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More Stupid Shit: Great Game Edition [1]

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Date: 2025-03-07

MAIA: The Orange Bumbler is intent on making America irrelevant... again.

People forget the US became the preminent world power by accident. More accurately, it became a world power as a result of the stupidity of Great Powers prior to WWI. They got so caught up in the Great Game between imperial Great Powers, they didn't understand they were making the Great War inevitable, and the fall out would be the beginning of their demise.

Prior to that, America was pretty much irrelevant to the world order. Post WWI, we became important as a source for manufactures Europe needed to rebuild, and of course for weapons.

Europe learned enough from the folly of the Great Game to buy into the League of Nations and take a stab at a rules based order, but not enough to understand such a system cannot withstand appeasement of those intent on reasserting Great Power perogative. They failed to stand up up to Japan's invasion of China, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's invasion if Czechoslovakia. Those acts of aggression were the Georgia and Ukraine of their day. Those failures, the first acts of appeasement in the face of Fascist states intent on reasserting the might makes right, imperial Great Power world order, led to WWII and the final nail in the coffin of European preeminence.

There is a difference between Europe's appeasement in the run up to WWII, and the Orange Bumbler's today though. Europeans did not want war, nor a return to the Great Game political order. To some extent they honestly thought they could avoid it by appeasement. The Orange Bumbler doesn't really care about the cutrent war, or that appeasement will result in a return to the Great Game. In fact that's a bonus, not a bug.

The assumption of MAGA-nauts is that a return to an imperialist Great Power world order will benefit the US because the US has pretty much run the show under the rules based order established post WWII. They assume Europe will not align with say, China, to defeat Russia. Should that occur, the US would be screwed.

The Orange Bumbler doesn't care about the US though. I bet he knows it will be bad for the US, and that he is screwing over Americans, including his supporters. All he cares about is enriching himself without consequences.

Step back, and strip the US of its web of allies built on its maintenance of the rules based world order, as imperfect as that may have been, and ask yourself exactly how the US would retain its global preeminence. There are four principal attributes I can think of, somewhat intertwined, that have, and would have to suffice.

Nuclear weapons and more specifically the monopoly held by a handful of powers. Monopoly on global military power projection capacity. Global financial power projection capacity due to dollar reserve currency and concomitant treasury bill safe haven status. Access to an extremely lucrative consumer market.

Nukes are pretty much useless. If we've learned anything from the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's that nuclear weapons do not help when it comes to subjugating a neighbor. Deploying them would destroy the target which kind of defeats the purpose. Of course there is the argument that nuking a neighbor to intimidate other neighbors would do the trick.

The thing is any such basis for hegemony would be short lived. It turns out that developing a nuclear strike capacity in the modern era isn't all that difficult. I mean, even the most sanctioned regime, that in North Korea, pulled it off. I'm pretty certain both Canada and Mexico could put together a sufficient nuclear deterrent in short order.

What matters more then is conventional military capacity, but there are a some problems there too. Local hegemony would be neutralized by nukes. Deploying a nuke to subjugate a neighbor might defeat the purpose, but they would still serve to deter subjugation by a neighbor. Does anyone think Poots in Boots would have invaded Ukraine if they had nukes? Another problem is conventional military capacity has geographic limitations without forward basing agreements. You have to ask yourself why anyone would risk the wrath of a closer hegemon, when the more distant is just as predatory. Unless that country had the capacity to fight off the distant hegemon, it wouldn't, in which case it might become an ally in the Great Game, but only when it benefits them.

Financial power is entirely wrapped up in the rules based order. That's why it's been so frustrating to watch the seemingly glacial pace at which sanctions have been imposed on Russia. There are rules that must be accounted for. For example, seizing, not freezing, seizing sovereign Russian assets and turning them over to Ukraine is not simple because it is a first, and must be done in a manner that does not establish a precedent that results in capital flight. Ironically, the Orange Bumbler's rejection of the rules based order has made it easier for the EU to do it.

China has an interest in working with the EU which is mutual. Both want to counter-balance the US and Russia. China also needs a safe haven for its sovereign funds now that the US looks to be melting down. Not to worry though, MAGA, all them Moose Limbs you loathe will still invest here.

Toss out the rules based order, go back to the Great Game, and what's the incentive to use the dollar? The reasons heretofore have been financial market transparency, political stability, military capacity, and size of GDP, all of which combine to make US Treasuries the most secure investment in the world, more secure than gold. Where's the security in Treasuries now that the US is eliminating agencies that compile and publish stats, or staffing them with hacks in charge of the books who will cook them to order for the guy in the Oval Office out of fear for their jobs? Where's the political stability in a system without checks and balances on political power, where power is obtained he who can lie, cheat and steal most successfully, and once in power are for sale to the highest bidder?

Finally, there is access to the US consumer market. It turns out the US isn't the only game in town in that department anymore either. There's the EU, a string of other countries such as Brazil, India, Japan, and Southeast Asia, etc. Also a lot of the US market's size, i.e., our wealth, is the result of the rules based order, status of the dollar, the security umbrella of our military capacity, etc.

Thanks to the return of the Great Game, our security umbrella will no longer be the only game in town as well. The EU is quickly moving towards fielding a military capacity as capable as ours. That will erase a significant adavantage our companies have enjoyed in competing for deals overseas, which in turn will negatively impact our growth, job creation, and size of our consumer market.

What gets lost with the free rider accusation MAGA-nauts level at Europe with such ignorant self-righteous indignation is Europeans have been doing exactly what we wanted them to do. We didn't want them to have a capacity equal to ours for two principle reasons. We wanted them dependent upon us so we could call the shots when it came enforcing the rules, and we understood our monopoly on military capacity functioned as an unspoken protection racket that benefitted our companies.

In the Great Game MAGA is cheering on, military expenditures will have to increase if MAGA-nauts expect the US to maintain market shares at levels that keep working Americans employed in manufacturing, farming and the like. They are clearly dead set against paying taxes to be the policeman of the world, America first, and all that. I assume they will be fine doing so to be the mafia kingpin of the world.

China is already making inroads where countries with extraction based economies are found. They are using self interested plans like the the Martial Plan to create markets for their goods financing infrastructure projects that make resource extraction more efficient. They don't try to humiliate these countries with ridiculous deals that effectively strip them of control over those resources. They also don't care about niceties like human rights, labor conditions, liberal democratic governance, etc, that these countries also find annoying.

There's another feature of the Great Game that negates the appeal of our consumer market, mercantilism. What MAGA-Nauts don't seem to get is tariffs are only one side of the coin in Great Game economics. The other side is subsidies. China might negotiate an agreement with the EU not to impose tariffs on each other while both maintain them against the US in response to our tariffs. At the same time both China and the EU might decide to subsidize sales to emerging markets separately, taking market share from US companies, or cut a deal to divvy up markets.

Are MAGA-Nauts up for paying taxes to subsidize our corporations so they can compete now too?

At any rate, MAGA have no clue what the world they seek will mean for them and their progeny. FAFO doesn't even scratch the surface. Odds on, the Great Game will not make Americans wealthier. The one thing the Great Game guarantees is another Great War between Great Powers with great big nuclear arsenals.

And the musical coda…

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