Or perhaps the start of the US decline by Musk/Trump sabotaging the Pax Americana.
>>>... USAID is just the most extreme example of how the Musk/Trump administration is sabotaging the American Empire. For yes, America is or was an imperial power, although in a different way from most past empires — less reliant on force, more reliant on good will and trust. What Musk and Trump have done is to destroy much of the basis for U.S. influence, leaving America far weaker than it was just a few weeks ago.
America’s imperial era — the Pax Americana — began after World War II. With Europe and Japan in ruins and Britain exhausted, the U.S. had no military or economic peers outside the Soviet bloc. As Phillips O’Brien
recently noted, America could easily have gobbled up lots of territory if it had thought in conventional Great Power terms.
But our leaders were more sophisticated than that. I don’t know whether they had read Norman Angell’s
The Great Illusion about how conquest
no longer made sense, but they certainly understood that America needed prosperous, willing allies, not more territory.
...
All of this makes us distrusted and friendless. It also makes us weak, because America needs allies even more now than it did during the Cold War.
Back then the U.S. economy was considerably larger than that of our major rival; it was always a severe strain on the Soviet Union to maintain anything resembling military parity. Now, however, as the chart at the top of this post shows, China’s GDP, adjusted for differences in price levels, is significantly larger than America’s. And that’s the right measure if you’re thinking about raw power. As the chart also shows, however, the world’s democracies as a group still considerably outweigh the major autocratic powers.
So this is a really bad time to be alienating democracies around the world and destroying America’s reputation as a trustworthy partner.
I mean, what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government.[bold added]<<<
Trump and Musk are making us distrusted, friendless and weak
paulkrugman.substack.com
