What a wonderful world it won’t be
Noah Smith (Noahpinion) published a grim picture of what the world might look like if Donald Trump regains the U.S. presidency. He’s admittedly not an expert on geoplitics. Neither am I. But you should read it. It’s compelling.
So much of our focus is captured by concerns closer to home: to women’s reproductive freedoms in our country, to our economy, to the threat Trump and Project 2025 pose to the future of our adolescent republic, to the horse-race dynamics of our presidential contest, etc. Smith asks us to pull back and consider the global implications of a second Trump presidency on a world threatened by what he calls the New Axis: North Korea, Russia, and China. Smith warns, “The free world is teetering on the edge of a knife.”
The United States since World War II has been the indispensable nation, the anchor for the western alliance that held the Soviet bloc in check during the Cold War. That was our pride. That was the problem:
But the U.S.’ importance to the democratic alliance system always represented a single point of failure. If America’s political will ever collapsed, it would leave Europe and Asia abruptly vulnerable to the might of a rising China or a resurgent Russia. During the 2000s and 2010s, there were ominous signs that such a collapse might happen. Political polarization increased alarmingly, the legislature became increasingly dysfunctional, government shutdowns and debt ceiling fights became routine, and progressives and conservatives developed their own largely disconnected media bubbles. Then Donald Trump was elected, and the nation descended into four years of nonstop culture wars and political shouting.
Trump don’t know much about geography (or anything else). He was hostile to NATO from the beginning. He’s more interested in seeing his name on a hotel in Vladimir Putin’s Moscow than in protecting the long term interests of the United States and our allies.
The U.S. has grown complacent. The financialization of the economy and globalization placed corporate profits over national interests. We pulled back from producing our own steel, microchips, ships, etc., and allowed China’s economic expansion to go unchecked. We sold our birthright (and our strategic advantage) for a mess of cheap, Chinese consumer goods. (I’m paraphrasing.)
Donald Trump’s policies did absolutely nothing to reverse this trend or revive American industrial strength. But his aggressive rhetoric toward China, and his rhetorical focus on U.S. manufacturing and trade imbalances, changed the country’s attitudes in important and needed ways. It destroyed the old free trade consensus, and paved the way for a new era of industrial policy — even if those policies were enacted by Biden rather than Trump. Meanwhile, Trump’s export controls, inbound investment restrictions, and hunt for Chinese spies were not always effective, but they represented the first glimmers of U.S. resistance to Chinese power.
Joe Biden, more seasoned and far wiser than the orange enfant terrible, took up where Trump’s miserable rhetoric left off.
Biden unleashed major export controls on China’s semiconductor industry that went far, far beyond anything Trump had done. Those export controls have been highly effective so far, slowing down China’s cutting-edge chipmaking efforts dramatically.
Biden implemented two major industrial policies to revive U.S. manufacturing. These were the CHIPS Act for semiconductors — the most strategic product of all — and the Inflation Reduction Act for batteries and other green tech. (Note that batteries are the essential component of FPV drones, which have become the essential weapon of the modern battlefield.) Those efforts are now bearing fruit, in the form of soaring factory construction in America.
It’s not enough, Smith believes, but it’s a beginning. And it puts the U.S, and its allies on a firmer footing for resisting Chinese and Russian expansion. None of that penetrates Trump’s pea brain. His rhetoric and his actions demonstrate no grasp whatsoever of geopolitical realities. He just wants membership in the Autocrats Club to stroke his own ego.
Both Trump’s rhetoric and his record in office indicate that he’s likely to cancel many of the policies Biden has been using to stand up to China. He’ll keep or increase Biden’s tariffs, of course. But he could cancel export controls, as he canceled the controls on ZTE in his first term, in exchange for empty Chinese promises or personal favors. He won’t make TikTok divest. He shows little interest in industrial policy, believing (wrongly) that tariffs are the main tool of reindustrialization. He has declared his intent to scrap the IRA, leaving America with little battery manufacturing capacity (and thus little drone manufacturing capacity).
What does it all mean if Trump regains the White House and sets about turning the U.S. into an autocracy?
If the U.S. abandons resistance to China and Russia, it will go very badly for America’s allies. Europe will probably fracture again, with some states (probably including Germany) falling all over themselves to appease the Russians. Russia will then become a sort of de facto hegemon in Europe. In Asia, China would probably conquer Taiwan, cutting off U.S. semiconductor supplies and establishing Chinese hegemony in East Asia. Japan and South Korea would then be forced to choose between either becoming nuclear powers or becoming de facto satrapies of the new Chinese empire. Essentially, America’s major allies would fall to America’s enemies.
Americans — or, at least, Trump supporters — might yawn at these developments. But if Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and America’s other allies fall, it will dramatically weaken America’s ability to defend itself. Remember that China is four times the size of America, and manufactures well over twice as much. Without its coalition of allies, the U.S. just doesn’t have the size to stand up to China.
And even if they de facto conquered Asia and Europe, China and Russia would not simply ignore America and let it go on its merry way. The specter of a U.S. revival would haunt them. They would therefore do everything they could to weaken America. Obvious steps would include 1) economically strangling America by cutting it off from trading routes and natural resources, and 2) sowing continued internal dissent in America in the hopes of causing it to collapse into a civil war.
They’re doing that now via propaganda news networks and social media bots, if you hadn’t noticed. “We are heading to a future where words have no meaning,” actor John Cusack warned recently. They are dissolving external reality. Hannah Arendt warned that that is the goal of totalitarians over a half century ago. What you’re seeing now is a foretaste of what’s to come.
Roger Berkowitz wrote at the Hannah Arendt Center:
The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it. It is to foster cynicism so that we don’t know what to believe and come to believe that nothing is true, no facts are reliable, and the world is simply a battlefield for partisan ideas. In such a world, truth retreats behind success as the value to be sought. What matters is victory, no matter the cost. Arendt understood that when factual truths are denied and substituted for by lies, the result is “an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established.” Such cynicism, Arendt argues, is the true goal of totalitarians: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
The Republican Party, once the supposed guardians against communist relativism has succumbed already. Donald (if his lips are moving, he’s lying) Trump has made numbly repeating his lies a mark of membership in his authoritarian cult of personality. In the name of putting America first, they are undermining America’s global authority and economic strength. MAGA’s won’t get their pottage either.
Smith concludes:
Bereft of its coalition of allies, America would be far less able to resist those efforts. Americans would suffer economically even as China and Russia stoked their hatreds and divisions. The worst ideologies of Trump’s first term — alt-right fascism, leftism, radical identitarianism, and so on — would all come back with a vengeance, encouraged by diligent Chinese and Russian online propagandists. Only now they’d also have a bad economy to fuel their anger.
Witnessing the hateful disinformation flooding my region in the wake of Helene flooding, it’s clear Trump’s foot soldiers are determined to “attribute to malice” every action they don’t understand. Unlike saucer cultists, they don’t see aliens wherever they look, but Deep-State FEMA agents and liberals bent on harming Real Americans™.
If you think a United States run by such people is a scary prospect, Jonah Smith invites you to consider (apologies to Sam Cooke) what a wonderful world it won’t be to live in one run by them. Remind friends reluctant to vote, as Martha and the Vandellas warned, there’ll be “nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide.”
So get out and vote, willya? Knock some doors. Make come calls if MAGAland is not the America in which you care to live.
(h/t SR)