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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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Other countries are cast as hot chicks where you “win” by getting an advantageous trade deal that puts them in a systematically disadvantaged zero-sum situation. Like a PUA “score” or something. This isn’t economics. It is performative cartoon masculinity.
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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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I’ve given up pointing out the nexus between overt economic anxiety and covert or in-denial racial anxiety. Though Trump’s crowd has made it explicit... that thing about the new Cold War being with non-Caucasians for the first time etc. This is a genuine blind spot for many.