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Global public goods! No, by all means, shrug this great burden aside, teach humanity a lesson, show us what the world without American self-sacrifice looks like.
I can't figure out to what extent Americans realize how off-putting their rhetoric is for people on the outside. Too drunk on power to care, or actually believe themselves to be victimized, justified in belligerence? Either way, very effective at making people root for US humiliation. If not reflected at the top of US hierarchy, I'd think it an astroturfing campaign ran by US adversaries.
Yes, that Trump of all people insists that the US is spending a significant portion of their budget on "global public goods" is bizarre.
Now, as an European I am willing to concede that living under the pax americana has been much better than anything which came before that. But Trump's treatment of Ukraine has made it clear that Europe is not a military priority for the US any more.
And did his buddy not just gut USAID and any NIH grant which pattern-matched against DEI phrases? Is he not the one with "America first"?
Arguably, one of the (mostly) good things which the US did as the hegemon was to champion free trade. Which is another thing he is dismantling.
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Among the small number of people who are paying attention and nevertheless support Trump, the standard argument steelmans as:
The main problem with this argument is that being offensive other than as a calculated tool of policy is an unforced error which simply makes people less willing to cooperate. So unless you start with a presumption that Trump is playing 11-dimensional chess such that every insult is a calculated maneuver in a power game you don't understand, you quickly come to the conclusion that he is being far more offensive than the optimum.
The other problem is that PMC communication norms exist for a reason. A core skill of PMC members who are elite enough to have other PMC members as inferiors is how to communicate inherently offensive information (such as blunt feedback or unreasonable demands) in a way does not force the inferior to take offense in order to avoid feeling like a cuck and/or looking like a cuck in front of their own inferiors. High-level diplomacy is a special case of communication between elites, so the PMC norms should apply - public chainsaw diplomacy is the opposite.
A separate but related problem is that Trump's domestic supporters either believe or excuse his lies, but to the rest of the world they just signal detachment from reality. The "madman strategy" involves communicating to the other party that you are irrationally committed to your goals, but otherwise oriented towards objective reality. Example: "I am happy to see global thermonuclear armageddon if I can't have Ukraine". Trump's approach is more like "I am happy to blow up the global trading system if you don't abolish these non-existent tariffs". This is the "fentanyl zombie strategy" and what you do if there are fentanyl zombies in your neighborhood is remove them, and if you can't do that you remove yourself.
Reagan was the Great Communicator because he was blunt ("Evil Empire", "Tear down this wall" etc.) precisely when correct, blunt statements served his goals, and polite the rest of the time. Trump is not that.
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You will not go far wrong if you assume the average American voter is only tenuously aware that people in other countries exist. It's a little hyperbolic, but the reality is that Americans just don't think about international affairs that much.
Por que no los do? A major part of Trump's appeal is that he synthesizes a bullying affect with a sense of righteous victimization. Trump tells his supporters America is getting screwed and they eat it up even as Trump gears up to try and mug the rest of the world.
Hence "Woke Right". To reclaim an old anti-semitic jibe, the woke/MAGA cries out in pain as she/he strikes you.
It seems to me that we cried out in pain without striking for some time, and now are striking. That seems crucially different.
Probably not to Botswana.
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'Making' implies the willingness to root was not already made, present and widespread. I can remember similar rooting / schaedenfreud/ etc. during the first Trump administration. I can also remember it from the early 2000s and the war in Iraq. From what I've looked at, it was also discernable in the Cold War in conflicts like the Vietnam War. As much as many Americans I've known like to believe they were at some point in the glorious past universally popular across the world, they, uh, weren't.
There is always an audience to root for humiliation. That audience also grows as the power of the one being rooted against grows. It especially swells when a powerful actor moves against the specific collective group. This is just a human nature dynamic, and not so different from the human nature that flows the other direction from people who feel they are being taken advantage of wanting to see others struggle without their support.
I think Americans are breaking some new ground this time around.
I don't deny this is a common dynamic, but I disagree that what I talked about can be discarded as belonging in this bin. This isn't Americans gracefully outbuilding others, but Americans looking to extort and suppress.
I struggle to think of a time where 'Americans' and 'gracefully outbuilding' were characterizations that went together outside of anachronistic self-flattery.
Extort and suppress accusations, however, has plenty of historical occurrences, including the Iraq War (Bush invaded for oil), the earlier Iraq War (Bush intervened in the muslim world for oil), the Cold War (capitalist-imperialist exploitation), the Vietnam War (fighting as an extension of the direct imperialist-capitalist exploiters), WW2 (naked exploitation of the British before the war, the post-war dismantling of the allied empires), and many, many more.
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A couple thoughts: America-bashing has been de rigueur in much of Europe, as an example, and its intensity varies by country, but coexists with interest and appreciation. We have the same, here, in the inverse.
Nothing is monocausal in the national politics of a huge country with 340 million people. One valuable framework to pair with others would be an understanding of different regional cultures given America’s great size. I think Woodard’s American Nations is an improvement over Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed. Some regional cultures are comparatively insular, and some more cosmopolitan. Our presidential elections to an extent involve voting blocks of regional cultures, with some historically wedded to one party, and others not. Note, these regions are not defined by state lines. Woodard’s Left Coast is designated west of the coastal ranges. Portland and Seattle are similar. The eastern two-thirds of Washington and Oregon are similar to Idaho and Wyoming.
Education level has much to do with whether or not Americans are aware of the sentiment inspired by Trump’s trade war. Which Americans you’re talking about informs how much sensitivity they have to the mood of our allies abroad. The inland American West has sparse population due to little water, has been treated as a kind of internal colony largely because of this, and has thus developed a very independent culture. They’re standoffish towards New York and D.C. so you can guess their level of concern for London and Tokyo.
One final thought about the pot calling the kettle black… My family are mostly college-educated, upper middle class white collar Republicans, who have quietly voted for Libertarians or relatively moderate Democrats, when they can be found, which is not easy given where we live, since Trump and MAGA have asserted broad control over Republican primaries. We’re not Trump supporters. But I can’t help note some hypocrisy from our European allies. Many Germans were shocked at Vance’s speech and his statements that were taken to be intervening in their politics. Ask the same what are their views are on Merkel receiving Obama in Germany while he was only the first-term junior senator from Illinois, and a presidential candidate — not even the president-elect — which was clearly designed to boost Obama’s foreign relations bonafides to U.S. voters ahead of the election, and you get shrugs. Obviously the impact of Trump’s trade war is far more serious than either Merkel’s actions or Vance’s speech. But I wouldn’t classify the populations of our allies abroad as always concerned with how their actions are perceived here, either.
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I don't think that matters to most people and tbf I don't think that matters to me too much, as long as it doesn't interfere in our ability to maintain an American dominated global landscape.
That doesn't mean American controlled and I doubt it will ever mean that. Any attempt to exert too much influence will whittle away the power we do have as people slowly but surely move to alternatives. It's like what happens with the UN in a sense, to have people at the table listening to you necessarily requires concessions else they just leave and you revert back to never having a table (the league of nations). Domination only works as a long term strategy with either tremendous unbreakable strength (maintaining this long term is really difficult as empires throughout history learned) or making others want to be there under your boot.
But I do believe America can be and desire for America to be the main central voice. And as long as we don't push people away too much, we can yell a little and issue some spankings.
Unfortunately Trump does not seem like the kind of person who can drive us into the sweetspot. Especially if things are as dire as he claims, waging trade war on the whole world at once would be especially idiotic. We can only do this sort of nonsense precisely because we dominate the world.
Main voice, but dominance or even control were it feasible. You don't mention, is this is driven by pure self-interest?
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Trump can't drive us into the sweet spot, but possibly there isn't a sweet spot -- a stable equilibrium -- to drive us into. If we have moved too far into accommodating Europe in paying for things they want (like freedom of navigation) while they just spit on the US in return, then Trump can at least drive us the right direction, though if he has the ability to overcorrect he certainly will.
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