The World Says an Effective Goodbye to America

It’s becoming increasingly clear — after Donald Trump’s embarrassingly narcissistic, not to mention insulting, performance before an international economic and cultural elite at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — that the United States can no longer be trusted.

In the minds of many of America’s former allies, the MAGA slogan has turned from “Make America Great Again” to “Make America Go Away.” Trump’s inexplicable longing to personally own Greenland has done even more to convince the world public at large that the American president has a screw loose.

Trump may eventually either slip into full-blown dementia or opt for a legally and financially cushioned retirement, but with the US presidency changing every four years, Europeans are acutely aware that there’s no guarantee that a future president — elected four, eight, or 20 years from now — won’t be just as unpredictably crazy and destructive as Trump. The US, in short, can no longer be relied on for either leadership or security.

Conclusion: With America’s credibility in the slag heap, it’s better not to count on America at all. 

Trump may soon be gone, but the damage he has done to America’s credibility will linger long after him. Among the immediate casualties, we can list America’s former role as titular “leader of the free world.”

Of course, Trump is not the only villain here. His openly sadistic chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is clearly convinced that wanton cruelty is an effective mechanism when it comes to frightening immigrants. In the process, he has frightened nearly everyone else away as well. 

The Global Economy Steams Ahead, Without the US

In a podcast interview with The New York Times’s Ezra Klein, Tom Friedman noted that the coming global competition will almost certainly be for dominance of the global economy, and it will involve a showdown between the US and China.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Friedman pointed out, doesn’t really count. Russia’s economy is little more than an oligarch-shackled basket case. Russia manufactures nothing of value, and its only reliable sources of income are oil, gas, extortion, and the unsustainable extraction of natural resources. 

Russia has virtually no place in global markets. Who wants to buy a Russian camera, watch, or even a laptop? China, on the other hand, is a manufacturing powerhouse, thanks mainly to American corporate eagerness to exploit China’s cheap labor for quick profits.

Instead of America being great again, Trump has managed to leave America isolated from the new global economic alignment.

Friedman questioned how the US, which represents a market of about 340 million people, can compete with China’s 1.4 billion. 

Of course, size isn’t everything, but when one weighs the pool of talent available to each country, China definitely looks intimidating. For example, the US graduates fewer than 200,000 engineering students a year, while China graduates more than 1.3 million. The numbers alone tell us that China’s chances of spotting superior talent, compared to the US’s, are overwhelmingly better.

The warning signs are already visible. In terms of quality of output, Harvard, formerly the world’s leading university, has slipped to third place, superseded by two Chinese universities, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou and Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, according to the CWTS Leiden Traditional Ranking. 

The New York Times points out that the Trump-led Republican onslaught against higher education in America, along with visa harassment of foreign students, has further contributed to America’s slipping in world rankings.

In his interview with Klein, Friedman suggested that the obvious approach to surviving China’s ascension to economic dominance is for the US to combine forces with the European Union, which represents a market of roughly 450 million people. Trump shot that one down with his performance at Davos. 

The new agreement between the European Union and India to create a relatively tariff-free economic market includes more than a fourth of the world’s population, or roughly 2 billion people. The fact that it pointedly excludes the US can be counted as the second aftershock in the wake of Trump’s trip to Davos. The first tremor was the decision of Canada — formerly America’s leading trade partner — to sign a similar deal with China. Instead of America being great again, Trump has managed to leave America isolated from the new global economic alignment. 

A President Out for Himself

Trump, who still can’t understand why he was denied the Nobel Peace Prize, may be counting on his “Board of Peace” to maintain his legacy after he leaves the White House. But who are the members of this board, who are being asked to contribute a billion dollars each and accept Trump’s lifetime membership before joining? 

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a random assortment of friends, and the man he formerly dismissed as “Little Marco” signed on to the Board of Peace Executive Board. The countries that joined as members sound like an anemic version of the Non-Aligned Movement. They are Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan. Argentina and Indonesia are also on the list, along with Paraguay, Kosovo, and Uzbekistan. Vietnam and Cambodia signaled their interest in joining. 

Canada was invited, but after Canada’s trade deal with China and a little straight talk from its prime minister, Mark Carney, Trump disinvited our northern neighbor. The future emperor of the world accepts no backtalk or criticism from inferiors.

The presidency no longer serves the country. It serves the narcissistic fantasies of a single, emotionally stunted individual whose primary interest is his and his family’s personal wealth.

The supreme irony in all of this is that while Trump was busy overturning three-quarters of a century of policy decisions that actually did make America great — or at least made it a worldwide superpower — America’s future competitors were learning from our earlier example the concepts needed to advance economically. For decades, America argued for free trade through both GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the World Trade Organization. 

The American approach moved the entire world economy forward, but it primarily helped turn the US into an economic hegemon. In 1980, the US GDP (gross domestic product) was $2.9 trillion. Today it’s $30.6 trillion, a tenfold increase. Most of the rest of the world has prospered as well, although not to the degree that the US did before the arrival of Donald Trump.

It would be easy at a quick glance to dismiss Trump as being stupid, uneducated, or uninformed, but it seems more likely that his objective in becoming president was not the welfare of the country or American society, but rather to take pointers from a group of already wealthy billionaires and corporate giants anxious to skim the cream off the American economy. 

The motto among American tech-oriented businessmen such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is “move fast and break things.” In a sense, the operating mode in a significant slice of the investment world can be described as “vulture economics.” If the US economy really is in decline, then it makes sense to grab what you can and move somewhere else. The fact that a businessman like Musk can attain a personal wealth of a trillion dollars, while national education flounders and poverty increases, is an indication that any consideration of the future of America as a society has fallen by the wayside.

Until recently, the normal White House approach to problem-solving has been to rely on experts to thoroughly examine all of the implications of a policy decision so that the president can make an intelligent choice of the best possible option. Trump reversed the process. Instead of engaging experts, he relies on his own limited knowledge and then turns to a group of sycophantic “yes” men and women to execute his whim of the moment. The presidency no longer serves the country. It serves the narcissistic fantasies of a single, emotionally stunted individual whose primary interest is his and his family’s personal wealth.

Where does that leave the rest of America? Anyone who understands basic economics knows that tariffs are just another name for a sales tax, which the government imposes on all its citizens, whether they can afford it or not. Tariffs provide an instant source of cash for government coffers, but they also exact a heavy price on both development and trade, and they destroy future markets. That is why pre-Trump America fought against them for so long.

A major difference between now and the period immediately after World War II is that after the war, the US was virtually the only major economy standing, whereas today, there are other alternatives. When Trump threatened tariffs on China, Beijing simply turned to Argentina and Brazil to buy its soybean crop. American farmers were left in the cold. Trump offered to take some money out of the tariff bonanza to keep them afloat. That may work for a year or so, but by then the market that those American farmers depend on will very likely have moved on. 

Some of the lost market share may return briefly, but the fact is that the US is no longer the only game in town. The recent deals between Canada and China, and the European Union and India, hint that the US may no longer be the most attractive proposition. The post-colonial, previously undeveloped “Third World” is no longer undeveloped. It evolved into the “Emerging Markets,” and today, many of those markets have already emerged.

The ‘Third World’ Turns the Tables 

Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) decided by 2008 that India had become a middle-income economy and no longer really needed British funding. DIFD, nevertheless, still had £20 million on the books and decided to use the remaining funds to encourage companies in India to mentor countries in East Africa, where a substantial Indian community had moved to work in Britain’s former colonial administration. 

East Africa had long been a major source of arabica and robusta coffee beans, but lacked knowledge of modern marketing methods. The region also produced enormous quantities of leather but had no real understanding of how to treat it properly to meet modern standards. India needed leather but could not obtain it locally because of Hindu attitudes towards protecting cows. 

In 2015, I went to India to report on a project for the International Trade Center. As part of the project, I toured several factories in India, including those producing ultra-high-end products for exclusive fashion houses in Paris, Milan, and New York. I was surprised at the high level of sophistication in the factories that I visited.

“The buyers keep making more and more complex demands on our production,” the head of one of the factories said, while showing me a piece of leather that had been treated to have a metallic glow. “We do the best we can, and we are meeting the demand, but it is not easy.” 

The other part of the Anglo-Indian project dealt with computer production and software. Africa is currently one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for business software. And thanks to the foresight of India’s first prime minister after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, who promoted advanced technology research centers across India, the subcontinent has always had an impressive supply of computer experts. In fact, more than half the tech workforce in Silicon Valley comes from Asia, while roughly 10 percent of the valley’s tech CEOs are Asian. 

With many of these tech workers convinced that they face a “bamboo ceiling” that prevents them from getting past a certain management level, the lowering of India’s tariff barriers with the European Union, combined with Trump’s harassment of foreigners, will likely lead to a major exodus of talent on the grounds that it’s more attractive to work in Europe than be hassled by an isolationist administration in America.

The reemergence of India and China as future global superpowers should not be surprising. India, after all, was responsible for developing key features of our current understanding of mathematics. It was an Indian, Aryabhata, who suggested that the addition of the zero was essential to basic arithmetic. The decimal system came from India. Much of algebra, trigonometry, and calculus, not to mention the game of chess, traces its origins to India. Europe uses Arabic numerals for its mathematical calculations. Much of the Arab world still uses the Indian number system.

At the beginning of the 19th century, China accounted for a third of the world economy, although much of the country’s production was mostly consumed in China. Helen Thomas, who teaches at England’s Cambridge University, points out that the emergence of the United States as a world power occurred around 1890, at a moment when European colonialism and internal political problems led to the collapse of the Chinese empire, removing it from the world stage. 

The American Civil War from 1861 through 1865 accelerated manufacturing in the northern states. When the war ended, American manufacturers began looking abroad for markets to take up their excess production. That gave the US an increased global presence, and the isolationism of China, along with its political disintegration, meant there was no real competition. 

The situation is quite different today. The political disintegration is in America, and it is accentuated by the mindless contradictions emanating from the Trump administration.

Donald Trump, Meet Ozymandias

Just as China’s population endured despite the collapse of its imperial system, America is not likely to disappear in the near future. But Trump, and MAGA voters who are swept along in his delusional wake, might take a hint from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias,” which warns of the illusions of power by describing the statue of a once-powerful king, now reduced to rubble, on which remains a vainglorious inscription:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Shelley’s poem concludes with this comment on the boastful ruler’s fall: 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Trump, who clearly prefers a Hollywood-style romantic mythology to a realistic account of history, might remember that Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the American continent was driven by the search for a route to India and the riches it possessed.

Power and wealth tend to skip from one spot on the globe to another. At the beginning of the 10th century, Baghdad was the world’s greatest city, as well as the most important hub for an international economy. It’s a role that New York played for much of the 20th century. As history so often teaches, glory can be fleeting. 

India previously wanted to sign a trade deal with the US. Now it has signed with the European Union, which, since the end of World War II, has managed to turn out an arguably larger, better-educated, and more productive population than the US. During his college days, Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He appears to have slept through the classes. Now, it looks like the rest of us will end up paying the price for what he failed to learn.