The Idiot’s Version of Everything That Needed to Happen
Democrats failed the world, and the worst people you can imagine took advantage.
History has needed many things from America in recent years:
Adapt to a multipolar world.
Transition out of a US-centered hegemonic order.
Accommodate—rather than antagonize—China.
Pull back from Europe.
Repudiate trade policies that are insensitive to the distribution of gains.
Hold the elites running the national security state accountable for overseeing systems of death and oppression.
These are things that might have happened as part of a “progressive”—which at this point just means sane—foreign policy. Global stability has been crying out for changes like these, and they would have naturally resulted from building a social democracy in America. Using the power of the state to provide real security for the working majority is also a way of correcting for historical imbalances of power.
But the Democratic Party wanted none of this.
Rather than discipline and shrink the national security state, Democrats brought the national security state into their party. Rather than accommodate China, Dems orchestrated the containment and encirclement of China, goading a future great-power war and cutting off Americans from Chinese innovations. Rather than adapt to multipolarity, Dems re-asserted US “global leadership,” doubling down on a strategy of primacy dressed in liberal rhetoric. And rather than rebalancing the power between class forces in society—capital and labor—the Democratic Party remains the party of the financial elite, unable to imagine empowering the working class for fear of losing big donors.
With the Democratic Party an obstacle to progress, a denier of grand historical trends, and a silencer of mass opinion, the MAGA movement has stepped in to exploit the void. MAGA responds to some of the imperatives of history, taking up many tasks that Democrats needed to do. But because MAGA is a violent, counter-revolutionary movement led by corrupt oligarchs, they are adapting to historical forces of change in ways that are violent, reactionary, corrupt, and oligarchic.
And so, under the guise of political accountability, Trump is literally prosecuting political opponents and liberals of the national security state. Who could have imagined that FBI director James Comey would be formally indicted by his own freedom-snatching Department of Justice? Or that War-on-Terror mavens of the Obama era, like James Clapper and John Brennan, would have their clearances revoked and find themselves under investigation by the same national security state they used to expand US drone strikes around the world?
The Trump administration is finally accommodating some of the power realities of co-existing with China, but it’s doing so in a corrupt, invidious way (see the TikTok deal) that allows both militaries to continue arms-racing each other at the expense of their own peoples’ freedom.
MAGA rose to power decrying neoliberal globalization—“free trade” made us less free precisely because it ignored the highly unequal distributions of gains it generated. But their solution has been an arbitrary regime of tariffs largely meant to enrich Trump’s friends, punish his enemies, and rent-seek from allied governments. The fruits of economic policy are more skewed now under Trump than they’ve ever been.
And most unsettling of all for many international relations scholars and foreign policy hands, American hegemony is not just over; it’s something MAGA repudiates. Global hegemonic orders require the provision of global public goods; some reciprocal obligation to uphold a stable system. MAGA’s foreign policy rejects that very premise, spurning America’s myriad global obligations while extracting as much as possible from America’s favorable power-position in the world. The result is ethnonationalist multipolarity; a more naked, predatory version of an imperialism that was always beneath the surface. What remains of American power is being used to cannibalize the broken and brittle remnants of the previous global order.
I can safely say we’re not living in the best of all possible worlds. Ours comes closest to the dystopias that sci-fi writers from the 1980s imagined. We are approaching the middle stages of a prolonged crisis of revolutionary proportions and we’re dealing with it in precisely the wrong ways.
Trump is taking up occasional rhetoric and policy changes that have long needed to happen, breaking America out of its old blood-covered, wealth-hoarding dogmas. But he’s doing so in ways that are profoundly stupid and venal and make worse the very problems he pretends to respond to.
I still need to read grand strategies of the left, which I trust is more complete. But none of these items include defending the norm against changing borders by force.
To transition and accommodate and depart without achieving goals is to assume that greater trade equity can monocausally address the classic UN security council concerns. I think there's an excellent case for trade that delivers more result to labor as a way of addressing the disproportionate share China holds of global manufacturing capacity while still improving the livelihood of the median Chinese citizen.
However, it is also classic high Obama-ism of a different sort to assume that by changing incentives and laying out the logic one's adversarial counterparts will see things your way. It can work, see the Iran deal, but it can and did also fail even when what was on offer was a genuinely good and beneficial idea. There's good strategy there, but Xi may say no to even a win-win offer and Putin has done so regularly.