The Daily Populous Sunday August 10th, 2025 day edition
Authored by jacobin.com and submitted by Sludgehammer

It is highly debatable whether a strategy of US primacy — meaning, a global power arrangement where the United States is not just one of a number of similarly powerful nations, but by far the most powerful and influential — is even in the country’s best interests. Pursuit of this goal has been devastating for American communities over the past few decades, from free trade deals that hollowed out local industry to endless wars that sent young Americans home in planes full of body bags.

But winning a permanent US-dominated future is what Donald Trump thinks is in the best interests of the United States. And so far, he is doing everything possible to undermine his own goal.

Just look at the state of US relations with India, a key US partner and a lynchpin of Washington’s wider strategy to counter a rising China. India is emerging as a major global player and economic powerhouse that, crucially, has spent the past few years at a low point in its relations with China.

When Trump’s trade war with China necessitated finding a new production base for iPhones to insulate US consumers from what would have been a price explosion, India gamely stepped up, allowing Apple to move the majority of iPhone assembly to its shores. As Trump side-eyes BRICS, the economic partnership not-so-subtly angling to sidestep US dominance, India is the closest thing to Washington’s man on the inside, steadfastly opposing the grouping’s budding efforts to undermine the US dollar supremacy core to global US power. This is the fruit of decades of bipartisan work across multiple administrations to draw India closer to Washington and away from Beijing’s sphere of influence.

In the space of a little more than a week, Trump has jeopardized all that. Trump is now levying a significantly higher effective tariff rate on India (50 percent), his ostensible partner, than China (30 percent), the country he considers his biggest adversary. This is driven in large part by Trump’s characteristically incoherent desire to punish India for undermining Western sanctions on Russia and buying Moscow’s discounted oil, something India has been doing for years now. The fact that Trump has taken a distinctly soft line on Russia throughout his second term, and the fact that China also buys Russian oil, makes this decision doubly baffling for frustrated Indian officials.

As a result, Indian relations with the United States are now suddenly strained — and actually improving with China. To retaliate, New Delhi has put a halt on a planned purchase of US weapons and cancelled an upcoming American trip by its defense minister. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is now set to make his first trip to China in seven years, where he will meet with President Xi Jinping.

India is far from the only example. Trump has likewise been antagonizing Brazil, which has for years been giving China hawks gray hairs as it has inched closer and closer to Beijing, even under previous far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. From the point of view of US policymakers, China deepening its ties with the largest country in South America and the world’s sixth-largest economy, a country practically on the United States’s doorstep, would be a strategic nightmare.

So naturally, Trump has used the US trade relationship with Brazil to meddle in its internal politics, pushing the country further into the arms of China. Unhappy with the Brazilian supreme court’s prosecution of Bolsonaro, whom Trump considers an ally, for trying to instigate a coup during the last election, Trump has both slapped sanctions on the judge overseeing the case and imposed steep tariffs on Brazil as a whole. Beyond the damage to the Brazilian economy, it is also arguably the most nakedly political use of the United States’s economic heft that we have seen in modern times.

It has not taken Beijing long to capitalize on the situation, with China’s foreign minister personally assuring the Brazilian government that China will support Brazil in “resisting the bullying practices of arbitrary tariffs.” China has now given the go-ahead for 183 Brazilian companies to sell their coffee, one of the sanctioned goods, in the Chinese market. China’s embassy in Brazil is trumpeting how Chinese and Brazilian firms are increasing their respective presences in each other’s markets.

In other words, Trump effectively intensified Brazil’s political and economic estrangement from the United States, its largest trading partner at the start of this century, and increased Brazil’s economic reliance on what the United States considers an adversary trying to get a foothold in its backyard. Further twisting the knife, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and India’s Modi — leading what are now the two countries hardest hit by Trump’s tariffs — had an hour-long conversation about the matter where they vowed to deepen their trade ties.

This isn’t the half of it. Less than two weeks ago, Trump triggered howls of outrage throughout Europe over a trade deal that somewhat lowered Trump’s exorbitantly high tariffs in exchange for a host of other trade and regulatory giveaways to the United States. At one point prior to its capitulation, the European Union considered hitting back against Trump’s tariffs with its “anti-coercion instrument” — tellingly, a retaliatory tool it had originally devised to potentially hit back against what it considered its most dangerous adversary, China.

The EU has swallowed a series of US-imposed humiliations in just seven months of Trump’s second term, including enduring repeated threats to annex a member state’s territory and reluctantly agreeing to massively increase military spending to take the pressure off the United States. The EU is playing the role of loyal poodle so far, but you have to wonder what future seeds of resentment are being sown.

We could keep going. Trump’s steadfast and, in fact, markedly escalated support for Israel’s ongoing genocide has — together with a variety of other policies, including his administration’s harassment of foreigners and hostility to international students — further run US global standing into the ground. An April survey of more than one hundred thousand people across a hundred countries found that the United States was viewed negatively in most of these countries. It also found that nearly 80 percent of the world has a more favorable view of its chief rival, China.

At the moment, Trump and his political allies are busy antagonizing friendly countries, including NATO ally and second-biggest trade partner Canada, by hinting at using trade and other mechanisms to punish them for, of all things, their policy toward a foreign government, Israel. It has just been revealed that Trump secretly approved the US military and spy agencies to wage war on drug cartels in Latin America, potentially violating national sovereignty in a region that has long chafed at US meddling in its affairs. At the same time, China is often the largest or second-largest trading partner in Latin America, and has actively been deepening ties with individual countries.

Trump’s abandonment of multilateralism and his hostility to the UN have opened the door to China, letting Beijing and its partners maneuver their own officials to positions of influence within these bureaucracies. And let’s not forget the way that Trump’s trade war inadvertently laid bare the extent of the United States’s own economic dependence on its rival after decades of neoliberal policy, leading to an embarrassing climbdown — an unforced, self-inflicted blow to global perceptions of US power.

If the United States had a leader who was actively trying to subvert US global power from the inside and give its chief rival win after win, that leader could hardly do better than Trump has done through seven months of sheer strategic incompetence. In a desperate bid to retain US primacy, Trump, in a pattern not unlike that of the predecessor he always trashes, has abandoned statecraft in favor of blunt force and intimidation. Ironically, that approach is only making the outcome he’s trying to avoid more likely.

ChopperChange on August 10th, 2025 at 03:49 UTC »

Thought experiment: If your goal was destroy America from the inside out, what would you do differently than Trump?

notyourstranger on August 10th, 2025 at 03:46 UTC »

If the plan was to destroy the US, what would he be doing differently?

TuringGPTy on August 10th, 2025 at 03:22 UTC »

Someone ask him why.