(MENAFN- Asia Times)
Trump isn't even president yet, and already some people are starting to realize that they didn't get quite what they hoped they were voting for. During his campaign, trump promised angry consumers that his policies would“rapidly drive prices down” and“bring your grocery bill way down.”
Unsurprisingly, Trump has now equivocated on that promise , declaring that“it's hard to bring things down once they're up.” Conservatives hoped that Trump would crack down on the trans movement and stand up for a traditional view of gender, but now he says he doesn't“want to get into the bathroom issue” and that he wants“to have all people treated fairly.”
Many technologists hoped Trump would be a friend of technology and a foe of inefficient unions, and yet now Trump is condemning automation and siding with the longshoremen's union:
And so on. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, of course - we've had almost a decade to watch Trump make promises and break them .
Everyone knows that Trump follows his own whims, impulses, and personal interests, and that what serves as his ideology is actually just a set of instincts and vague ideas that cobbled together on his own while watching too much CNN in the 1990s. If you projected your hopes and dreams onto Trump when you pulled the lever, well, I guess that's on you.
All in all, I'm not too worried about the state of the United States right now. Our economy is robust; even if Trump re-accelerates inflation by running big deficits and messing with the Fed, it probably won't be catastrophic.
Our society is slowly calming down from a decade of unrest. Climate change is a threat, but it's mostly being caused by other countries , so even if Trump cancels green energy subsidies it'll have only a marginal effect on the planet.
A lot of long-term chronic concerns, like inequality, are certainly worth addressing but not as immediately urgent as we made them out to be in the 2010s. Trump may throw Ukraine under the bus, and though this would be a terribly immoral and reprehensible thing to do, it also won't result in a direct threat to the US.
And yet there's one big exception, which is the threat posed to the US by the People's Republic of China. China has the capacity to defeat the US in any extended conventional war, thanks to its domination of global manufacturing; soon, it may have the capacity to defeat the US and all of its allies combined . At that point, what China does to the US will be limited only by what China feels like doing to the US.
And I think it's clear that what China's current leaders want is to reduce the US to a second-rate power so that there's no chance it will threaten their hegemony or their freedom of action in the future. This is what some people argue the US did to Russia after the Cold War. And communist China is not nearly as nice a country as the US was in the 1990s.
The economic and political consequences for the American people would be, to put it mildly, pretty negative.
The only way I see to prevent this outcome, other than simply praying that China somehow collapses or that the Chinese are some sort of uniquely passive and mild people who won't really do any of the things their leaders say they want to do, is to reduce the manufacturing gap between the US-led alliance and China.
Biden made some strides toward this during his term in office, reviving US manufacturing somewhat with his industrial policies, and implementing stringent and wide-ranging export controls on the Chinese chip industry.
The big question is whether Trump will continue the effort to (partially) catch up to China in manufacturing, or whether he will scrap it. This might seem like a stupid question, since Trump talks quite a lot about how his tariffs on China are going to restore American manufacturing. But you shouldn't believe this story, for several reasons.
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