Michael Anton was wrong. The Trump campaign wasn't about saving America from a suicide mission. It was about launching a kamikaze attack on the heart of globalism.
The Wages of Self-Defeat
Despite George Washington's warnings, the United States is now so enmeshed in the international system that its prosperity depends on it. As a result, Trump's Flight 93 doctrine is a formula for self-defeat.
Take immigrants. Whatever the president may think, the U.S. economy runs on immigrants. Agriculture, construction, and the service sector all rely heavily on recent immigrants, many of them undocumented. Indeed, so vital are they as economic actors that the undocumented annually contribute $11.6 billion in state and local taxes and help keep Social Security afloat even though they have little prospect of ever drawing from the fund themselves. Immigrant workers, both legal and undocumented, make the U.S. economy an estimated 11% larger than it would otherwise be. At a time of record low unemployment and labor shortages -- and with a population that is inexorably aging -- the United States should for economic reasons alone be encouraging an influx of immigrants, not trying to keep them out.
Trump, meanwhile, is fixated on the "$800 billion a year" that the United States runs as a trade deficit with countries around the world. You undoubtedly won't be surprised to learn, given the source, that this number is off, since it doesn't incorporate the net surplus in "services" -- such as tourism, royalties, and banking -- the United States has with other countries, which promptly brings that figure down to $500 billion. Far more important, the focus of White House attention shouldn't be that trade deficit, which doesn't reflect the overall strength of the U.S. economy, but the enormous and ever-growing debt the United States has, something the Trump tax "reform" plan and his driving desire to continually boost the country's already bloated military spending only aggravate.
In addition, tariffs are one of the worst ways of addressing trade deficits, since they almost invariably generate retaliatory tariffs so that the "cure" ends up hurting far more than the problem. "The United States will be opening fire on the whole world and also opening fire on itself," a spokesman for the Chinese Commerce Ministry aptly noted after Trump announced his latest round of tariffs on Chinese goods. Although he may ultimately declare victory in this war, it will certainly be a pyrrhic one.
Trump's approach to national security is equally self-defeating. It's bad enough that Washington is applying the screws to allies to up their military spending -- and their purchases of U.S. military goods. Worse, he's not even using the burden-sharing argument to reduce national security expenditures, which have soared above a trillion dollars a year. The wars that Washington is still fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and Africa, as well as the wars it's supporting, as in Yemen, continue to generate instability in that vast region and blowback at home. Trump's willingness to entertain new wars with Iran, Venezuela, and (if negotiations go south) North Korea is yet more unnerving.
The most devastating impact of the Flight 93 Doctrine, however, will be on the version of the international community Washington had such a hand in creating in its moment of dominance. The organs of the global economy like the World Trade Organization set the rules of the road that have consistently preserved Washington's privileges, including the dollar's use as the world's most common reserve currency. In the form of treaty organizations like NATO as well as bilateral alliances, that community similarly supports American military adventures around so much of the globe by subsidizing its bases, contributing soldiers and weaponry to its military campaigns, and purchasing huge amounts of its military exports. Even as he blathers on about making America number one, Trump is systematically drilling into the very foundations of U.S. power.
There can be no doubt that the rules governing the global economy should be rewritten, given the widening gap between rich and poor. And yes, America should rethink its global military posture and the alliances that support it. Washington needs a radically new foreign policy doctrine that rejects the exceptionalist thinking of the past and offers a more cooperative way for the United States to interact with the world.
But Trump's Flight 93 Doctrine is the opposite of what's needed. It will accomplish what Osama bin Laden set out to do so many years ago. By driving a wedge between the United States and its allies, initiating trade wars that will weaken the economy, potentially driving the country toward bankruptcy through insane budget priorities, and destroying the very fabric of the international community, Donald Trump is on a suicide mission. He's rushing the cockpit, that's for sure, but don't expect a soft landing. When it comes, it will be a terrible, heartbreaking crash.
John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book is Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe's Broken Dreams. This winter, Frostlands, book two of his Splinterlands series, will be published by Haymarket Books.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.
Copyright 2018 John Feffer
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