As a series of tendencies and shocks to cumulatively arrange the old order, American president Donald Trump, even his detractors must admit, has the deadly donation to locate the painful pulse of the nation, only to light it more with self -destructive measures while eroding the world credibility of Washington.
He clearly sees the symptoms of American decline: deindustrialisation, a fragile middle class, swollen trade deficits and the political cost of endless wars. But he metabolie the spectacle crisis, the grievance in doctrine and interdependence in betrayal.
For decades, the United States has worked as the imperial nucleus of a global capital recycling device. The system depends on the continuous influx of excess capital of heavy export economies, notably China and Germany, towards the saturated financial architecture of American debt.
The American trade deficit reached $ 1.1 billion in 2023, a figure that eclipses those of other peripheral or semi-peripheral savings like India.
In that day, Trump’s populist screams against the “unworthiness” of the American people, dispossessed in the very belly of world wealth, is not entirely moved.
Its instinct according to which the endless wars serve as shows to obscure the real mechanism of American hegemony – the debt regime of the world dollar – is correct in a raw and pre -theoretical sense. Since the late 1960s, when America has ceased to be an excess nation, its geopolitical muscle was not based on production but on its dollar control as a global reserve currency. The military-industrial complex is only the theatrical wing of deeper financial imperialism.
However, Trump is radically mistaken in his conviction that punitive prices and the protectionist boastful will resuscitate “average America”. The prices, at the end of the neoliberal stage, cannot revive the industrial capacity victim by decades of relocation and rental capitalism.
Instead, they may destabilize the even mechanism in which the American debtor’s empire status is transformed into an asset: the recycling of the debt denominated in dollars in American capital markets. If this circuit is broken, the wealth of paper of Wall Street and the speculative empires of Trump’s own class will collapse.
To significantly raise the working classes and lower means that have fueled his electoral resurgence, Trump should declare war on China or Brussels, but on Manhattan and Malibu, hedge funds, investment capital and speculative real estate.
“Asymmetrical interdependence”
During a large part of the post-second world war period, which was marketed as “globalization” was, in fact, an imperial project covered with liberal universes. It was the projection of the American hegemony of the Capitalist Staff through a scaffolding of multilateral institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, NATO – and the sacrosaccean status of the dollar as the signatory of the planetary currency.
They are not neutral executives but instruments of asymmetrical interdependence: the United States has exported capital, debt and ideology, all in importation of dependence, discipline and excess work of the periphery and the semi-peripheral. The so-called “Washington consensus” has never been a consensus but a diktat.
The system also worked through a deeper ideological fantasy than the free markets and the world order based on rules were apolitical, universal and mild. However, even most of the liberal international criticism warns that the fantasy has stacked. The very interdependence which supported us the primacy is retired.
Companies and governments around the world need American consumers, financial markets and alliances, offering Washington a gentle coercive power. Trump’s tactics have turned this balance upset. By “seasoning interdependence”, the administration escapes the very base of the American advantage.
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argue that the order depends on the stable power balances, shared standards and maintenance institutions. Trump shaken the three of them. The following is a deeper drift in the disorder, which is not resolved until Washington reorients itself or is overwhelmed by a new exemption. The dive may already be in progress.
“In his erratic and erroneous effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump can bring his period of domination- which the American publisher Henry Luce first called” the American century “- to a ceremonial end,” they write in a Foreign affairs essay.
The armament of the global economy creates the very symbolic order that the United States used to legitimize its rule. By narrowing the strategic space of its opponents, Washington also corrode the interconnected network which once lent credibility and allure to its empire.
A price here, a black list there, and the freezing of foreign banking reserves – everyone can gain a tactical advantage, but at the cost of the erodation of confidence which supported the liberal international order. After all, what merchant or government would anchor long -term plans for a system where each node can be cut by a presidential signature?
Trump’s disruption is risky for the United States precisely because new economic blocks emerge from the wreckage of Western hegemony. Many leaders of the world South world remember colonialism and think that the 21st century freed them from Western diktats. Where the United States used to be done as the only way of progression, the technological power of China and the scope of security of Russia now resemble less as threats and more counterweight.
On Soft Power’s front, when natural disasters strike or propagate epidemics, Western style NGOs and the media have lost part of their framing power, because the Chinese and Russian help convoys are now on television alongside those of the Red Cross.
Velvet diplomacy of the years of the Cold War – plush bears on bombers – has been largely replaced by quarantine diplomacy, the promises of vaccines and the former American development agencies playing a second violin with belt and road contracts.
In May, a major Index of perception of democracy have reported that the majority of people around the world now see the United States negatively. The sounder noted that after Trump’s return to the White House, America’s reputation “took a particularly massive success in EU countries” and fell strongly everywhere.
Even the founder of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, sighed that the position of the United States was “poorly loved” in most of the world. On the other hand, the image of China improves worldwide, even exceeding the United States in global favor in most regions.
At home, the United States cannibalize its future. Budget cuts in the main research agencies such as the NSF and the hollow NIH of the very ecosystem that once led American innovation. The laboratories shrink, the scholarships disappear and the world talents turn to Beijing, Singapore or the water – where funding flows and visas follow.
Meanwhile, China invests aggressively in semiconductors, AI and green technology, eroding the American edge.
As Carl Benedikt Frey from Oxford says, Trump’s agenda is likely to dismantle the pillars of American innovation. Technological leadership is not a birth right but is built. And Washington lets him rot.
Trump’s decision to transform pricing penalties and export bans into blunt instruments has worried a lot about the abandonment of existing rules and undermine the soft power that Washington has spent decades to build.
Analysts argue that American power is based on a mixture of hard strength and attraction, even if this very soft power has enabled hard power interventions. Interdependence with business partners and multilateral institutions generates an American lever effect, while global admiration for “American culture and ideals” makes the Allies flexible, they support.
Trump’s assault on commercial pacts and international agencies undermines the foundation of American power and accelerates the erosion of the post-war period.
In principle, if the American power was absolute, it could force the partners to align themselves indefinitely. In practice, aggressive trade measures sowing resentments. Many countries have been one of the United States -led trade agreements while awaiting mutual benefits – they are now wondering if Washington will simply upset their exports to punish political positions.
The WTO and other legal places, for long arenas where small states could want the greatest, are largely sidelined. Without a clear application, the most vulnerable savings will look for alternative blocks or flexible to stay outside the American orbit.
The most cruel irony is by inflicting pain on others – or threatening – the United States undergoes goodwill and partnerships that supported its post -war hegemony.
The writer is a main journalist based in Lahore
