RIP Rules-Based International Order; Trump Accelerates Paradigm Shift to Might Makes Right, Multipolar Spheres of Dominance

[nycfan]

Setting aside the who's and how’s for a moment, I think it is worth stepping back to recognize that we are likely experiencing a massive, long-term shift in the world order away from the post-WWII rules-based order that was framed by nearly 45 years of the Cold War and another 35 years of American Hegemony.

For all its faults, and there have been many, the American-lead rules-based order has resulted in an immense growth of the world economy and improvements in living standards. Scientific and technological advances of the last 80-100 years have been astonishing.

But we really do seem to have elected a leader determined to cooperate with our former Cold War adversaries to dismantle that era and all the advantages America has gained as a result.

The democratic gains of the end of the Cold War will have been dispiritingly short-lived, in retrospect — but their reversal started at the same time they began, in 1989, crashing on the blood-stained streets in Tiananmen Square. The failure of the Arab Spring was perhaps the key reversal of the tide, and the Pandemic shattered belief in democracy and science and expertise — the enemies of democracy have relentlessly pressed their advantage in asymmetrical warfare through flooding the zone with disinformation to convince democracies to destroy themselves.

Now we move toward regional autocracies carving up their spheres of dominance. For now, our new government is one of the powerful individual actors that many of us still stuck in the dying era see as one of the Bad Guys.

But take heart, I guess, because internationally the Bad Guys are winning.

 

[nycfan]

In Requiem

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” ___ John Adams

“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”____ Hannah Arendt

If a democracy’s elected leaders unite against violence, democracy tends to survive. Where elected politicians collude with insurrection, democracy is in danger.” ____ Michael Ignatieff

“The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time”. ___ Kim Stanley Robinson

“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” ___ Franklin Roosevelt

 

[CFordUNC]

I’m not sure there has ever been an instance in the entire history of the world where a country just completely and totally squandered and forfeited its power, leadership, and influence in such an unnecessary manner. It’s actually pretty stunning when you consider the scope of it all.

 

[Burgawnc]

NYC, excellent quotes.

re Chad's comment, in complete agreement with you and astounded by the broad complicity that is enabling the collapse.

 

[nycfan]

NYC, excellent quotes.

re Chad's comment, in complete agreement with you and astounded by the broad complicity that is enabling the collapse.

I cannot take credit for assembling them, I borrowed them and see I failed to post the link to that. I will fix that oversight.

 

[Shenanigans]

Setting aside the who’s and how’s for a moment, I think it is worth stepping back to recognize that we are likely experiencing a massive, long-term shift in the world order away from the post-WWII rules-based order that was framed by nearly 45 years of the Cold War and another 35 years of American Hegemony.

For all its many faults, and there have been many, the American-lead rules-based order has resulted in an immense growth of the world economy and improvements in living standards. Scientific and technological advances of the last 80-100 years have been astonishing.

But we really do seem to have elected a leader determined to cooperate with our former Cold War adversaries to dismantle that era and all the advantages America has gained as a result.

The democratic gains of the end of the Cold War will have been dispiritingly short-lived, in retrospect — but their reversal started at the same time they began, in 1989, crashing on the blood-stained streets in Tiananmen Square. The failure of the Arab Spring was perhaps the key reversal of the tide, and the Pandemic shattered belief in democracy and science and expertise — the enemies of democracy have relentlessly pressed their advantage in asymmetrical warfare through flooding the zone with disinformation to convince democracies to destroy themselves.

Now we move toward regional autocracies carving up their spheres of dominance. For now, our new government is one of the powerful individual actors that many of us still stuck in the dying era see as one of the Bad Guys.

But take heart, I guess, because internationally the Bad Guys are winning.

NYC, I you! You post faithfully every day about our impending, 100% for sure it's coming, apocalypse. You know your enemy.

I feel like Wesley, tortured by a death machine, after intimidating Prince Humperdink, and finding Inigo Montoya, and my favorite giant.

As you wish...I will not stoke political violence. I will save humanity though.

Sometimes that involves shitting on a dumb rednecks face.

 

[donbosco]

Helluva opening post.

 

[nycfan]

WSJ Editorial Board:​

​

Trump’s Old World Order​

Does he want deals with Russia and China to carve up the planet? He should tell Americans.​

GIFT LINK --> Opinion | Trump’s Old World Order

"With his first weeks back in office, and especially after Friday’s Oval Office brawling with Ukraine’s president, it’s clear President Trump has designs for a new world order. Perhaps he could share this vision with the country when he addresses Congress on Tuesday.

...While he solicits Moscow, Mr. Trump is hammering traditional U.S. friends. He plans 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, in violation of his own USMCA trade deal, and his defense secretary has threatened to invade Mexico to pursue drug cartels. He wants to hit Western Europe with heavy tariffs on its autos, and slap reciprocal tariffs on the rest of the trading world.

These tariffs are harsher than those he has put on China. He is clearly courting Xi Jinping, the Communist Party boss, calling him a great leader and talking about a new mutual understanding. He has shown no similar interest in defending Taiwan, and he has said in the past that China can easily dominate the island democracy in a conflict. Watching Mr. Trump and Ukraine, the leaders of Taiwan and Japan should be deeply worried.

... All of this would amount to an epochal return to the world of great power competition and balance of power that prevailed before World War II. It’s less a brave new world than a reversion to a dangerous old one.

...Mr. Trump says he is making America great again, not retreating from the defense of freedom. He says he wants “peace,” but is it peace with honor, or the peace of the grave for Ukraine and accommodation to Chinese domination in the Pacific? And why isn’t he increasing defense spending?

If Messrs. Trump and Vance really are “stripping away” illusions, why not have the courage to say what those illusions are? Perhaps it’s because such retreat might not be as popular as vague promises of peace. And perhaps because American retreat might not be as peaceful as they think.

... As Charles Krauthammer famously said, decline is a choice. Mr. Trump has an obligation to tell Americans what new order he thinks he is building. Then we can have a debate about his intentions and its consequences. Tuesday night would be a good moment to make his ambitions clear.

 

[superrific]

Some thoughts:

1. First, in 1992, a guy named Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called "the end of history," in which he argued that the 1990s marked "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

This book got a lot of fanfare at the time. My reaction was pretty simple: what the fuck are you talking about?

2. I don't think Tiananmen Square was as significant as the OP makes it out to be. Chinese communism is not really a threat to the rules-based international order. China has mostly played by the rules, with the exception of some of its trade practices -- but by 2012, 2013, China had cleaned up a lot of its most egregious practices. And here, I think, Americans -- and Europeans -- are more to blame than people recognize. The popular version is that Xi came in, started to aggressively consolidate control, and realized an aspiration to be a Mao-like figure in the Chinese pantheon.

And maybe that's right. But my Chinese students used to tell me a different story. Maybe it was propaganda (unwitting, for sure -- maybe they learned this in school and were repeating it), but it didn't seem like it. BTW, my Chinese students were far better than my American students in terms of ability; the language barrier often limited their comprehension and expression, but when they got it, they really got it. Neither here nor there, really, except to say they were smart.

What they told me was that America was trying to keep China down, that the WTO accession was a trick. They didn't mean that the thesis of "rich prosperous China will become democratic" but rather, America treated China like it was Bangladesh (a comparison explicitly given by one). We wanted cheap imports and nothing more. China wanted deeper engagement. The Chinese policy of requiring foreign investment through joint partnerships with Chinese companies was not intended to be IP theft; it was intended to be a win-win to deepen American engagement, help develop China's tech sector, and share prosperity. American companies, by contrast, wanted China to be a source of cheap manufacturing. The "IP theft" was merely Chinese companies trying to live up to the original spirit of the partnerships.

There's some truth to that. There were a lot of Chinese companies incorporated in Delaware, and they were trying Western style corporate governance. A lot of companies brought independent directors from America. Delaware's corporate governance was not an easy fit for a Chinese economy that had run on principles of guanxi (i.e. friendship and back scratching) for generations. But they were trying. The Americans often did not try. It was the negligence of American directors of a Chinese company that sparked the nastiest rebuke I've ever seen from a Delaware Chancellor, and it was possibly the high-water mark of liability for directors.

I'm no China expert and do not get anything like a full view of its economy or society. But the "stealing IP" narrative didn't make a lot of sense at the time, and I do not think it was intended as such. I suspect that my students were right about the way American companies shit on what they saw as "makeweight" partners, until the Chinese were like, "fine, if you're going to see us as thieves, we might as well steal to get something." And I think this environment propelled Xi. The "engagement" hawks lost credibility and Xi's more combative, assertive program took hold.

 

[aGDevil2k]

I’m not sure there has ever been an instance in the entire history of the world where a country just completely and totally squandered and forfeited its power, leadership, and influence in such an unnecessary manner. It’s actually pretty stunning when you consider the scope of it all.

But Eggs!

 

[superrific]

3. One thing that all of my Chinese students talked about was China's population. "We are smart, educated, and there are 5 times as many of us," they would say. "America will fail if it tries to keep us down." And I think that is prescient. Even today, Americans seem unable to grasp the implications of China's ordinary size.

To illustrate this point, I offer example of Yao Ming -- the tallest good NBA player in the history of the league. Wemby is on track to be better, but even Wemby is only 7'4." Why do I say Yao? Because Chinese people are, on average, relatively short -- two inches shorter than American men on average, and four or five shorter than many European countries. So why did China produce the tallest player? Because there are so many Chinese. Even though Yao was more standard distributions away from the mean than Mark Eaton, the sheer population difference overcomes that difference.

What's true of Yao will be true in other fields -- especially for traits that don't have an observable difference in mean values. The smartest person in the world is 5x more likely to be Chinese than American. China will produce 5x as many elite engineers as the US. Maybe 3x when you factor culture and environment. China will produce more Olympic gold medalists (which is why I've thought the claims of Chinese cheating are overblown -- I mean, maybe it happens, but you'd expect China to dominate in many Olympic sports because the size of their population).

Americans really have trouble coming to terms with this. I certainly do, and I think I'm more aware than others. And pair that with our new tech reality providing greater reach to a smaller number of people. It was a saying back in the 90s that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. These days, that would probably be 10% do 90% (note: I am using these numbers purely as illustration). So the quality of the elites is important, and China is always going to have an easier time producing 1000 super-elite scientists than the U.S.

And that tension between an America that is used to being the world leader -- not just in power, or economy, but (perhaps most especially) in human capital -- and an ambitious China that will have better elite human capital than the US is a major source of tension. The US wants to maintain tech superiority over China, but how is that possibly going to happen? DeepSeek is but one illustration. And where we are today is emblematic of that reality. Chinese made the best social media app. They have the best cars now. They have the best semiconductor production. They are, I'm guessing, pulling ahead in AI or will be soon.

If the US tries to compete with China as adversaries, we are going to lose because of numbers alone. That was the instinct behind the attempts for the western world to embrace China -- it will be better for everyone if we have a community of 3 billion people working toward similar goals (I'm adding Europe, the US, China and rounding up) than if 1.5 billion are fighting 300 million. Alas, the patronizing attitude shown by Americans to Chinese people made that cooperation less likely. I don't know if it's racism or xenophobia or simple unfamiliarity.

The racist white-supremacist outlook that is increasingly common in the US is going to hurt us. Even if it were true that white people are the most talented on the planet (almost certainly not true), our relatively small size will make our hegemony impossible. Put India and China together than they have 10x the population of America. They are bigger than us in the same proportion that the US is bigger than Texas.