A Tale of Thucydides
China shouldn’t worry — Trump is too weak and unfocused to be a threat
I just moved from one European city to another, so a brief note with no coda today.
When the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations met in Beijing, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping spoke about the lessons of history:
Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”
Donald Trump, on the other hand, spoke about fast food:
Just as many Chinese now love basketball and blue jeans, Chinese restaurants in America today outnumber the five largest fast food chains in the United States, all combined. That’s a pretty big statement.
I’m old enough to remember when we were a serious country.
Anyway, should China in fact worry about the Thucydides trap? Not while someone as pathetic as Trump is in charge.
The Thucydides trap refers to the theory, originally propounded by the Greek historian for the war between Athens and Sparta, that conflicts erupt when a declining power is confronted by a rising rival. So Xi was implicitly insulting the United States, portraying it as a nation in decline. Someone presumably explained this to Trump, who went on Truth Social to declare that Xi was talking about U.S. decline under “Sleepy Joe Biden,” not now that he has made us “the hottest Nation anywhere in the world.”
In reality, the widespread Chinese view that America is in decline has only grown stronger under Trump II. According to the New York Times,
In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”
And that was before the debacle in Iran.
So, as in the Thucydides trap, will a declining America lash out at a rising China? Not under current management, or at least not in any effective way.
Trump and his officials constantly denigrate his predecessor. Denouncing Joe Biden has become their all-purpose response to questions about Trump’s policy failures and cratering polling. But the Biden administration was, in fact, serious about responding to China’s technological and industrial challenge. Notably, the CHIPS and Science Act was explicitly intended in large part as a way to respond to China’s inroads in information technology by boosting the U.S. technology sector, while the Inflation Reduction Act’s promotion of industries associated with renewable energy was an attempt to blunt the impact of growing Chinese dominance in electrotech.
Trump, however, has moved rapidly to cancel Biden’s industrial policy, a turnaround that has, among other things, led to a marked slump in manufacturing construction:
Having abandoned industrial policy, Trump has turned to trade deals. The fact sheet released by the White House after his trip to Beijing proclaimed that
President Trump negotiated a sweeping package of commitments that will drive high-paying American jobs and open new markets for U.S. goods.
The main component of this package was a Chinese commitment to buy $17 billion a year of U.S. agricultural products, on top of an earlier commitment to buy more soybeans. Actually, I should put “commitment” in scare quotes: China made similar promises during Trump I, and completely failed to deliver. But suppose that the Chinese actually come through this time. How big is this “sweeping package”? Adding the extra $17 billion to a best guess at the value of the promised soybean purchases, and comparing it with existing U.S. exports, it looks like this
:
So by abandoning Biden’s efforts and pursuing what he considers the art of the deal, Trump has in effect traded a serious effort to keep America competitive in advanced technology game for a hill of soybeans — and a small hill at that.
I could go on, but you get the point. The global scene right now isn’t dominated by a conflict between a rising and a declining superpower, because the declining power is led by a man who has no idea what makes great powers great, is easily distracted by trivia, is focused on self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, and fantasizes about himself as Jesus. If you want classical analogies, think of America right now as the Roman Empire under Caligula, although Caligula didn’t do anything like as much damage …
I remember thinking “Xi knows how dumb Trump is and just openly insulted America in a way that Trump doesn’t understand.” The Thucydides trap comment was genius.
I will miss Colbert.
Maybe it is fitting that, in the terminal stage of our democracy, the jester gets hooked offstage, so the murder can begin in earnest.
But “jester” is too small a word for what Colbert was. He was funny, yes. He could taunt tyrants in the open, with everybody watching. But there was also kindness in him — a gentleness, a religious patience, a visible love of ordinary human goodness. His comedy did not come only from contempt. It came from the old democratic hope that cruelty is ridiculous because people are meant for better things.A public comic is not ornamental. He is one of democracy’s social poles: the figure who laughs at tyrants in the open, with everybody watching. His presence says something important still lives. His removal says something is amiss.
To get rid of Colbert makes the world smaller. “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”With Colbert gone it narrows the statistical field between Left Democracy and MAGA Right Authoritarian. One less public square. One less shared ritual. One less place where the tyrant can be taunted freely.
This is sub-individual influence. Not “believe this,” but “inhabit this emotional weather.” Not “vote this way,” but “recognize yourself here.” With Colbert. Now gone.
The platform does the rest. It offers known diversions to my personality file, my intellectual curiosities, my likes, curiosities that have nothing to do with politics. It offers subtle MAGA rabbit holes, or attention diversions.
The new Paramount-Amazon-Apple-HBO-Palantir-Exxon merger dramatically narrows what we see and hear. Not for each individual streamer, educated, older, but statistically, where it counts for 340 million citizens. A 3% MAGA swing is a very valuable thing. $$$$ Synergistic force. The new themes for movies are blondes, divided homeland, rough hierarchy, chosen man v world struggle, grievance as identity. Ulysses. Yellowstone spinoffs.
The platform does the rest. It records the pause, the completion, the rewatch, the aversion, the adjacent appetite. It learns which symbols hold the viewer. 2 seconds, 20 seconds, strung together for a day, refined. freebased. for a lifetime. Then it offers more: ranch masculinity, limbic sensuality, grievance comedy, border panic, anti-bureaucratic contempt, crime clips, strong fathers, soft enemies, hard men, ruined towns, stolen country.
I miss Colbert. my morning jester hooked offstage. sigh.