> Trump is a populist president who sees the value of US exports (on the back of blue collar work) being more important than global dollar dominance. This plays hand in hand with his championing of tariffs (foreign goods become more expensive) and hostility towards immigrants (apply upwards pressure on domestic wages).

It has nothing really to do with populism. It's the US's only rational option. You can't just run trade deficits forever, no matter what the people who make money from trade deficits tell you. A parasite that gets so big that it disables the host is a dead parasite.

People act like this is the how the US always worked. We just started this with Reagan, and every moment since then has seen the rise of finance, the victory of unproductive capital and speculation, and the decline in domestic manufacturing and standard of living that you would expect.

There's never been a moment where there's been anything to point at for a finance capitalist to feel vindicated that his success would lead to the US's greater good, so he resorts to claiming that it is simply impossible to be any other way. At best this is sunk cost fallacy, but at worst, it's just propagandistic gaslighting from a bunch of people who don't have any connection or loyalty to anyone in the US, don't care when it's people suffer, don't care how its children will live, and will just leave if their houses start to feel insecure. There's your populism.

I agree with your assessment, but Europe is in unique trouble that the rest of the world has no need to relate to. The US will simply have Europeans jailed or killed who steer Europe counter to US interests. Right now the US is on a slow road to peace with Russia, while trying to cultivate and maximize European animosity and estrangement from Russia. The world in which the US is mocked in Europe by NATO (a device to carry out US interests) for trying to appease Russia is a world that no one but a realist could have predicted.

Everybody else will de-dollarize, and the US will threaten Europe and the UK with tariffs if they don't peg the Euro and pound to the dollar. The US will be trading freely with Russia and China, while sanctioning Europeans for buying energy from Russia and bribing European governments to harass Chinese companies.