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.
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.