I.F. Stone’s restive ghost!
Oct 09, 2025
Opinion Global trade
A world with two predatory superpowers
Nations must work out how to contend with Trump’s America and China
Martin Wolf
Editor: A selection form Mr. Wolf’s ‘Two Preditory Superpowers’ essay : that ignores America, as the only Nation to use two sucessive Atomic Bombs against Japan!
Donald Trump’s second term is transforming the world. It is quite likely that the autocratic regime he and his minions in the administration and the Supreme Court are creating will endure. Yet even if it does not, it will have changed the world simply because it has happened. What has happened once can happen again. This must transform views of the future. Yet that future will not just be determined by the US. China is also a superpower. So, what role might it play in this new era?
Let us start with the US. Other democracies used to think it shared core values with them. But this US quite clearly does not. Trump himself is grievance-fuelled, deal-driven and capricious. This alone makes it hard to deal with him. As Célia Belin of the European Council on Foreign Relations adds, his foreign policy “is his domestic agenda, exported”. Thus, she writes, “Trump and his Maga camp are using the same three methods at home and abroad: elimination, transformation and subjugation.” At home, they seek to eliminate the “deep state”, and turn a liberal America into a nationalist one. Abroad, similarly, they seek to eliminate alliances and other commitments and transform allies into vassals.
…
These goals are bad for most of the world and foolish for the US. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics takes this long view in a Foreign Affairs article on “The New Economic Geography”. In the post-second-world-war world, he writes, the US provided insurance to other countries against all sorts of risks. But the costs it bore were not uncompensated: other countries invested in the US, opened their economies to US investors, lent money to the US cheaply, made the US dollar the global currency, and turned US capital markets into the hub of global finance. This was then a mutually beneficial deal.
Trump whines that the US has been “ripped off”. The fact, however, is that it has remained the world’s richest and most technologically advanced economy in a period of unparalleled global growth: between 1950 and 2020 average global real GDP per head rose by 360 per cent! Ripped off? Hardly.
…
Alas, Trump has killed this grand bargain. In its place, we see a host of unreliable and predatory deals. In addition to imposing huge tariffs on countries that thought they were friends of America, Trump has demanded money be invested at his own discretion, to the great irritation of foreign partners. This is pure gangsterism.
Another way of thinking about what has happened is that in the old world of trust in the US, there was interdependence, but some countries were more dependent than others. This allowed interdependence to be “weaponised”. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argue, the US did so, rather freely. Within what were seen as mutually favourable long-term relationships, such weaponisation, notably over the use of sanctions, was tolerated, however grudgingly. But Trump is turning interdependence into a chokehold. That is a very different matter.
…
I. F. Stone’s restive ghost.
StephenKMackSD's Blog 