is a paradigm shift rather than a decline of the US empire. The implosion of the current system is not synonymous with advances on the path to building a truly better alternative for people: the autumn of capitalism does not coincide automatically with the spring of the people.
I agree with the direction the world is heading, I disagree with your “why”. It’s not a calculated decision. If it were ghouls like Biden or Romney or John Bolton I could buy it, but Trump and his clique are incompetent hubristic racists. They would never give up Americas position as global top dog willingly. They’re doing what they’re doing because they’re stupid racists. They don’t understand soft power. They dislike USAID because it gives money to “shithole countries”. They don’t understand the subterfuge and subtlety. They take the world at face value, especially Trump. They don’t want to do regime change because they actually believe the talking points about doing it “for democracy” or whatever.
The end result is the same, but the neoliberals in the US are wailing right now, while the fascists don’t even understand why.European leaders will not realise the world has changed. They will count the days until trump is gone and then when nothing changes they won’t be surprised because in four years it will be the new normal. The rest of the world will move on however, because it is not in the stranglehold of the most ideologically committed neoliberals.
However it’s not quite like you’ve made it out to be. The bases are still there. This is more the US regressing to an obvious colonial state, converting vassals to suppressed subjects.
To put it another way: Trimp and his ilk believe that NATO is a defensive alliance.
I read a Michael Hudson interview a while back when he recounted about what happened when Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods back in 1971. He said that the newspapers at the time had all anticipated the end of US hegemony - how can the US continue to keep its global leadership position when all the reckless spending in Vietnam had far exceeded its own gold reserves? Nobody knew what to do back then, and the economists all projected that the US dominance would soon be a thing of the past.
The situation of the US empire in the 1970s was not that much better than its predicament today: the Civil Rights and anti-war movements had pummeled domestic confidence in the US government, the rise of class consciousness leading to MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign near the end of the 60s and his eventual assassination, the military defeat in Vietnam and the end of Bretton Woods, being isolated from the international community after the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Yom-Kippur War, the 1973 oil crisis and the stagflation that followed.
Challenged from both within and from without, you’d think that the hegemony of the US empire is soon to become a part of history and the USSR would ascend.
Then… Nixon went to China in 1972. Exporting its industries to China permanently crushed the domestic workers movements and trade unions, and running a persistent trade deficit (ala Hudson’s Super-imperialism) allowed the dollar to retain its hegemony in spite of its reckless spending, and thus regained its control at the world stage.
I also vehemently challenge the notion that Kissinger was some geopolitical genius - if you look at the predicament of the US at the time, Nixon had no choice but to get help from China.
What I do agree with the author though, is that the end of unipolar world is likely here. I think we’ll see China saving the US empire once again. The US can no longer ignore the contradictions of its de-industrialization that led to the Sanders and MAGA movements since 2016 threatening Wall Street finance capital, and China is now mired in a huge property bubble and dampened consumption that would be open to the dollar to come to the rescue. Both need one another, just like how Mao and Nixon saw the opportunity back in the early 1970s.
A renewed status quo is the likely outcome here.
I think we’ll see China saving the US empire once again.
How do you think this will happen? Trump blames China for literally everything, and his base are foaming at the mouth for war with China as much as the propagandists for the ruling class are.
i think if it does happen they’ll just lie about it. its not like fascist regimes arnt full of contradictions, whats another on the pile worth?
yeah i highly doubt the US is going to scrap its decade+ long build-up for war with China just like that
You forget that when Nixon and Mao met, China just fought America less than 20 years earlier with 180k deaths and 200k wounded/disabled on its side.
As bad as the US-China relationship is right now, I guarantee you it was much worse back then during the Cold War, when the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Like heck, China today is still talking about resuming friendship with the US. You realize that Mao was literally openly taunting the US into dropping its atomic bombs and see which country would survive longer. Mao repeatedly talked about fighting a “ten thousand years war” (lol) against American imperialism even until the final day of the world’s destruction. This kind of language simply does not exist in today’s Chinese diplomacy.
How do you think this will happen?
As I said, if Wall Street enters China en masse, then the dollar hegemony will be saved, takes a good cut on BRI (and thus the global supply chain), Trump gets to boast about how he reduced the trade deficits that “China has been robbing us from”.
China gets to revive its slumping economy, relieve the local government debt burden, resume its development and bringing more people out of poverty and improve their living standards, at the expense of giving up its monetary sovereignty.
It’s win-win for the US and China, but not so much for the rest of the world - Europe will lose the most out of everyone. A renewed status quo.
Yea as someone else said, Trump is probably not thinking about it in this way (though what you said may be true).He put China Warhawks in his cabinet picks.
I think he operates with a “businessman” mentality, which just looks like a mess when you’re doing it for a country. He prob just thinks of Xi as another businessman, not really caring about what the actual economic ideology of China is. China could bail US out, because they know what they’re doing, but I also remember Xi telling Biden about the US being an unreliable trade partner.
This isn’t a useful reading. They very much expect to continue to be the world’s police, they just are cutting back on their tools of “soft change” for more direct means of getting what they want.
Exactly, reading these moves as some calculated idea of turning resources inwards is quite wild. They’re just trying to maintain their current position by being shootier with countries they once pretended not to be shooty with.
Idk how I feel about this. Personally I think there’s a lot that has happened that seems to contradict this. Trump is expressing real expansionist ideas - his idea of Canada as a “51st state,” which as far as I can tell seems to be the only reason he’s enacted these tariffs on them, some attempt to use economic force to get them to accede to unification, and these attempts to buy Greenland. He seems to want to exert more influence over Latin America, this whole Panama Canal thing, the rhetoric which seems to foreshadow an invasion of Mexico. You also have Elon getting involved in German and UK politics - the afd thing and the “grooming gang” thing, seemingly an attempt to bring the far right to power there. And we know Elon has always has his eyes on Bolivia due to lithium, probably also the reason why there’s such focus on Greenland.
So tbh it doesn’t seem to me at least like there’s been a whole lot of pulling back. I don’t think USAID has been dismantled as this guy says, it’s just being taken over by Elon, I think there are plans to put it under the state dept. The foreign assistance pause is temporary but it’s not ended - I think a lot of these things are going through Trump era restructuring for whatever reason. Even the who thing, there’s been a whole to do about leaving WHO but when trump was signing the eo he (and I forget the quote) is open to rejoining the who under a better deal or whatever. And the whole eo, he’s mad about the influence China has in the organization. Prettt much, he wants greater dominance over the organization and I think leaving the who and pulling funding/collaboration is an attempt to force the who to accede to his demands. The WHO has already had to pull back capacity due to this.
Even the Rubio thing, yeah he’s saying we’re in a multipolar world now or whatever, but really he’s expressing a need to reassert American dominance in global politics. Sure he’s talking about diplomacy, but it seems to be a gesture towards realpolitik than any sort of pulling back as this guy is characterizing it. Rubio seems to have simultaneously drank the kool aid and believes the liberal lie that USAID and stuff are selfless humanitarian missions that he wants to pull back from, while also recognizing the decline of American hegemony and expressing a need to reassert “American interests.”
It’s like trumps first term when he pulled out of the tpp and the Iran nuclear deal. This was called isolationism, just as he’s referred to as an isolationist now, but it didn’t come with any real pulling back and instead trump ramped up tensions with both China and Iran for 4 years, not recognizing that both the tpp and jcpoa were tools to contain both countries.
Anyway a lot of disorganized thoughts, hopefully someone got something out of that or maybe I’m just straight up wrong
As well as agreeing with other rebuttals here, I’d like to again rebut the weird American exceptionalist take many leftists have, that its allied western countries are effectively ‘vassals’ being indirectly subsidised by America’s magical super wealth. And the implication that without America’s guiding power they would fall apart.
They’re absolutely suck-ups to America’s big shooty power, but it’s a two-way deal. ‘western’ countries give America a free pass for war crimes, involvement in global diplomacy, and generous trade deals, and in return get to benefit from America’s military interventions. To say it’s a one-way subsidy is wrong, and almost lets other ‘western’ countries off the hook for their own awfulness part in global violence. They’re just partners in imperialism. If America pulls out militarily, ‘allied’ countries will (and already have started to) invest more in their own deadly military to do their own imperialism instead.
There’s a big reason most of Europe is still indirectly buying Russian oil instead of fully transitioning to American oil, it’s because they know needing America economically will actually make them truly dependent.
as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage.
Yes, if it was as irrational as people think, capitalists would have found a way to stop him. I would expect neoliberals to come to this conclusion as well, since neoliberal academics argued in his first term that his isolationism is the policy you would expect of a declining empire, e.g. Schweller 2018:
The interaction between nationalism and power trajectory produces entirely different foreign policy orientations in rising and declining powers—the former embraces an outward-looking, extroverted foreign policy of expansion, while the latter adopts an inward-looking, introverted foreign policy of restraint and retrenchment. The resurgent nationalisms of the rising challenger and the declining hegemon are entirely compatible with a future relationship characterized by peace and harmony. Obviously, the two nationalisms pose no inherent conflict of interests: China currently wants more global influence; the Unites States wants less. Hence, there is good reason to expect a soft landing as the world moves from unipolarity to bipolarity. …
President Trump and his administration revile the Washington national security establishment’s unthinking fidelity to the idea of a liberal international order that, for decades, has been deemed worthy of expending huge amounts of American blood and treasure to preserve. … Viewing the phrases ‘rule-based order’ or ‘liberal international order’ as anathema to US interests, the Trump administration seems more comfortable with the call for a diverse global order—one anchored less to liberal democracy and human rights and more to a narrow definition of the national interest, an accurate assessment of power realities, and, above all, prudence.
capitalists would have found a way to stop him
I don’t think capitalists can be counted on as a rational actor in this case. Musk certainly has a lot of ventures that rely on imported goods and materials, but he is literally too ideological and short-sighted to see how tariffs will impact him, and he’s not the only one.
I remember a war nerd episode where they were talking about how westoids say Russia is run by oligarchs, but that the SMO demonstrated that Putin is not wholly beholden to them. Most of the oligarchs got in line (or they got their shit confiscated). Imo, we are seeing a similar dynamic play out in the US.
Trump’s tarrifs are basically a fait accompli. What could the capitalist class do at this point to stop this? The cat’s out of the bag.
And those most unprepared for it, as is already painfully obvious, are America’s vassals caught completely flat-footed by the realization that the patron they’ve relied on for decades is now treating them as just another set of countries to negotiate with.
For real the sooner these countries realize this the better. America is giving no reasons for its allies to maintain ties with it, and you got other economic powers outside America so its not the only player in town.
not my stuff, but i thought it was a neat way to understand the recent tariffs
