Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation
Why Trump Could Lose His Trade War With China
I’m in Denmark’s Parliament. Here’s Why America Has Us So Stunned. a few weeks ago, when Vice President JD Vance said Denmark is “not being a good ally” to the United States.......... Danes were stunned and stung. Our country has been nothing less than a stalwart ally of America. Many of us felt as if we were losing a longtime friend — almost as if a brother were abandoning us: The United States has been Denmark’s closest ally for 80 years. We have followed American presidents into wars that many Danes felt were not ours to fight. ........ The only time Article 5 has been invoked was on Sept. 12, 2001. Less than 24 hours after the terrorist attacks on the United States, its European and Canadian allies stood up to assist Americans........ Denmark lost roughly as many service members per capita in Afghanistan as the United States did.
........... It took a war on our continent to make us realize that peace can never be taken for granted. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Denmark has been the second-largest donor of weapons and support to Ukraine as a share of G.D.P. and among the largest donors in total. Today, Denmark invests over 2 percent of our G.D.P. in defense — above the NATO guideline — and in 2025 and 2026, we will spend more than 3 percent. ........... When it comes to the military defense of the Arctic, NATO acknowledges that it is a shared responsibility. ............ In the post-World War II era, there were over a dozen American military installations in Greenland. Today only one American base remains, with around 150 permanent personnel — the Pituffik Space Base, which Mr. Vance recently visited. The Danish military presence is not robust, either. But as Mr. Rasmussen said last month in a post on X: “We respect that the United States needs a greater military presence in Greenland,” and “we, Denmark and Greenland, are very much open to discussing this.” Denmark has just decided to increase spending on Arctic security by more than $2 billion. America is welcome to increase its investment, too. We can even do it together. ............ “When you demand to take over a part of the Kingdom of Denmark’s territory — when we are met by pressure and by threats from our closest ally — what are we to believe about the country that we have admired for so many years? The country that, if any, has stood up for others’ freedom. You know us, you know what we stand for, and you know that we don’t give in.”
It’s Not Hard to Imagine a Chinese-Led Global Economy Who wins the trade war? Every time you think you understand the state of play, President Trump simply flips the game board. The result: American economic uncertainty is now off the charts, registering highs well past the peak of pandemic panic. Economists are expecting a recession, automakers are already rolling through layoffs, and fund managers haven’t been so bearish on American assets in decades. The stock market looks more and more like a meme coin, heading for a possible rug pull, and the president looks like someone who simply enjoys inflicting pain on almost anyone while unable to feel any of it himself. .............. Last week Spain’s democratic-socialist government proudly announced plans to intensify relations with China, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that doing so would amount to “cutting your own throat.” President Emmanuel Macron of France urged European companies to stop investing in the United States, and the European Union as a whole, which is developing a retaliatory tariff response and plotting potential tax increases on American tech companies, announced it is sending a delegation to Beijing in July. It is now sending trade negotiators here with burner phones, as it did when negotiating there, and E.U. officials are declaring the entire trans-Atlantic alliance dead in the pages of The Financial Times. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, who may emerge from this month’s elections as the new face of global liberalism, declared the eight-decade-old economic order — on which the modern American empire was built — simply “over.” ................. Tourist travel from Canada is down more than 70 percent
......... From many countries in Europe, it’s down around 30 percent. ........ in the single week since “Liberation Day,” exports from the United States dropped by almost one-third; imports to the United States fell by nearly two-thirds.
............ When Trump embarked on his trade war, it was intended as a performance of global dominance, but what he is showing us looks more like a Little America. (Build the wall, indeed.) ........... China commands global trade ..... the tariffs will only add to the lead — pushing many more countries to work more with China and less with America.
............ 30 percent of American trading partners would fully recover from even total cessation of U.S. trade within one year; within five years, more than half would. ........... Twenty-five years ago, eight out of 10 countries in the world conducted more trade with the United States than with China. Today seven out of 10 count China as their larger trade partner. .................. China’s share of global manufacturing has grown so much that by 2030, it is expected to reach seven times what it was in 2000; America’s will have fallen by half. And while Trump’s supporters describe the trade war as an effort to reverse that pattern, they’ve done so little beyond erratic tariffs — with no major pledges of government investment and no real commitment to policy stability — it all looks more like policy by culture-war meme. ............ The country is now routinely installing as much solar power as the rest of the world combined while producing 90 percent of the world’s solar panels and more than three-quarters of its electric batteries. ........... Chinese spending on university and government research had surpassed that in the United States, even before Trump declared war on the country’s elite universities. And then along came Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency to reduce the American budget by billions of dollars and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport international students here on visas or with green cards. ............ As recently as 2010, China produced a truly negligible part of the world’s medicine; now it is the world’s second-biggest developer of new drugs, and from 2020 to 2024, the value of drugs licensed worldwide from China grew fifteenfold .......... The country has surpassed Europe and the United States in the number of high-quality scientific papers published and has opened up leads in materials science, engineering, chemistry and computer science — all domains in which China is responsible for more than 60 percent of cutting-edge research. These seem like important fields. ........... For most of Trump’s second term, an electric-car billionaire has been at least the second-most-powerful man in government, but Tesla’s stock price has fallen by nearly half since December, with liberal backlash in America and sales in European countries falling almost 50 percent compared with last year. China’s electric vehicle powerhouse, BYD, meanwhile, expects sales in Europe to double in 2025, having grown its global sales almost 15 times over since 2020. “The first China shock was when China was incorporating into our supply chains,” the economic historian Adam Tooze proclaimed in November. “The second China shock is when we beg to be incorporated into theirs.”
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation
The Investors Who Prop Up America Won’t Soon Forget This
I’m in Denmark’s Parliament. Here’s Why America Has Us So Stunned.
The Vibe Shifts Against the Right The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”
........ “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.” ........ A term of high praise on the dissident right is “based,” short for “based in reality.” But never has an administration been more divorced from reality, and more determined to shove insulting ideological fictions down our throats, than Trump’s. ............... When liberalism was firmly entrenched, its discontents could treat authoritarian ideas as interesting avant-garde provocations. Authoritarianism in power, however, was always going to be crude and stupid. ........... Trump’s tariffs have pushed some to the breaking point because they reveal the immediate material cost of that stupidity. The decadent cynics of the new right could dismiss Trump’s lies about the 2020 election as mere hyperbole. It’s harder to be sanguine about a collapse in one’s own net worth and economic prospects. ............ When she looks back on the milieu she was once a part of, she said, she sees no solid ideas for a post-liberal society — it was all just aesthetics, resentments and vibes. “And now the vibes have knocked into reality,” she said. “And it is so jarring to see that none of the vibes stand up to scrutiny. None of the vibes actually fit onto the 21st century. None of the vibes, if implemented, would lead to anything but immiseration and war.”
The vibe is shifting yet again. The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.
— Alex Kaschuta (@kaschuta) April 11, 2025
"I told you" says @powerfultakes.
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) April 9, 2025
Was it a mistake to vote for Trump?
If I'd known that MAGA would become a poverty cult obsessed with bringing Chinese sweatshops to the US, I would have supported DEI Kamala. However, as far as I am aware, no one (including Karlin) anticipated…
"It is still theoretically possible to turn this around. The Republican-controlled Congress should invoke the 25th Amendment, carry Trump away in a straitjacket, revoke the tariffs, and spend their political capital (which would be soaring) on important issues like deporting illegal aliens. But this is the kind of action that would be taken by smart people, not Republicans."
This Is What Trumponomics Is Really About what is the purpose of Trumponomics? ....... In a word, reindustrialization. ........ Tariff-fueled nationalism is a callback to eras when industrial America reigned supreme. For a time during the 20th century, parts of Europe and Asia were rebuilding after two world wars, so U.S. factories thrived, and manufacturing provided upward mobility for millions of Americans.
Trump’s Trade War
Peace For Taiwan Is Possible
The Last Age of War, The First Age of Peace: Lord Kalki, Prophecies, and the Path to Global Redemption
Quantum Computing: Applications And Implications
Challenges In AI Safety
AI-Era Social Network: Reimagined for Truth, Trust & Transformation
To reindustrialize will require investment in people and machines — and a coherent strategy. Given the Trump administration’s aversion to collaboration and the internal contradictions of the factions within the administration, its reindustrialization drive appears disconnected from reality and destined to fail. ......... Mr. Trump has been skeptical about global trade for decades. In 1987 he took out an ad in a newspaper warning that “for decades, Japan and others have been taking advantage of the United States.”
