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I think something interesting going on. There’s a faction that thinks it is pro-trade but against the international rules based order, and wants a condition of Hobbesian bilateralism where there are no stable arrangements and some sort of mercantilist zero-sum realpolitik.
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This faction seems to have 2 broad strategic goals: cut down what they see as China’s unfair maneuvering and weaken what they see as bureaucratic intermediary multilateral orgs especially Europe-based.
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What they miss is that the global economy isn’t a random trade network with lots of choice of trading partners for everything but an organic structure with players cast in very specific roles carved out by historic and geographic contingency, plus cultural affinities.
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It’s a bit like a decrepit, broke, precariously employed 55 year old divorcing wife of 20y and abandoning kids by talking himself into believing there’s a world of hot 22 year olds just waiting for him if he just works out a bit (aka steel-making) and gets hair implants (moon!)
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The big dissonance is that they think a version of “fair” free trade is achievable with 19th century style bilateral protectionism via weaponized tariffs and barriers. This strikes me as a sad middle-aged incel trying to learn PUA tricks and larping bronze-Age-paleo bs.
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So the explanation that ties all of this together is… A reactionary movement by a group that is losing relative power and trying to recreate the conditions under which they formerly dominated unequivocally? i.e. clear gender hierarchies, bullying foreign policy, etc
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Roughly yeah With a thin gloss of pretending to be a champion of “real” free trade and being against cronyism that falls apart when you poke. Like the “drain the swamp” rhetoric that just recreated a retro swamp in DC that resembles 19th century machine politics.