Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson review
(Evening Standard) – From plagues and volcanic eruptions to the current Covid pandemic, mankind has always been faced with catastrophes.
Thought Leader: Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson: Trump’s Tariffs and the End of American Empire
By WWSG exclusive thought leader, Niall Ferguson.
The president stands as much chance of reindustrializing the U.S. as you do of getting your frozen laptop to work by smashing the motherboard with a Minecraft hammer.
In A Minecraft Movie, five characters, including a fat American played by Jack Black, stumble through a disused mine in Idaho into a fantastical land where mining, construction, and manufacturing are fabulously easy. Simple, docile villagers subsist on vegetables, and there’s a bit of a nocturnal crime problem. But you can throw together a castle for yourself—not to mention giant steel nunchucks—in seconds. It is awesome. (I owe these insights entirely to my 7-year-old son Campbell.)
The only problem is that underneath this idyllic Overworld is the Nether—a hideous, totalitarian regime where mining is obviously a lot less fun. Unfortunately, there is no tariff barrier keeping the denizens of the Nether from invading the Overworld and attempting to plunge it into eternal darkness.
You may think it is a stretch to say that this is a near-perfect allegory for the second Trump administration. But bear with me. Because what you think is happening is not what is happening.
Depending on your worldview, you probably think Trump’s tariff blitz is one of two things. Either a committed protectionist is trying to Make America Great Again by killing “globalism,” ending “forever wars,” and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Let’s call this Project Minecraft. Alternatively, an unhinged demagogue is crashing both the world economy and the liberal international order, mainly to the advantage of authoritarian regimes. Call this Project Moscow.
But here is what is actually happening: The American empire that came into existence after the failed autarky and isolationism of the 1930s is being broken up after 80 years. Despite Trump’s imperial impulses—wanting to annex Greenland, calling for Canada to become the 51st state—he is engaged right now in a kind of wild decolonization project.
Like the post-1945 British Labour governments, he wants to shelter domestic manufacturing and the working class behind tariffs while reducing overseas commitments. But the net result will be both economically damaging and geopolitically weakening. Americans will come to miss globalism and policing the world. They will belatedly realize that there is no portal through which the United States can return to the 1950s, much less the 1900s. And the principal beneficiary of Project Minecraft will not be Russia, but China. Call it Project Manchuria.
Trump has repeatedly promised to make the United States a “manufacturing powerhouse” to avoid being permanently overtaken by its Asian competitors. (In the 1980s it was Japan; now it’s China.) According to the president, friends even more than foes have been “taking our jobs, taking our wealth.” His solution is to impose tariffs on all U.S. trading partners.
There is certainly a constituency for the view that Americans were better off in the past than they are now, and that nineteenth-century policies are the way to go. Christian Whiton, for example, has argued that “reasonable tariffs, Jacksonian defense policy, and immigration control [will] set [the] stage for peace and prosperity after turbulence.”
In reality, however, applying policies that were appropriate more than a century ago, when the U.S. enjoyed all kinds of advantages as a location for manufacturing, will cause something worse than turbulence.
With his assault on “globalism,” Trump stands as much chance of success as a British prime minister who proposed to reassemble the empire, or a German chancellor who attempted to restore the Hohenzollerns to the throne. Time’s arrow does not fly backward.
To read the rest of this article, go to The Free Press.
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