Yes and no. The decline already started before Trump’s first term. The peak was the 90s or early 2000s, but even then the conditions that caused the decline were already in place. They had hollowed out their industrial base and offshored manufacturing in favour of a financialized economy, and it worked very well for a time. It restored profitability and disciplined labour, effectively neutering unions. America’s technological advantage carried it through the 90s and 00s, and its Cold War era military remained unchallenged for a long time.
However, I emphasize that it was the Cold War era military. All that military power came from manufacturing, but that hollowing out of their manufacturing base also hollowed out arms manufacturing. The defence contractors merged and conglomerated, and they became even more profitable, but their actual material output has been dropping precipitously as they focused on high margin low production rate technological wonder-weapons. They made oodles of money, but delivered little. Still, with the leftover Cold War military as the backbone and the cutting-edge modern equipment as the teeth, they were able to dominate smaller states and remain a major threat to the other large military powers.
However, the rot really started to become apparent this decade. The Ukraine war revealed that Russia’s leftover Soviet factories could outproduce all of NATO in terms of artillery shells, one of the most basic pieces of war materiel. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea drained naval interceptors at an unsustainable rate, being used up against relatively cheap missiles and drones. In manufacturing terms, America already couldn’t keep up.
Then, in walks Trump 2: the Revenge Term. To his (very limited) credit, he did understand on some level that America had been deindustrialized - he had repeatedly said that “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country” - and his tariff spree last year was aimed at bringing back domestic industry. It was too little, too late of course, and only harmed America’s global image without significantly restoring domestic manufacturing. He also seems to have either forgotten this, or never really understood the ramifications of deindustrialization for military power, or convinced himself that he completely restored american manfacturing. Probably a combination of the three given that he’s senile.
He had also absorbed the right wing cultural theory of American decline, that they had gone woke and therefore gone broke, and all they needed to do was violently reassert themselves on the world stage in order to reclaim their old glory. This analysis is of course completely at odds with material reality (that America no longer has the manufacturing power to maintail a global military empire), but Trump is stupid, senile, and very suggestible, so he managed to get talked into going to war with Iran, despite knowing that American manufacturing had been hollowed out.
Now they’ve exhausted a large proportion of their precision-guided standoff weapons (harpoons, JASSMs, etc.), their interceptor missiles (THAADs, Patriots), they had an aircraft carrier almost burn down due to a laundry fire, and another carrier serving what looks like boiled shoe leather since they also hollowed out their logistics.
This wasn’t all Trump’s doing, he just came in as the right man at the right time to completely fuck up the US empire. They probably had a few decades left of global hegemony, but in trying to reassert themselves when they no longer had the juice to fight a middle power like Iran (let alone China), they’ve drastically accelerated their decline.
Fully agree. Trump is a symptom of the American cultural response to this decline, not the source.
USA very much followed the pattern of the Spanish Empire. Found a golden goose that turned their currency into the world standard, and proceeded to import themselves out of self sufficiency.
That being said, on May 26th 2016, I was laughed at by my entire work office for saying that Trump winning the GOP nomination (At that time we all assumed Hillary would win) would be noted by future historians as the beginning of the dissolution of the united states. Trump is a snowball, not snowfall.
And honestly that’s what were seeing with California filling the void left from defunded federal agencies like FEMA, FDA, EPA, etc. I honestly predict that the USA will splinter into several factions depending on what states participate.
It’s also likely that if he had won the 2020 election, his second term wouldn’t have been like this, since he wouldn’t be so aggrieved. It would likely have been more like his first term, where he was basically a standard republican but with no decorum.
It took the democrats setting him up as an “easy to beat” opponent in 2016, getting beaten, flailing uselessly, torpedoing bernie for biden and beating him in 2020, assuming that he was vanquished for good, trying and failing to punish him for January 6th (thus setting him on the warpath), then enabling the Gaza genocide and completely fumbling the 2024 election, to put this specific version of Trump in power at the worst possible time. It’s kind of like a feedback loop or a cascading failure. It’s perfect in a way.
I think its hard to say either way. Definitely something I’ve been thinking about as well.
Like on the one hand, it’s pretty obvious project 2025 was the product of them having 4 years to screw in a single light bulb between themselves. I don’t think they would have accomplished everything in the bill even with the extra term.
On the other hand, what kind of power could they have consolidated with the extra 4 years of continuity? If things had gone “according to plan” I could see Trump magnanimously passing the presidential torch to a sycophantic successor who’d allow Trump to retain his Cult leader status.
It took the democrats setting him up as an “easy to beat” opponent in 2016, getting beaten, flailing uselessly, torpedoing bernie
I know you’re referencing 2020, but IMO the DNC snubbing Bernie in 2016 incentivized a lot of “nihilistic” or “accelerationist” votes. To a degree they had a point. Hillary undeniably would have been more successful at perpetuating American Hegemony. So many people voted for Trump because they underestimated how much the decline of US global supremacy would effect them directly.
Yes and no. The decline already started before Trump’s first term. The peak was the 90s or early 2000s, but even then the conditions that caused the decline were already in place. They had hollowed out their industrial base and offshored manufacturing in favour of a financialized economy, and it worked very well for a time. It restored profitability and disciplined labour, effectively neutering unions. America’s technological advantage carried it through the 90s and 00s, and its Cold War era military remained unchallenged for a long time.
However, I emphasize that it was the Cold War era military. All that military power came from manufacturing, but that hollowing out of their manufacturing base also hollowed out arms manufacturing. The defence contractors merged and conglomerated, and they became even more profitable, but their actual material output has been dropping precipitously as they focused on high margin low production rate technological wonder-weapons. They made oodles of money, but delivered little. Still, with the leftover Cold War military as the backbone and the cutting-edge modern equipment as the teeth, they were able to dominate smaller states and remain a major threat to the other large military powers.
However, the rot really started to become apparent this decade. The Ukraine war revealed that Russia’s leftover Soviet factories could outproduce all of NATO in terms of artillery shells, one of the most basic pieces of war materiel. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea drained naval interceptors at an unsustainable rate, being used up against relatively cheap missiles and drones. In manufacturing terms, America already couldn’t keep up.
Then, in walks Trump 2: the Revenge Term. To his (very limited) credit, he did understand on some level that America had been deindustrialized - he had repeatedly said that “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country” - and his tariff spree last year was aimed at bringing back domestic industry. It was too little, too late of course, and only harmed America’s global image without significantly restoring domestic manufacturing. He also seems to have either forgotten this, or never really understood the ramifications of deindustrialization for military power, or convinced himself that he completely restored american manfacturing. Probably a combination of the three given that he’s senile.
He had also absorbed the right wing cultural theory of American decline, that they had gone woke and therefore gone broke, and all they needed to do was violently reassert themselves on the world stage in order to reclaim their old glory. This analysis is of course completely at odds with material reality (that America no longer has the manufacturing power to maintail a global military empire), but Trump is stupid, senile, and very suggestible, so he managed to get talked into going to war with Iran, despite knowing that American manufacturing had been hollowed out.
Now they’ve exhausted a large proportion of their precision-guided standoff weapons (harpoons, JASSMs, etc.), their interceptor missiles (THAADs, Patriots), they had an aircraft carrier almost burn down due to a laundry fire, and another carrier serving what looks like boiled shoe leather since they also hollowed out their logistics.
This wasn’t all Trump’s doing, he just came in as the right man at the right time to completely fuck up the US empire. They probably had a few decades left of global hegemony, but in trying to reassert themselves when they no longer had the juice to fight a middle power like Iran (let alone China), they’ve drastically accelerated their decline.
Fully agree. Trump is a symptom of the American cultural response to this decline, not the source.
USA very much followed the pattern of the Spanish Empire. Found a golden goose that turned their currency into the world standard, and proceeded to import themselves out of self sufficiency.
That being said, on May 26th 2016, I was laughed at by my entire work office for saying that Trump winning the GOP nomination (At that time we all assumed Hillary would win) would be noted by future historians as the beginning of the dissolution of the united states. Trump is a snowball, not snowfall.
And honestly that’s what were seeing with California filling the void left from defunded federal agencies like FEMA, FDA, EPA, etc. I honestly predict that the USA will splinter into several factions depending on what states participate.
It’s also likely that if he had won the 2020 election, his second term wouldn’t have been like this, since he wouldn’t be so aggrieved. It would likely have been more like his first term, where he was basically a standard republican but with no decorum.
It took the democrats setting him up as an “easy to beat” opponent in 2016, getting beaten, flailing uselessly, torpedoing bernie for biden and beating him in 2020, assuming that he was vanquished for good, trying and failing to punish him for January 6th (thus setting him on the warpath), then enabling the Gaza genocide and completely fumbling the 2024 election, to put this specific version of Trump in power at the worst possible time. It’s kind of like a feedback loop or a cascading failure. It’s perfect in a way.
I think its hard to say either way. Definitely something I’ve been thinking about as well.
Like on the one hand, it’s pretty obvious project 2025 was the product of them having 4 years to screw in a single light bulb between themselves. I don’t think they would have accomplished everything in the bill even with the extra term.
On the other hand, what kind of power could they have consolidated with the extra 4 years of continuity? If things had gone “according to plan” I could see Trump magnanimously passing the presidential torch to a sycophantic successor who’d allow Trump to retain his Cult leader status.
I know you’re referencing 2020, but IMO the DNC snubbing Bernie in 2016 incentivized a lot of “nihilistic” or “accelerationist” votes. To a degree they had a point. Hillary undeniably would have been more successful at perpetuating American Hegemony. So many people voted for Trump because they underestimated how much the decline of US global supremacy would effect them directly.