Donald Trump is not known for doing his homework — he’s more of a go-with-my-gut kind of guy. What I find most terrifying about what Trump is doing today is that he seems to be largely relying on his gut to bet that he can radically overturn how America’s institutions have operated and the way the nation relates to both its allies and enemies — and get it all right. As in, America will become stronger and more prosperous, while the rest of the world will just adjust. Next question.
Well, what are the odds that Trump can get all of these complex issues right — based on trusting his gut — when on the same day that he was announcing his huge tariff increases on imports from the world over, he invited into the Oval Office Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist who believes that Sept. 11 was an “inside” job. She was there, my Times colleagues reported, to lecture Trump about how disloyal key members of the National Security Council staff were. Trump subsequently fired at least six of them. (No wonder so many Chinese asked me in Beijing last week if we were having a Mao-like “cultural revolution.” More on that later.)
Yes, what are the odds that such a president, seemingly ready to act on foreign policy on the advice of a conspiracy theorist, got all this trade theory right? I’d say they’re long.
What is it that Trump, with his grievance-filled gut, doesn’t understand? The time we live in today, though far from perfect or equal, is nevertheless widely viewed by historians as one of the most relatively peaceful and prosperous in history. We are benefiting from this pacific era in large part because of a tightening web of globalization and trade, and also because of the world’s domination by a uniquely benign and generous hegemon called the United States of America that is at peace and economically interwoven with its biggest rival, China.
In other words, the world has been the way the world has been these past 80 years because America was the way America was: a superpower ready to let other countries take some advantage of it in trade, because previous presidents understood that if the world grew steadily richer and more peaceful, and if the United States just continued to get the same slice of global G.D.P. — about 25 percent — it would still prosper handsomely because the total pie would grow steadily larger. Which is exactly what happened.
The world has been the way the world has been because China brought more people out of poverty faster than any other country in history, largely on the back of a giant, relentless export engine that took advantage of the U.S.-engineered global free trade system.
The world has been the way the world has been because the United States had the good fortune to be bordered by two friendly democracies, Canada and Mexico. Together the three nations wove a network of supply chains that made them all richer, no matter that many goods manufactured in North America could have a label saying, “Made by America, Mexico and Canada together.”
The world has been the way the world has been thanks to the alliance between the United States and both the other members of NATO and the European Union, which, with U.S. help, have kept the peace in Europe from the end of World War II right up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This vast, prosperous trans-Atlantic partnership has been a pillar of global growth and security.
The world has been the way the world has been because America had the government work force it had, with its expertise, incorruptibility and funding of scientific research that was the envy of the world.
Trump is now betting that the world will stay the way the world was — growing more prosperous and peaceful — even if he converts the United States into a predatory power ready to seize territory, like Greenland and even if he sends the message to aspiring talented legal immigrants that if you do come here, be very, very careful what you say.
If Trump turns out to be right — that we’ll still enjoy the economic benefits and stability we’ve had for nearly a century even if America suddenly shifts from a benign hegemon to a predator, from the world’s most important proponent of free trade to a global tariffing giant, from the protector of the European Union to telling Europe it’s on its own and from a defender of science to a country that forces out a top vaccine specialist like Dr. Peter Marks for refusing to go along with quack medicine — I will stand corrected.
But if Trump turns out to be wrong, he will have sown the wind, and we as a nation will reap the whirlwind. But so, too, will the rest of the world. And I can tell you, the world is worried.
When I was in China last week, more than a few people asked me if Trump was launching a “cultural revolution” the way that Mao did. Mao’s lasted 10 years — from 1966 to 1976 — and it wrecked the whole economy after he instructed his party’s youth to destroy the bureaucrats that he thought were opposing him.
This question was so much on the mind of one retired senior Chinese official that he emailed me last week, with a warning: Mao sent his young party cadres to attack “anyone who could think — ruling elites such as Deng Xiaoping, college professors, engineers, writers and journalists, doctors, etc. He wanted to dumb down the entire population so that he could rule easily and forever,” the former official wrote. “Sounds a bit similar with what is going on in the U.S.? I hope not.”
I hope not, too — especially for a reason raised by Stephen Roach, a Yale economist with long experience in China. When Mao’s Cultural Revolution happened, Roach noted, China was largely isolated and the effects were mostly felt within its borders. A similar cultural revolution in the United States today, Roach noted, could have a “profound impact” on the entire world.
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