Rome built roads and pushed back on the barbarians in the north.
Rome did not protect trade for foreign nations (even trade Rome wasn't a participant in) without a demand for absorption into the Roman state.
Building infrastructure within your own borders and pushing back on the barbarians on the periphery are simply standard expectations for all states not free trade policy.
This is true. However, how effective would tariffs be as a negotiation tactic if they came out and said "don't worry, it's just a negotiation tactic" ?
So is Trump lying about the tariffs being potentially permanent? Because, if not, "do X or I will continue to withhold Y from you" seems like a perfectly valid and sensible negotiating tactic. It is straightforward and lets your counterparts know exactly what they have to do and you've already shown them that you're willing to seriously harm them if you don't get what you want.
It is the same strategy Trump himself used against Colombia.
If Trump isn't lying that he was willing to keep on tariffs this seems like a pretty good negotiation tactic since he achieves the same certainty that he is serious without the doubt that he's serious/acting in good faith.
If Trump is lying, then what are we to make of his sudden pause after refusing to offer such a thing? It seems the worst of all worlds. You appear insincere and erratic and like you're pulling a negotiation tactic with people being unable to settle on one explanation.
I'm not one to ascribe genius and 4D chess for every move that DJT does, but this case in particular does have Art of the Deal written all over it
Maybe. But one might wonder whether Art of the Deal is what you want here.
It's one thing to highlight leverage. But there is a question of whether you actually want to keep people guessing about what you want in a trade deal, especially when that trade deal will have to be sold to their domestic audience who a) have to accept it as legitimate and b) have to trust that Trump's demands are bounded and that making them eat shit on supply management or whatever won't actually just lead to Trump coming back in a little while because your willingness to fold emboldens him.
Tinfoil hat: there's little incentive for American conservatives to create any legislation around immigration. Action through executive enforcement, while not as effective as legislation and reform, will keep the base energized and conservatives in power. What's the equivalent for the progressives? Taxes on the rich?
People used to say abortion. Ironically, they went in both directions: Democrats didn't want to codify Roe (somehow) because they liked Republicans threatening it and giving their voters a reason to get out, and that Republicans loved fund-raising on it and wouldn't want the enemy mobilization that would follow if they actually caught the car. And then...
Ultimately, I think both explanations are naively cynical and don't account for practical difficulties you face when actually legislating and are a bit optimistic in attributing the gridlock and decay of Congress to the master plans of legislators. I don't think they're acting.
That depends on whether or not you believe that long trade negotiations occur as a means of negotiating trade, or as a means of furnishing the sinecures of lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats.
One of the arguments made against reciprocal tariffs is that it was simply too difficult to calculate - given the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of items and so many countries, and the non-tariff barriers that the Trump admin themselves pointed out - by April.
I would be much more confident in the "lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats trying to get paid" explanation rather than "Trump panic button" if Trump had already outperformed the naysayers by putting out a reciprocal tariff scheme that didn't boil down to a simple formula.
Why can't some of that responsibility be delegated to other countries?
Past experience? The more parties you delegate enforcement to the more parties whose interests can clash.
You have four or five nations managing this stuff and you risk just being back in the great power era where people protected their own trade and spheres of influence.
Also, a lot of nations simply aren't as good at this right now due to delegating it to America. It's not Somali pirates you need to worry about but state-sponsored groups like the Houthis, and their sponsors themselves if they decide to pull a Saddam.
Global trade has existed for thousands of years. Spices and silk have been imported by the west since time immemorial.
Your example - a luxury good like silk - is telling.
We live in an incomparably more connected time and much smaller falls can lead to large changes in our standard of living.
With a level of charity that I would myself question the reason behind: "reasonable requests" get indefinitely referred to committees and yield "we'll see" (which means probably no in practice) responses.
The alternative is not the President politely requesting X in a diplomatic communique and then sitting around, especially if the thing is clearly something people are not inclined to do. It's some mixture of messaging combined with arm-twisting and maybe even tariffs, just without the weird deficit/tariff calculations, the erratic behavior or the opacity or inconsistency in the messaging.
It's not as if this is even unknown in the Trump administration: it is quite clear what his beef was with the Colombian president and why it would end and what he would do if it didn't.
WhiningCoil feels like they're being psyopped by the debate, I feel similar. The debate forces you into arguing about whether the American president is incapable of coercing nations or manufacturing crises for them without this level of uncertainty or incompetence.
People literally cannot say what Trump's goal is for sure, but we're all forced to play this game.
Tanista
1d ago
and won't need to resort to industrial-scale infringement to get their fix.
But why not do so anyway, honestly? Rich countries don't do Turkish Star Wars because they have deals that force them to respect copyright law. If the whole thing is breaking down, why not?
That's going to be the case for mainstream entertainment pretty much no matter what by definition of being "mainstream entertainment". They're not aiming to be that challenging, they're aiming to appeal to mass markets. Mainstream entertainment isn't going to stop being slop if China stops watching because the average American is still a slop consumer to begin with, yet alone the below average Americans that still have money to spend on the Netflix subscriptions and theater tickets. If anything a lot of modern mainstream media is arguably better compared to the slop of Dance Moms and Real Housewives and Kardashians and Honey BooBoo and shitty reality television from just a decade or two ago.
The top ten highest grossing movies in 1990 looks very different from today. IPs have always been a thing. Slop has always been a thing.
But you used to have smaller-scale movies like American Beauty be some of the biggest movies of the year, you used to have more variety in your action slop so you'd get a Gladiator along with your Marvel and Bruckheimer slop, and that movie could credibly win Oscars without it being a pity nomination like with current comic book films like Black Panther.
If anything, the American audience has proven itself capable of watching more complex stuff. Not just in the past but on TV today. Part of the problem is the opposite: films have an even larger global market they need to appeal to today. The slop is extra bland because they need to squeeze juice out of every disparate community in the world.
Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.
Is that what happened to the zombie genre?
Tanista
1d ago
Every bet that the GOP will finally break with Trump has been wrong.
Intellectually, I know there has to be a point but I can't put my own money on it.
I imagine it's the same for actual Republicans.
Maybe Ackman missed one of the two political views Trump has held for decades? Couldn’t say.
I think for a lot of people immigration is the thing Trump is most associated with. It's what he initially got the most buzz and criticism for .
He's also just a liar armored in sycophants trying to "translate" his thoughts to something acceptable to win power which always makes it harder. At a certain point I give people a little grace for not knowing that he actually has values.
An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.
This doesn't even pass the smell test, because why then did it quickly become notable - and criminal - that Christians wouldn't sacrifice?
And yes, I'm sure the Senate liked to believe that they managed the relationship between Gods and the people. And, because of the slack in the polytheist system, they eventually could slide Emperors in there (and those sorts of proclamations are obviously more likely to reach us compared to a random freedman's sacrifices). But people probably still worshiped their tribal gods. In fact, when Constantine finally got tolerance for the Christians it was justified on the grounds of good politics: each group would cause its patron deity to be favorable to the Empire. That seems like the opposite relationship.
You can't look at the trouble a far more concerned Christian clergy had with enforcing uniform doctrine on the laity and imagine that the Senate alone managed religion
Because a) Elon and b) the vast majority of people do not know how to contribute or cannot. It'd be different if you could jump on a colony ship but what is the average person to do here?
This is the problem with many legitimately impressive secular achievements: lots of people have nothing to offer or nothing to gain. We don't want to be building pyramids and we can't all be at Los Alamos.
Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability.
My thesis is that in picking this fight, Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, their delusions are globally shared and become reality in their own right. But perhaps not enough to offset the gross physical one.
People do keep pointing out that Trump has had this fixation with tariffs and the US being screwed by the world for so long that Japan was his original target.
I have wondered if he simply slid China into that same niche and never updated anything else.
This whole thing is demented but if you imagine Trump is still in the 80s or 90s in his head fighting the trade war he never got to fight then, it makes a bit more sense.
Tanista
4d ago
If he crashes the economy and loses, even that is going to reverse. Democrats will win and see little reason to compromise on woke.
Its generally accepted that they don't have a theory to operate under other than "say whatever I need to in order to get re-elected."
Politicians are driven by survival. But they can also be idealogues. I don't think it's that simple
Trump is the one whose statements get treated as critical emergencies
Maybe because Trump is a path-breaking president? I mean, wasn't that the appeal? He doesn't follow the rules or do the things people usually do. The reaction should differ.
Would most other politicians start off arguing about the size of the crowds at the inauguration? Especially so directly? Like, you can leak some stuff to friendly journalists . Trump just had his press secretary fighting people over it.
Even if normal politicians didn't give a hoot about things like the markets or the stability of the rules-based liberal international order they either pretend or talk about it a certain way. If we're cynical, they believe election depends on it (presumably because the media will tear them apart and the public will assume that someone so uninhibited and lackadaisical in speech would also be so in deed), so they squeeze their statements through a filter of committees and precedent to not scare the hoes.
Trump deliberately broke with that and added his own particular brand of unhinged behavior. That will be notable and alarming and you can't always tell when a notorious bullshitter is bullshitting or if he's really going to double down and whether he'll actually follow through or be worn down. Take tariffs or trade: the same statement in 2016 and 2025 have different chances of being implemented, but a person who thinks it's an awful idea has reason to be alarmed. How do you cover this guy without that element?
Hell, even this year, his policy bounced between tariffing countries and then pulling back. At least a few reasonable people may have believed he wasn't actually going to fight it to the max and was negotiating against for some new USMCA thing.
Your credibility for going after Trump relies on you also going after other politicians, including those on your team, with comparable enthusiasm.
The media has cut down plenty of figures for dubious reasons. Sometimes it even harms Democrats (why is Al Franken not in politics anymore? It was a silly situation).
I'll remind people that media credibility was heading to the toilet BEFORE Trump arrived on the scene. It dropped below half in 2005.
There's a long-term problem there. But Trump is also a problem of his own.
The media blew a lot of powder on essentially partisan issues, because the mainstream media has a partisan lean. Immigration restrictionism wasn't a threat to the Republic.
Keeping politics within a certain window was conflated with defending the right to have politics as such, a European fascination that everyone would be better off without.
That was an unforced error. Lying about things like "very fine people" was an unforced error.
But Trump legitimately said and said weird, unhinged things for reasons that people still find hard to divine (I don't think we ever settled on a consensus about his master plan for Canada) and it can't all be put on the media. Maybe Trump is just dysfunctional?
Given a certain level of risk dubious implementations can be insane. Who Trump is and how he acts cannot help but color the whole thing.
I'll try out an experimental new vacuum cleaner from a sketchy salesman. I'd be significantly more skeptical if he offered me a revolutionary new surgery. It would be insane of him to even offer.
That's true. And they don't care.
Or they don't believe it. This is also my struggle with accelerationists on the left : I get the idea, I just doubt that they actually have internalized how bad things can get, and how long they can stay awful.
Even bad times for Americans are better than a lot of places. And, as the most powerful country, Americans have reason to think that if they simply got rid of the suckers and losers the whole thing could just pick up again.
so using that fact to extort them into annihilation is not going to work.
If the Democrats came to them with a total surrender on immigration in exchange for ending this tariff game, do you think they'd take it?
Tanista
7d ago
The things Trump says are sufficiently horrible that SOP for his supporters ever since 2016 has been saying "Take him seriously, not literally" and calling out people who take him literally as TDS sufferers.
All I could think reading @faceh's post here was "so basically the situation is that, if you report on the ridiculous things Trump does or says constantly, you will lose credibility if he's only lying (or constrained), as opposed to him losing credibility for continually saying things that would be alarming under other presidents?"
This doesn't justify lies by media figures, who didn't help themselves. But it is a questionable incentive structure.
It’s been apparent to me for years and years that the vast, vast majority of opponents to Trump & Trumpism have little to no theory of mind when it comes to their political enemies.
This is true but Trump also just has a personality cult.
Trump drags the party to where he is, based on his own idiosyncrasies. It's not just Democrats who failed to fully account for this. The entire Bulwark-class of the GOP are outsiders now for a reason. Many Republicans took stances against Trump only for him to double down and forcibly bend the base and party to him (he was attacked for the Access Hollywood tape in a way that seems far less likely today for people who want to stay in the party).
The number of people who think Canada is an enemy has risen...purely amongst Republicans. If you had asked people before the election about it, they would hardly have cared. I've seen even skeptical media figures (who're presumably more invested in politics) suddenly start caring about Canada and a trade deficit they never mentioned as a meaningful Trump priority beforehand.
Trump flips on TikTok? No issue. How exactly do his stated plans for Gaza fit in with the "no wars, no foreign entanglements" thing? We'll figure it out.
Part of it is that your enemies exist in a bubble but part of it is also that the most mercurial man in politics is the only one with a bully pulpit and ability to swing his base apparently.
So what? Plenty of people benefit from public goods or are not harmed by them directly and yet they often never get built or decay as parties see it in their interests to exploit the commons.
A sword is a sword. The same ability to protect sea lanes opens the risk of a party trying to control it. The more parties you have with serious navies with no absolute superior the more the temptations rise. The more a party might wonder why it must accept losing a valuable natural resource to a rival or opponent and then be forced to protect that opponent's trade.
Nations that have amicable relations today like Western Europeans cannot agree on a European army or how it is to be used. Why would we assume this would change in a world without America?
The simple temptation here is just...to not do that. Let them fend for themselves and protect your own trade. Then the next temptation for other parties is to prey on those who either can't or they have rivalries with. And then there's the temptation to lock weaker nations into trading only with you, which may strictly be worse than a totally free trading system, but balances the costs of your navy with more control because you assume someone else is planning the same thing.
Demographic decline is not a matter of a bit of will. The European nations that once protected their own spheres are in terminal demographic decline. They don't have the bodies, they don't have the money (because of welfare, not the military) and the world has changed.
But it also just is insurmountable for many nations.
America can blow up everyone that'd interdict its trade. How about Poland? Lesotho? Indonesia? Ghana? What about when the trade is being stopped by a legitimately powerful nation like Iran?
I mean, if you take the broadest definition of globalism, sure.
The trade system we know and take for granted (that some call globalism pejoratively) would in fact end and it would be a noticeable change and drop in the living standards of a lot of people.
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