A lot of analysts and scholars need to get their heads around the possibility that the Trump administration might smash the foundations of US global dominance
Replies
Surely he'll smash the economic foundations and replace them with military ones. The country will be poorer, but they don't care about the people. It's all about primitive attack and revenge.
aug 26, 2025, 6:53 am • 2 0 • view
Shoki Omori, chief strategist at Japanese bank Mizuho, highlighted concerns over the pressure Trump has been putting on Powell in recent weeks. "Powell as of now seems to be fighting back but whoever comes next may just listen to whatever the White House wants. Not looking good."
aug 26, 2025, 7:45 am • 2 0 • view
Struggling to see why people find this so hard to grasp. Like duh.
aug 26, 2025, 6:26 am • 45 0 • view
A lot of people invested entire careers in researching, discussing and helping to wield US global power so they're inevitably going to struggle in a world where what they claimed was impossible might happen
aug 26, 2025, 6:28 am • 29 0 • view
I can imagine the applications from overseas to study at Yale or Harvard must be drying up right now. A bit hard to stay a world-leading university if the rest of the world is avoiding it like the plague.
aug 26, 2025, 6:32 am • 7 0 • view
It takes a while for the shine to come off that apple. I would expect that "police state in which masked goons target foreigners" is more of a repellent factor, alongside "shocking levels of violence for advanced industrial economy" and "barbarous healthcare system."
aug 26, 2025, 7:04 am • 4 0 • view
I would argue that’s the wrong way to think about this. Yale and H are the last to feel this particular bite (well, H got other Trump problems). It is the great mid-tier unis that’ll face steep drops first. that’ll lead the broad basis to crumble. Anyway, potatoes, potatoes - same outcome.
aug 26, 2025, 6:48 am • 17 0 • view
Yes, the top colleges where you would say “I have a diploma from college” will still have a good cost/benefit appeal. It’s the ones where you say “studied in America” which will suffer.
aug 26, 2025, 7:11 am • 2 0 • view
Maybe, but what we see from outside the country is ICE kidnapping students, and universities losing grants and control of curricula. And, although their biggest targets are law-abiding immigrants of color, ICE is including in its sweeps white people from countries like Germany and the UK
aug 26, 2025, 7:40 am • 0 0 • view
Yeah, I'm imagining some of these young brainboxes thinking, "Do I want to see the inside of an ICE gulag or do I want to start applying to Oxford/Melbourne/Sorbonne instead?
aug 26, 2025, 7:51 am • 1 0 • view
Anyone bright enough to go to Harvard or Yale has other options, so they won't get the cream of the crop anymore, which means that the US doesn't get those people staying on after graduation
aug 26, 2025, 7:40 am • 0 0 • view
Yes. The sunk cost of their education, their whole way of thinking.
aug 26, 2025, 10:17 am • 0 0 • view
The entire US political elite is a deer frozen in headlights of a truck driving straight at it. An average Bluesky shitposter has a better grasp of the gravity of the moment than these overpaid bozos.
aug 26, 2025, 6:29 am • 6 1 • view
I genuinely suspect it's in part because it might smash US global dominance in all areas except the stock market (and you know, give it time).
aug 26, 2025, 6:45 am • 2 0 • view
A lot of it is just baked in cognitive bias towards the presumption of stability and failure of imagination. Similar to early stages of COVID when a years long emergency wasn't on the radar of anyone.
aug 26, 2025, 6:43 am • 1 0 • view
Markets doing their best to ignore it also bizarre to me.
aug 26, 2025, 6:50 am • 7 0 • view
It’s just a challenge not to sound like a silly, easy to dismiss doomsayer when you say that genuinely, this could end up looking like what Peron did to Argentina. Just permanently destabilize and hollow out the country.
aug 26, 2025, 6:29 am • 39 6 • view
I think it's important to balance realism about the building risks around the America Crisis with avoidance of overly linear determinism. Take risks seriously but also acknowledge that with luck and a lot of work future US administrations could fix them
aug 26, 2025, 6:35 am • 11 0 • view
But the longer the current dynamic drags on then even in a best case scenario the more resources future US governments will need to rebuild state capacity that underpins great power status
aug 26, 2025, 6:37 am • 13 0 • view
State *credibility* seems to be the main problem? Resources can rebuild capacity in time, but it will be much harder if everyone believes that a maniac will be elected in 4 yrs to trash it all again. As for diplomacy, clearly people who dealt in good faith with post-2016 US are credulous idiots.
aug 26, 2025, 6:56 am • 3 0 • view
What do you see as the possible source of a durable political consensus for rebuilding state capacity? Or an elite consensus for rebuilding independent institutions?
aug 26, 2025, 6:42 am • 0 0 • view
Where my pessimism kicks in is that my hunch is there needs to be a severe financial shock to the US system at a time when the GOP is in power to create space for comprehensive reform, debunk stale elite consensus and long term discredit the hard right. Like how 1929 led to the New Deal
aug 26, 2025, 6:47 am • 19 6 • view
Or perhaps better precedents would be how the crashes of the 1840s/50s (2008) created the basis for the much bigger shock of 1873
aug 26, 2025, 6:50 am • 5 0 • view
Much more than this is necessary. I find it obvious that the current regime is not willing to give up power anymore, no matter future election outcomes. The next transfer of power won‘t happen by peaceful means. Whether small scale violence or full civil war will depend on the US military.
aug 26, 2025, 6:55 am • 0 0 • view
That’s how l think as well, and the fact that you do as well makes me feel…better? Except it’s a terrible thing to think
aug 26, 2025, 6:51 am • 0 0 • view
Maybe the pope can help. The corrupt decision to vote for Trump and the failure to stand up now, indicates that there is a perversion of morality and that it is disconnected from action. A society will fail if people just optimise actions against their local oft manipulated utility gradient.
aug 26, 2025, 2:14 pm • 0 0 • view
The moral decay has spread. Alligator Alcatraz, remigration, anti-renewables,… these are all things which people babble out or accept which are immediately or by simple extension highly immoral. Instead of listening we should tar and feather these guys or at least make them watch ABBA musicals.
aug 26, 2025, 2:17 pm • 0 0 • view
That’s right, I agree. But I have trouble imagining the source of bi/nonpartisanship that would restore balance and continuity to American institutions. At this point it is at best a see-saw, like much of Latin America.
aug 26, 2025, 6:38 am • 2 0 • view
It is probably me, but as a challenge: I can't think of a country on such a collision course with reality and that stopped before it actually did collide with reality. When that happens and with time, some have come back (Germany, Japan, on a lower level many former colonial powers).
aug 26, 2025, 3:49 pm • 0 0 • view
Brazil with nukes except at this point Brazil is the more stable state with underrated regional hegemon potential
aug 26, 2025, 6:42 am • 4 0 • view
This is true but also important to acknowledge where any rubicons may exist - with Brexit lots of people couldn’t get their head around the one way nature of leaving, or they though this would make it impossible that anyone would ever do it… US reserve currency status is prob one of these things.
aug 26, 2025, 6:40 am • 0 0 • view
On the one hand the cold hard reality of the market will hopefully push him away from the worst excesses but on the other hand every empire eventually falls, and somebody has to chronicle this.
aug 26, 2025, 6:49 am • 1 0 • view
Bereavement. People are struggling to get to Acceptance that the United States died.
aug 26, 2025, 6:49 am • 1 0 • view
aug 26, 2025, 9:05 am • 0 0 • view
There's a chicken and an egg problem here in that the same market actors who would be slamming the metaphorical red button with both hands to signal how terrible this is are stuck in the same "the US is a competent rational actor so this is all fine" fallacy.
aug 26, 2025, 7:02 am • 3 0 • view
The US has already lost its leadership role in the world 6 months ago.
aug 26, 2025, 7:37 am • 2 0 • view
And it is ireversibile
aug 26, 2025, 7:38 am • 2 0 • view
Trump 2.0 is truly The Project for a Post-American Century.
aug 26, 2025, 9:31 am • 0 0 • view
"Might"
aug 26, 2025, 11:03 am • 0 0 • view
Vladimir Putin is best investor of the decade
aug 26, 2025, 6:42 am • 3 0 • view
Think it’s Project Xi now.
aug 26, 2025, 6:48 am • 4 0 • view
Take a concrete example: nobody is going to treat this SCOTUS as a source of authority in the Common Law world. It’s an outlier. The CJEU is probably now more important in terms of shifting global legal norms.
aug 26, 2025, 7:22 am • 11 0 • view
Might? The sabotage of NIH, NSF, etc already did the trick … our competitors on the world stage cannot believe how lucky they got and are doubling down on their investments in science … however the analysts can do what exactly when congress and the supreme court wont do anything?
aug 26, 2025, 10:42 am • 1 0 • view
Universities / Science / Diplomacy / Trade / Currency / Arts and a Military no longer projecting but redirected against it's own people.
aug 26, 2025, 7:13 am • 0 0 • view