Every day I become more grateful for the election of Donald Trump. All praise. Millions of millions of people have worked to destroy the American empire, and all failed. Donald is succeeding, speeding the process by about a decade, I’d guess.
Likewise I and many others have hated the neoliberal trade order for decades: since the late 80s in my case. It was designed to destroy countries;sovereignty, making it impossible to truly regulate investors, to run industrial policy or even, in rich nations, to keep wages up. As a Canadian, ever since the FTA Canadian manufacturing has proceeded on a slow death march, till instead of selling the US more good than the US sells us, as was historically the norm, we now buy more goods from the US than vice-versa. (The trade surplus is due to energy.)
Meanwhile Trump is essentially forcing the Europeans to take charge of their own destiny and stop doing what America says. This should have happened decades ago, and EU elites to man-up have cost Europe’s countries dearly. It’s quite likely neither NATO nor the EU itself will survive: both excellent outcomes. NATO should have been disbanded when the USSR fell. American troops may leave Europe, or at least there should be a further draw-down, also excellent. As for the EU, it has been an engine of stagnation and de-industrialization, especially since the introduction of the Euro.
The end of the Empire, the end of the “no industrial policy, no sovereignty” free trade order, possibly the end of NATO and American occupation of Europe.
Oh, the process will suck, and it will hurt. But for the first time since the US imposed its terrible neoliberal trade order on the world, there is at least a chance of most countries being able to properly manage their own economic affairs.
Unfortunately for Americans, Trump is doing this in the stupidest and most harmful way possible—for America. It needed to be done, sure, but pissing off almost every trade partner in the world all at the same time and speeding up the end of dollar hegemony in such a chaotic way is not going to go well for America or Americans. As the primary beneficiaries of the previous order (other than the Chinese, who suckered the Americans using their greed) the end of the order is going to be ugly, and since America now has no friends except maybe the lickspittle Brits, there’s going to be little cushion for the fall to America’s real economic status.
So, all hail Trump. He’s an idiot, a monster and is doing plenty of terrible things. But he’s ending the American century sooner and more decisively than anyone could really have expected. There’s still the risk of war, to be sure. But if we can avoid that, well, Trump will go down as a very important President and his reign will have made a better world possible.
Sometimes what the world needs is a colossal fuckup in charge to bring the end of an order.