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This Is How the World Ends, Part V
See Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.
The United States has never made foreign policy by
committee.
The Constitution grants the
executive broad authority and autonomy to collect information, come to
conclusions, chart out strategies and implement foreign and military policy.
Congress technically has oversight, but the legislative branch lost interest in
and surrendered meaningful control over foreign policy over a decade ago.
Within the executive branch there are no meaningful checks on the president's
powers, with all senior executive staff serving at the President's pleasure
(or, if you prefer, whim).
Trump has been pruning his
executive staff quite rigorously in recent months, and the foreign affairs team
is no exception.
Think back to the 2016
campaign. In the early months there were 18 people vying for the Republican
nomination. Everyone assumed Trump's campaign was a marketing scheme, so Trump
got 18th pick for advisors. This landed him with
disasters-in-waiting such as Michael Flynn.
Upon actually becoming
president, a number of individuals from more established interests either saw
an opportunity to shape a man who was obviously a neophyte and/or felt it was
their duty to the country to try and advise the freshman president. This gave
rise to what I've called the "Axis of Adults." These are the men
who wanted to make sure the country didn't go off the rails.
The chair of the National
Republican Committee – Rince Priebus – became Chief of Staff in an attempt to
inject some Republican orthodoxy. Marine General HR McMaster became National
Security Advisor with the intent of speaking truth to power. ExxonMobil
CEO Rex Tillerson took over the State Department to share the insights of
corporate America. Gary Cohn climbed aboard to explain the ins-and-outs of Wall
Street.
All sought to actively shape
President Trump's views. All are now gone.
Another pair already have one
foot out the door. Priebus' replacement as Chief of Staff – General John Kelly
– felt the best thing he could do to help the president was ensure accurate
information delivery. That meant, among other things, taking away the president's
phone so he wouldn't ingest bad information... and so Trump now plans his life
without much consulting his chief of staff. General James Mattis – the Defense
Secretary – now seems to be the only person allowed in the room with an
interest in accuracy, context and consequences. It makes him a bit of a downer
in adrenaline-fueled TrumpWorld, and I'd be shocked if he wasn't excused by
year's end as well.
Bottom line: All the chaos and
disruption of the past 15 months has been the result of a Donald Trump who
has been actively held back. Now the world gets to see what a Trump
unleashed – an America unleashed – can do.
The pace of… everything is
about to pick up considerably. Between the end of the WTO and the dawning
exploitation of secondary sanctions, the US is getting the free use of its
other hand - its natural economic power. The Trump administration is testing
America’s strength just as other major powers are hitting structural
barriers, not least of which are demographic. The Americans are now only one of
the few peoples that are repopulating, within a generation the average American
will be younger than the average Brazilian (the Americans are already younger
than the average German or Chinese). At the same time the collection of
people who have repeatedly talked the president out of some of his more
disruptive policies are now either gone or sufficiently discredited in the
president's eyes that they might as well be.
It isn't so much that any
individual actions taken by the Trump administration will or won't work.
It isn't so much that there is or isn't a grand, multi-faceted plan in the
White House. It isn't even that the president does or doesn't understand the
context or consequences of his policies. And it certainly isn't that this is
not what I would do if I were king for a day.
It is that global population
patterns are dependent upon global manufactures trade to generate income, and
global agricultural trade to pay for food from abroad. It is that the global
transport that enables such sectors to work requires a global order.
It is that since World War II
the United States has sustained the only true global order that our world has
ever known.
It is that not only is the
United States no longer holding the global order together, it is actively breaking
it down and there is no power or coalition of powers that can even
theoretically take its place. It is that a world without America is a world in
which other countries – whether out of desperation or opportunity – feel forced
to protect their own interests. And most are wildly out of practice, wildly
vulnerable, or – in most cases – both. It's that America’s only
significant geopolitical competitors – Europe and China – have become
irrevocably addicted to that order just in time for it to end.
And perhaps most worryingly, it
is that the Americans’ abdicating global leadership isn't the same thing as the
Americans’ abdicating global power, or global reach.
It is that the party is over.
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