Martin Jay
What's the joke Putin, Xi and Modi ? Well, Trump actually - whose childish antics are making us all rich.
What's the joke Putin, Xi and Modi ? Well, Trump actually - whose childish antics are making us all rich.
What was the joke ? When leaders of China, Russia and India huddled together recently at the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), they had a funny moment for a few seconds, captured by world media and shared on social media extensively. The SCO was initially just China, Russia and some former Central Asian Soviet states, but in recent years has expanded its membership to Iran, Pakistan and India - making it a formidable bloc. The joke Putin, Xi and Modi shared might have been at Donald Trump's expense, as the more that the U.S. president does internationally, the more of a joke he becomes universally around the world. The U.S. president is literally a comic figure - a clown who amuses world leaders who are embracing a new multipolar world which has found a new system of global trade that bypasses the U.S. altogether. Like BRICS, the SCO is growing all the time and now planning to have its own development bank, as these countries totally abandon the U.S. dollar, the U.S. banking system, and now the IMF and World Bank.
The joke, possibly, is that it is Trump and his erroneous policy decisions which accelerate the growth of both the SCO and BRICS each day - as Trump's ideas are so firmly rooted in a period of time in the second half of the 20th century where the U.S. was the dominant superpower and could bully everyone on the planet with its foreign policies. In the old days, huge foreign policy failures like Korea and Vietnam mattered less, as America was always the 600-pound gorilla who could sit wherever it wanted to sit when it entered a room. Having said that, the Vietnam war was hugely expensive and cost the American economy heavily - which is why Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold, so that future wars could be fought with freshly minted dollars with no side effects. In reality, subsequent wars - certainly Iraq and Afghanistan - were fought using money which was essentially borrowed from Global South countries, even China, through treasury bonds - basically loans given to countries backed by the U.S. government. But in recent weeks, with the real story of the Iran war emerging, some economists are wondering how much longer America has in this new system of endless borrowing from the Global South. With the rapid acceleration of both SCO and BRICS, borrowing money from the U.S. treasury might simply become an outdated idea - and a surplus of dollars around the world which not many people want only means one thing: inflation.
Inflation would come about, economists argue, as the price of the U.S. dollar would have to be weakened - which at a glance doesn't look like a bad thing (and something that Trump actually wants). A cheaper dollar gives a shot in the arm to U.S. manufacturers, but it also makes foreign goods more expensive, which drives inflation. Leaders like Trump, who don't really understand international trade, don't get the downside to a weaker dollar - which is an argument that only works when you have real control over the world's economies and their central banks, like in Nixon's day. "It may be our dollar, but it's your problem," one of Nixon's advisors is quoted as saying to Europeans in the early seventies at a conference which explained how he planned to weaken the U.S. dollar and keep the hegemony.
Trump can't do both. And the more he messes with foreign policy - like a disgruntled, privileged brat who is used to his tantrums getting attention - the more the U.S. economy and its once-hegemony sinks. Perhaps this is what Putin, Xi and Modi were laughing about. Their economies are literally being advanced by Trump's stupidity and every poor decision he makes based on nursing his own wounded ego. The recent attack by U.S. forces on an island in the Persian Gulf must have made all three laugh their socks off, as it will cost the U.S. dearly. Did Trump do it so he could lie to U.S. reporters and claim to have attacked Kharg Island instead ? Does he even understand the basic unwritten rule of escalation in the Middle East ? Iran now has to hit U.S. troops and bases twice or three times harder just to retain its political capital. Can the U.S. sustain such a beating when its own arsenal is down to worrying levels never seen before, in particular interceptor missiles like THAAD?
The delusional antics of Trump are leading America to ruin at a speed most thought was unimaginable. While few - if any - U.S. presidents, unlike U.S. soldiers, understand how poor the U.S. military is (all it ever does is lose wars it starts and has to retreat in embarrassment), it is telling how out-of-date Trump is when it comes to global economics and where the U.S. stands in the world. His recent campaign against India was pathetic - singling out an old ally with sky-high tariffs which will force Modi to forget the U.S. market altogether and look elsewhere for its exports. India has no choice when it comes to Russian oil, which is the lifeline of its economy, and now secondary sanctions which Trump is imposing on countries that do business with Iran are also hitting Delhi. But does America come out of it even looking like a winner when it has to block India's exports of rice to Iran ? America's delusional views about where it stands in the world today are seen in the same prism as bags of rice. Trump can't stop Iran selling oil to China, but it can block bags of rice from being loaded onto ships or trucks headed towards Iran. This is not a superpower flexing its muscles - but more of a former empire struggling to cope with the new pecking order which has pushed it down the line. Maybe the joke in Tianjin was: "How can we fix the U.S. elections so Trump comes back for a third term?"