The World Begins Its Long Goodbye to America

This article by Global Geneva Americas' Editor William Dowell was first published as part of A Different Place.

It’s increasingly clear that Donald Trump’s embarrassingly narcissistic and needlessly insulting performance before an international economic and cultural elite at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has finally succeeded in convincing Western Europe and much of the rest of the world that the United States can no longer be trusted.

In the minds of many of America’s former allies, the MAGA slogan has turned from “Make America Great Again” to “Make America Go Away.” Trump’s inexplicable longing to personally own Greenland has done even more to convince the world public at large that the American president has a screw loose or has become hopelessly delusional.

Receding into dementia, or retirement?

It is, in fact, likely that Trump will eventually either slip into full-blown dementia or opt for a financially cushioned retirement, but with the U.S. presidency changing every four years, Europeans are acutely aware that there’s no guarantee that a future U.S. president won’t be just as unpredictably nutty and destructive as Trump. The U.S., in short, can no longer be relied on for either leadership or national security.

With America’s credibility in the slag heap, it’s better not to count on America at all. Of course, Trump is not the only villain here. His openly sadistic chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is clearly convinced that when it comes to scaring immigrants wanton cruelty is an effective mechanism. In the process, he has frightened nearly everyone else away as well. Trump may soon be gone, but the damage he has done to America’s credibility will linger long after him. Among the immediate casualties, we can list America’s former role as titular “leader of the free world.”

In a podcast interview with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, Tom Friedman noted that the coming global competition will almost certainly be for dominance of the global economy, and it will involve a global showdown between the U.S. and China.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Friedman pointed out, doesn’t really count. Russia’s economy is little more than an oligarch-shackled basket case. Russia manufactures nothing of value, and its only reliable source of income consists of oil, gas, extortion, and the unsustainable extraction of natural resources. Russia has virtually no place in global markets.

Who do you know who wants to buy a Russian camera, watch, or even a laptop? China, on the other hand, is a manufacturing powerhouse, thanks mainly to American corporate eagerness to exploit China’s cheap labor for quick profits.

Friedman questioned how the U.S., which represents a market of about 340 million people, can compete with China, whose population now stands at more than 1.4 billion, and is more than four times that of the U.S.

Cartoon by Global Geneva contributing cartoonist/editor Jeff Danziger.

China: Far more intimidating than Russia

Of course, size isn’t everything, but when one looks at the pool of talent available to each country, China definitely looks intimidating. For example, the U.S. graduates fewer than 200,000 engineering students a year, while China graduates more than 1.3 million. From a statistical point of view, the chances of China spotting superior talent are overwhelming.

The waning signs are already there. In terms of quality of output, Harvard, formerly the world’s leading university, has slipped to third place, already superseded by Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and Shanghai’s Zhongshan University, according to the CWTS Leiden Ranking.

The New York Times points out that the Trump-led Republican onslaught against higher education in America, along with visa harassment of foreign students, has further contributed to America’s slipping in world rankings.

A major mistake for Trump not to engage with Europe - rather than slang it

In his interview with Ezra Klein, Friedman suggested that the obvious approach to surviving China’s ascension to economic dominance was for the U.S. to combine forces with the European Union, which represents a market of roughly 450 million people. Trump shot that down with his performance at Davos.

The new agreement between the European Union and India to create a relatively tariff-free economic market that includes more than a fourth of the world’s population, or roughly 2 billion people, and excludes the U.S., can be counted as the second after shock following Trump’s trip to Davos.

The first was Canada’s decision—formerly America’s leading trading partner—to sign a similar deal with China. The Canadian decision to explore shifting a significant portion of its trade from the U.S. to China was soon followed by a similar gesture from Britain. Instead of America being great again, Trump has managed to leave America excluded, isolated, and alone in the cold.

Obviously, thinking ahead, Trump, still smarting at what he sees as being “denied” the Nobel Peace Prize, may be counting on his “Peace Board” to maintain his legacy after he leaves the White House. But who are the members of this board, who are asked to contribute a billion dollars each and accept Trump’s lifetime presidency?

Cartoon by Jeff Danziger

Trump's "Peace Board" - a mediocre crew

Apart from Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a random assortment of friends, and the man he previously dismissed as “Little Marco,” the countries that have signed on to the Trump plan sound like an anaemic version of the Non-Aligned movement. They are Belarus, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Qatar, Kosovo, Paraguay, and Uzbekistan, not to mention Jordan and Europe’s notorious troublemaker, Hungary. Millet’s Argentina, and Indonesia are also on the list. Vietnam and Cambodia have signaled an interest in joining.

Canada was invited, but after its deal with China and a little straight talking from Prime Minister Mark Carney, Trump noisily retracted the invitation. The future emperor of the world accepts no backtalk or criticism from inferiors, but in reality, he represents nothing of value.

The irony in all of this is that while Trump was busy overturning three-quarters of a century of policy decisions that actually did make America great, or at least made it a worldwide superpower, America’s future competitors were actually listening to America’s advice and adopting the concepts needed to advance economically.

For decades, America argued for free trade through both GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the World Trade Organization. The American approach moved the entire world economy forward, but it primarily helped turn the U.S. into a superpower. In 1980, the U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was $2.9 trillion. Today it is $30.6 trillion, a tenfold increase. Most of the rest of the world has prospered as well, although not to the degree that the U.S. did before the arrival of Donald Trump.

Cartoon by Jeff Danziger

The Trump objective: a long-term vision to engage billionaires and corporate giants

It would be easy at a quick glance to dismiss Trump as being stupid, uneducated, or uninformed, but it seems more likely that his objective in becoming president was not the welfare of the country or American society, but rather to take advantage of a group of already wealthy billionaires and corporate giants anxious to skim the cream off the American economy.

The motto among American businessmen such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is “move fast and break things.” In a sense, the operating mode in a significant slice of the investment world can be described as “Vulture Economics.” If the U.S. economy really is in decline, then it makes sense to grab what you can and move somewhere else.

The fact that a businessman like Musk can attain a personal wealth of a trillion dollars, while national education flounders and poverty increases, is an indication that any consideration of the future of America as a society has fallen by the wayside.

Until recently, the normal White House approach to problem-solving has been to rely on experts to thoroughly examine all of the implications of a policy decision so that the president can make an intelligent choice of the best possible option.

Cartoon by Jeff Danziger

Serving narcissistic fantasies

Trump has reversed the process. Instead of engaging experts, he is relying on his own limited knowledge and then turning to a group of sycophantic “yes” men and women to execute his whim of the moment. The presidency no longer serves the country. It serves the narcissistic fantasies of a single, limited individual whose primary interest is his and his family’s personal wealth.

Where does that leave the rest of America? Anyone who understands basic economics knows that tariffs are just another name for a sales tax, which the government imposes on all its citizens, whether they can afford it or not. Tariffs provide an instant source of cash for government coffers, but they also exact a heavy price on both development and trade, and they destroy future markets. That is why pre-Trump America fought against them for so long.

A major difference between now and the period immediately after World War II is that after the war, the U.S. was virtually the only major economy left standing, whereas today, there are other alternatives. When Trump threatened tariffs on China, Beijing simply turned to Argentina and Brazil to meet its soybean demand.

American farmers were left in the cold. Trump offered to take some money out of the tariff bonanza to keep them afloat. That may work for a year or so, but by then the market that those American farmers depend on will very likely have moved on. Some of the lost market share may return briefly, but the fact is that the U.S. is no longer the only game in town.

The deals between Canada and China, and the European Union and India, now hint that the U.S. may no longer be the most attractive proposition. The post-colonial, previously undeveloped “Third World” is no longer undeveloped. It evolved into the “Emerging Markets,” and today, many of those markets have already emerged.

In 2015, I went to India to report on a project for the International Trade Center (ITC), a bridge organization linking the World Trade Organization and U.N. Development efforts. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) had decided that India had become a middle-income economy and no longer really needed British funding.

DIFD, nevertheless, still had £20 million on the books and decided to use the remaining funds to encourage companies in India to mentor countries in East Africa, where a substantial Indian community had moved to work in Britain’s former colonial administration. DIFD’s reasoning was that India, having recently emerged from colonialism, might be better suited than Westerners when it came to advising formerly colonized Africans.

East Africa had long been a major source of Arabica and Robusta Coffee, but lacked knowledge of modern marketing requirements. The region also produced enormous quantities of leather but had no real understanding of how to treat it properly to meet modern standards. India needed leather but could not obtain it locally because of Hindu attitudes towards protecting cows.

As part of the project, I toured several factories in India, including those producing ultra-high-end products for exclusive fashion houses in Paris, Milan, and New York. I was surprised at the high level of sophistication in the factories that I visited.

“The buyers keep making more and more complex demands on our production,” the head of one of the factories said, while showing me a piece of leather that had been treated to have a metallic glow. “We do the best we can, and we are meeting the demand, but it is not easy.”

The other part of the Anglo-Indian project dealt with computer production and software. Africa is currently one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for business software. And thanks to India’s first prime minister after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru’s insistence on creating advanced technology research centers across India, the subcontinent has always had an impressive supply of computer experts. The ITC trip to India made it abundantly clear that India has the potential to eventually equal or surpass the accomplishments of China. All it needs is a bit of outside help and the deal signed with the Euopean Union promises to deliver that.

From the U.S. perspective, it’s worth noting that more than half the tech workforce in Silicon Valley comes from Asia, while roughly 10 percent of the valley’s tech CEOs are Asians. With many Asian tech workers convinced that they face a “bamboo ceiling” preventing them from rising to higher management levels, the lowering of India’s tariff barriers with the European Union, combined with Trump’s harassment of foreigners is likely to lead to a major exodus of talent on the grounds that it’s more attractive to work in Europe or in their soon-to-be booming home countries than be hassled by an isolationist administration in America.

The re-emergence of India and China as future global superpowers should not be surprising to anyone with even a basic understanding of world history. India, after all, was responsible for developing key features of the global approach to mathematics. It was an Indian, Aryabhatta, who suggested that the addition of the zero was essential to basic arithmetic. The decimal system came from India. Much of algebra, trigonometry, and calculus, not to mention the game of chess, traces its origins to India. Europe uses Arabic numerals for its mathematical calculations. Much of the Arab world still uses the Indian number system.

At the beginning of the 19th Century, China accounted for a third of the world economy, although much of China’s economic production was consumed in China. Helen Thomas, who teaches at England’s Cambridge University, points out that the emergence of the United States as a world power occurred around 1890, largely thanks to the fact that European colonialism and internal political problems had led to the collapse of the Chinese empire effectively removing China temporarily from the world stage.

The American Civil War in 1860-65 led to a dramatic increase in manufacturing. When the war ended, American manufacturing began looking for new markets to absorb it excess production. The result was an increased focus on international trade that gave the U.S. an increased global presence. The isolationism of China, crippled by its political disintegration, meant there was no real competition. That situation is quite different today. This time the political disintegration is in America, and it is accentuated by the mindless contradictions resulting from the Trump administration.

Trump, who clearly prefers a Hollywood-style romantic mythology to a realistic account of history, might remember that Columbus’s discovery of the American continent was driven by a search for a route to India and the riches it once possessed.

Power and wealth tend to skip from one spot on the globe to another. Baghdad once played the role that New York did in the 1960s.

India had previously wanted to sign a deal with the U.S. Now it finds that the European Union is a more attractive partner. Reduced to relative poverty at the end of World War II, in the years since, Western Europe has managed to gain an arguably larger, better-educated, and more productive population than the U.S., which, despite its obvious wealth, is beginning to show signs of decline. During his college days, Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business. He appears to have slept through most of the classes. Now, it looks like the rest of us will be asked to pay the price for what he failed to learn.

Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.