20/ Using adversary's frame is to lose before you start, so what's alt to the Surkovian frame (doesn't matter if attrib is apocryphal btw)
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21/ It is to recognize that the way battle lines are drawn, to choose a *nation* to be loyal to is to already side with Putin-Trump axis
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22/ Option 1 is "whatever comes after neoliberalism following logic of increasing global integration with soft power", call it Option X
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23/ Option 2 is whatever emerges from an effort to rewind to 'great again' zero-sum economics. Call it Neomercantilism.
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24/ You might not like this dichotomous framing of neomercantilism versus Option X (the 'other side of neoliberal transition era' thing)
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25/ Perhaps you have your own fond visions of say a global social-welfare coalition or a Buddhist 'gross world happiness' optimizing order
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26/ Unfortunately those options aren't on table. Nobody credible is working on anything meaningful in any direction besides the 2 big ones
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27/ How do you "play" for Option X? The key is to recognize that neomercantilism has *no* economic legs. It is an oil-economy endgame.
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28/ Option X super-lever: "in the short run, the market is like a voting machine But in the long run, the market is like a weighing machine"
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29/ Here "market" broadly includes all forms of "voting/weighing" dynamics. The thing that is structurally immune to bullshit over long term
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31/ To bring it back around to starting point of the riff, points 1/ and 2/, this is not a contest of *national* exceptionalist narratives
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32/ It isn't Trumpian American exceptionalism to 1950s MAGA state versus Putin-Surkov exceptionalism rewinding to Eastern Roman Empire.
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