America vs. the World: Trump Destroys the Liberal World Order

[Huckleberry]

The Atlantic gift link

America vs. the World​

President Trump wants to return to the 19th century’s international order. He will leave America less prosperous—and the whole world less secure.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over. This is not because the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it. Rather, the American order is over because the United States has decided that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security. The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it.

Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.

Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.

 

[Bamaro]

Whait until this fool goes off crazily tomowwow at Davos. Hopefully NATO leaders and others will finally call him out for what he is rather than trying to placate him with false praise to mollify the demented todler.

 

[92tide]

The Atlantic gift link

America vs. the World​

President Trump wants to return to the 19th century’s international order. He will leave America less prosperous—and the whole world less secure.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over. This is not because the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it. Rather, the American order is over because the United States has decided that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security. The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it.

Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.

Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.

we will all be much worse off for this

 

[UAH]

Whait until this fool goes off crazily tomowwow at Davos. Hopefully NATO leaders and others will finally call him out for what he is rather than trying to placate him with false praise to mollify the demented todler.

I followed a review from Europe this morning and it appears to be unravelling. Even Carney is getting heat in Canada over his attempt to make Canada more independent from the US. I am afraid that if anyone is to constrain the toddler it will have to be us. I am not hopeful at all for future generations of Americans.

 

[92tide]

I followed a review from Europe this morning and it appears to be unravelling. Even Carney is getting heat in Canada over his attempt to make Canada more independent from the US. I am afraid that if anyone is to constrain the toddler it will have to be us. I am not hopeful at all for future generations of Americans.

his followers and apologists love his authenticity, so very little chance of that happening

 

[UAH]

we will all be much worse off for this

Take a quick look at the yield on the Japanese Bond, the continued dumping of the US Bond along the price of gold and silver it becomes clear where the smart money is going. There is a financial meltdown waiting just beyond our view.

 

[crimsonaudio]

Take a quick look at the yield on the Japanese Bond, the continued dumping of the US Bond along the price of gold and silver it becomes clear where the smart money is going. There is a financial meltdown waiting just beyond our view.

Silver has gone bananas.

 

[selmaborntidefan]

There is a financial meltdown waiting just beyond our view.

And this is what happens when you hire a guy with six bankruptcies that folks insist is a business genius to run things.

And this after he already wrecked the economy once previously because he couldn’t handle what his own followers think was just a little flu bug.

The only thing that surprises me is how unsurprised I actually am.

 

[UAH]

Silver has gone bananas.

View attachment 55258

I saw a major brokerage this morning saying that Silver could double from here. Glad we didn't dispose of what we had held for years now.

 

[Tidewater]

There are two main schools in international affairs: liberalism and realism.
Liberalism emphasizes international or multilateral organizations, international norms, the injection of morality into international affairs.

The most famous pop-culture critique of this was in the film Team America, when Hans Blix threatens Kim Jung Il: "We will be very angry at you. And we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are at you."
More substantive critiques came out of the neo-con misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which we witnessed confused Afghan women dipping their fingers into blue dye after they had voted. (One wonders what those women made of the whole affair) and trying to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy, because Iraqis are just like Americans: they understand and love representative democracy just like we do.
In Belgium, the running joke is that NATO stands for "No Action, Talk Only"
Obviously liberalism has its limitations.

The other school is realism, which is explicitly amoral (realist analysis excludes morality from its analysis). The powerful do what they want and the weak do what they must. The central analytical tool in realism is power. My professor in grad school had us read Leviathan. At the time, I thought he wanted us to examine Hobbes in relation to domestic politics (which is how he is normally read), but later on, I realized that he wanted to illustrate a society (the society of nations) in which there is no arbiter and in which morality does not apply. The most famous recent expositor of realism is John Mearsheimer, who blamed the West for telling Ukraine that they had the right to pursue ties with the EU and NATO. I find this akin to blaming the rape victim for being raped ("Did you see what she was wearing?")

Kagan is a (former) Republican adherent to liberalism in international affairs. His wife Victoria Nuland famously had some naughty things to say about the EU during the Euromaidan protests because the EU was injecting itself into the political crisis without really doing anything substantive.

I tend toward the liberal side, but I acknowledge that there is a place for power as well.

 

[Bodhisattva]

There are two main schools in international affairs: liberalism and realism.
Liberalism emphasizes international or multilateral organizations, international norms, the injection of morality into international affairs.

The most famous pop-culture critique of this was in the film Team America, when Hans Blix threatens Kim Jung Il: "We will be very angry at you. And we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are at you."
More substantive critiques came out of the neo-con misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which we witnessed confused Afghan women dipping their fingers into blue dye after they had voted. (One wonders what those women made of the whole affair) and trying to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy, because Iraqis are just like Americans: they understand and love representative democracy just like we do.
In Belgium, the running joke is that NATO stands for "No Action, Talk Only"
Obviously liberalism has its limitations.

The other school is realism, which is explicitly amoral (realist analysis excludes morality from its analysis). The powerful do what they want and the weak do what they must. The central analytical tool in realism is power. My professor in grad school had us read Leviathan. At the time, I thought he wanted us to examine Hobbes in relation to domestic politics (which is how he is normally read), but later on, I realized that he wanted to illustrate a society (the society of nations) in which there is no arbiter and in which morality does not apply. The most famous recent expositor of realism is John Mearsheimer, who blamed the West for telling Ukraine that they had the right to pursue ties with the EU and NATO. I find this akin to blaming the rape victim for being raped ("Did you see what she was wearing?")

Kagan is a (former) Republican adherent to liberalism in international affairs. His wife Victoria Nuland famously had some naughty things to say about the EU during the Euromaidan protests because the EU was injecting itself into the political crisis without really doing anything substantive.

I tend toward the liberal side, but I acknowledge that there is a place for power as well.

Good post. I too studied Hobbes (and many others) in undergrad as part of my political philosophy coursework, and then again in grad school for international relations. The interplay between how one wants things to be versus how things are is a challenging balance to strike. You have to be well versed in both schools of thought. I too would want things to work in the realm of liberalism, but certainly realism has to be understood and employed when necessary.

 

[selmaborntidefan]

Whait until this fool goes off crazily tomowwow at Davos. Hopefully NATO leaders and others will finally call him out for what he is rather than trying to placate him with false praise to mollify the demented todler.

I'm old enough to remember when there was a genuine fear in Republican circles that their leader (an actor named Reagan) might go off into mindless meanderings at summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. For the most part, Reagan DID NOT do that (not as he did in Cabinet meetings).

I honestly wish one of these foreign leaders who speaks English lets Baby Don go off with one of his "what's going to happen" things and then tells him, "If nobody on your team has the balls to tell you, I will - you are NOT a Jedi."

 

[Tidewater]

Good post. I too studied Hobbes (and many others) in undergrad as part of my political philosophy coursework, and then again in grad school for international relations. The interplay between how one wants things to be versus how things are is a challenging balance to strike. You have to be well versed in both schools of thought. I too would want things to work in the realm of liberalism, but certainly realism has to be understood and employed when necessary.

My professor at Troy State (my other degree from an Alabama school) was a retired ambassador, a career foreign service guy. He told some interesting stories about the business end of American foreign policy.

While the Deputy Chief of Mission in Lesotho (the Chief of Mission was a personal friend of Ronald Reagan and DoS usually pairs a career diplomat with a political appointee ambassador). A US contractor was being paid by the US tax-payer to build a road and it turns out he was robbing the US taxpayer. The ambassador called the contractor in, confronted him with proof. The contractor replied, "You can't do anything about it. That money is already appropriated."
The ambassador picked up the phone and called Reagan directly: "Ron? John Smith here. How you doing? How's Nancy? Yes, Sally is doing well. Listen, the reason why I called is because the contractor here is robbing the American taxpayer and says that nobody can do anything about it. Is that true? (Pause) Oh really? I can do that? OK, Ron. Thanks."
The ambassador hung up, looked at the contractor and said, "The contract is cancelled. You're fired."

My instructor's point was that while we normally prefer career civil servants rising up the ranks of the foreign service to become ambassadors, but there are some advantages to a political appointee. A career diplomat would never pick up a phone and call the president. He would go through channels and it would take months and maybe never even got resolved a political point he resolve this with a phone call. I found that interesting.

 

[Bodhisattva]

My professor at Troy State (my other degree from an Alabama school) was a retired ambassador, a career foreign service guy. He told some interesting stories about the business end of American foreign policy.

While the Deputy Chief of Mission in Lesotho (the Chief of Mission was a personal friend of Ronald Reagan and DoS usually pairs a career diplomat with a political appointee ambassador). A US contractor was being paid by the US tax-payer to build a road and it turns out he was robbing the US taxpayer. The ambassador called the contractor in, confronted him with proof. The contractor replied, "You can't do anything about it. That money is already appropriated."
The ambassador picked up the phone and called Reagan directly: "Ron? John Smith here. How you doing? How's Nancy? Yes, Sally is doing well. Listen, the reason why I called is because the contractor here is robbing the American taxpayer and says that nobody can do anything about it. Is that true? (Pause) Oh really? I can do that? OK, Ron. Thanks."
The ambassador hung up, looked at the contractor and said, "The contract is cancelled. You're fired."

My instructor's point was that while we normally prefer career civil servants rising up the ranks of the foreign service to become ambassadors, but there are some advantages to a political appointee. A career diplomat would never pick up a phone and call the president. He would go through channels and it would take months and maybe never even got resolved a political point he resolve this with a phone call. I found that interesting.

I studied at GW. My favorite professors also worked at State, Commerce, USTR or the like. Very interesting to see the convergence of theory and practical application. Sadly, as they told me and as I would learn firsthand years later, government bureaucracy moves at the speed and efficiency of a paralyzed patient in a coma.

 

[Tidewater]

Another anecdote about the implementation of US foreign policy, that the professor shared with us involved the UN. During the Cold War, there was going to be a General Assembly resolution condemning Israel for occupying former Palestinian land. The US delegation went around canvassing other national delegations to see who was gonna vote for and who was gonna vote against Israel. They bribed some (with projects in their home nations). Others they knew were not going to win over. One of the latter went to the bathroom. The US delegation got the key to the bathroom lock, and, with that delegate inside the bathroom, locked the deadbolt to the bathroom door and then snapped the key off in the lock. Then the US delegation went back to the general assembly quickly and said, "Let's vote"
(A) That's dirty pool.
(B) Who cares what the General Assembly declares? (This was the Cold War so meaningless actions had political significance attached to them).

Not sure where this fits in the liberalism/realism range.

 

[JDCrimson]

Another anecdote about the implementation of US foreign policy, that the professor shared with us involved the UN. During the Cold War, there was going to be a General Assembly resolution condemning Israel for occupying former Palestinian land. The US delegation went around canvassing other national delegations to see who was gonna vote for and who was gonna vote against Israel. They bribed some (with projects in their home nations). Others they knew were not going to win over. One of the latter went to the bathroom. The US delegation got the key to the bathroom lock, and, with that delegate inside the bathroom, locked the deadbolt to the bathroom door and then snapped the key off in the lock. Then the US delegation went back to the general assembly quickly and said, "Let's vote"
(A) That's dirty pool.
(B) Who cares what the General Assembly declares? (This was the Cold War so meaningless actions had political significance attached to them).

Not sure where this fits in the liberalism/realism range.

If it involves dirty pool tactics, I would put in the realism bucket...

 

[Tidewater]

If it involves dirty pool tactics, I would put in the realism bucket...

Fair enough, but it was done at the UN, a multinational organization. A pure realist would not care what the UN does.

 

[crimsonaudio]

 

[UAH]

View attachment 55355

Gold trading above $5000 per ounce. I am seeing comments that faith has been lost in fiat currencies. Japan, France, UK and the US are seeing bond yields skyrocketing due to the emerging debt crisis. Markets have the lowest cash levels at any recent times. This might be saying that "cash is trash" The winners will be those that own assets.