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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   32181 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Anticipating the outline of the 5D chess explanation: this was the plan all along, training allies to meekly accept US dictates, baiting the disrespectful Chinese into cringe, standoffish behaviour. Now allies, cowed, thankful, will only negotiate 1:1, happy to put tariffs on China to avoid the terrible, terrible flood of goods. Such determination was shown that nobody will dare reduce own vulnerability to another round of similar 'negotiations'.

The intellectual leader of MAGA has basically already confirmed your line of thinking.

They’d have to convincingly explain why he wouldn’t just say “we’re aligning the world away from China, let’s get tariffs between members of the Free World to 0% so we don’t subsidize the Chinese manufacturing industry that can be used against us” or any version of that, adding or subtracting important information.

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. Witness that American presidents have been encouraging increased EU defense spending for decades, but it took the (IMO very questionable) announcements of the last few months to seemingly cause a change in mindset and priorities. It takes a (perceived) crisis to make people reconsider seemingly "forever" policies: "but we need our dairy tariff to protect our delicate cows and farmers and their ancestral cheese making practices" sounds so nice and reasonable, making it hard to ever get rid of. Neoliberalism is really bad at enacting policies that sound mean.

Even with all that said, I still am not convinced it's worth it. Or even that close to being worth it.

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.

Luckily MAGA influencers put out so many mutually conflicting explainers for what Trump's strategy actually is that they can always pick one narrative and say that this was the plan all along.

Looking at this, I wonder if it’s not some kind of reverse rug pulling, where insiders buy on the dip, knowing reversal is coming.

More seriously, I wonder how aware Trump is that this constant flip flopping is destroying his ability to make credible threats in future.

"Trump is acting in a way which maximizes his ability to rip off the stock market through insider trading" is as good an explanation as any.

Him becoming not credible is only a problem for the US, not for him personally. If the stock market stops reacting to his announcements he can always order the US military to occupy Greenland to get their attention back.

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