Empire

 There's a fashionable framework in the academic left to refer disparagingly to the United States as an imperial power. It's intended to make us seem like the prime malefactor in the world.

As Paul Krugman points out, but many others have noted, America's "imperial" power comes from the lightness with which it influences - rather than dictates to - other countries. This isn't perfect. One of the many tragedies of the Iraq war was how it squandered this presumption that America might be powerful, but it constrained itself with the same rules it applied to others. Even Vietnam was in defense of a sovereign (if malignant) government in South Vietnam.

The point of Krugman's post is to note how Trump is destroying the system of alliances upon which America's largely benign empire rested. What's darkly hilarious is that Neocons like John Bolton began the process of destroying that conception of American Empire during the Iraq War, yet they hate Trump for...accelerating that destruction? I don't think we should assume intellectual consistency from that crowd.

It's a cliche that Americans are strikingly ignorant of the rest of the world. I've written plenty about Murc's Law within the context of American politics. There's also the corollary about how only America has agency on the international stage. This is how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris become responsible for Netanyahu's war crimes. 

Trump takes this concept and warps it even further. Ignorant of everything about foreign policy concepts, he sees everything as a mafia-style shakedown. He understands power dynamics in a crude, bullying way, but he does not understand the basic idea of sharing and friendship. This has worked to cow the Republican Party and disorient everyone else, but the application to other sovereign nations is problematic.

Is this the end of "American Empire"? Rome famously governed loosely in times of peace (and was even more brutal in times of war). Rome had emperors far worse than Trump (at least so far), and they trundled along. The question is whether our allies can ever look at us as reliable partners again? There's "a lot of ruin in a nation" as Adam Smith said. We can survive this (though there are no guarantees). Whether we can see the Pax Americana survive is very much a different question.