alt Hacker News> The damage he did was low-to-moderate, all things considered.
I don't think that's true. I'd say it was more like a Phantom Menace, like arming a ticking bomb with a postponed effect.
> Now, the damage is beyond repair. The USA is fucked, on a downward spiral that will be difficult(near impossible) to correct.
Yeah. Instead of MAGA, he managed to loose the USA's remaining superpower status in just a few years, that's some achievement history will surely remember.
But I don't think everything is lost, although extremely hard and might take at least a century or so to correct (assuming no further damages, that China won't take over and of course that there will still be a human civilization to speak of by the end of the century).
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I scorn trump as much as the next socially-adjusted human, but this is overstated:
> he managed to loose the USA's remaining superpower status in just a few years
America is still the most powerful military force and the largest economy, and mickey mouse has recognition in places where they carry water from wells in pots. A beast that size keeps lumbering a long time after brain death.
Trump has shredded other nations' trust in America as a partner, but he has not made it possible to ignore. Ignoble but not ignorable.
If we run the clock forward, then declining arms exports due to sovereignty concerns wool make the USian defence industry harder to sustain. But that takes decades to play out.
From the perspective of the architects of his policies, The Heritage Foundation, things are roughly going as they want, and these losses are a price worth to pay to ensure what they want to happen, happens.
Their perspective is relatively simple. Unhinged, but simple.
They believe the US is strictly incapable of remaining as the sole global superpower, and that due to cultural this and that, risks falling into a middle power or worse. Hence, they want to resuscitate the pre-WW1 notion of imperial Spheres of Influence, in which the world is carved between Great Powers that dominate their surroundings, and to make sure the US stays as one for decades to centuries. The US Sphere would be the Americas plus a small piece of Europe.
For this to work, a few things are needed:
a) The middle powers, and the weak countries, must all learn their place, that they have no real agency, that they must submit to the Great Power that dominates the sphere they're inserted into, and that if they revolt they're going to experience all manners of pain, from economic warfare to actual hot war in their territories.
b) The other strong countries must agree with this project, so although they're enemies on the long run, they must unite in the process of carving the world into those Spheres, and not to interfere too much with the other powers doing their own carving. Any current potential interference (Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran etc.) is a piece in the table to be used in negotiating the future frontiers between their Spheres.
c) And, internally, a shared culture, where the majority becomes supportive of this via the indoctrination appropriate to each case for the long run.
That's the gist of it. Everything else, including the public face of the implementation, are details that can be replaced as long as the overall strategy keeps advancing.