This hardly earth-shattering observation makes me even more sceptical about the debacle Trump has visited on the world in general and the US specifically.
Tocqueville pointed out some similarities between America and Russia, prophesying that one day they would rule the world together. But his prediction was based on the two countries’ potential for demographic growth, which has been partly realised in America but not at all in Russia.
Yet Americans and Russians do like to remark how similar they are, even though both are aware of the many traits they don’t share. One salient similarity is their historical animosity to Europe, not necessarily geopolitical but always psychological, cultural and, if you will, civilisational. In such terms, both countries are envious upstarts and rancorous outsiders.
“Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.” His Russian colleagues, even those better than him, often said something similar about their own nation, as any reader of Dostoyevsky’s or Tolstoy’s diaries will confirm. In his Karamazovs, Dostoyevsky talked about genuflecting before “the sacred stones of Europe”, which didn’t prevent him from loathing every animate European.
A propensity to xenophobia and insularity makes it easy for expert demagogues in both countries to sell the idea of the world ganging up on them. They could all repeat the slogan of the notoriously thuggish football team, Millwall FC: No one likes us, but we don’t care.
The Russians have indeed turned their paranoia into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their tendency to pounce on their neighbours like rabid dogs, coupled with their persistent threats to conquer or, barring that, annihilate the world, have instilled affection in few foreign hearts.
In America’s case, the Millwall Syndrome isn’t so clear-cut. It’s true that educated Europeans, both Leftists and traditional conservatives, tend to treat the US with, respectively, visceral hatred and supercilious condescension. Yet the uneducated, which these days is to say overwhelming, majorities are tropistically attracted to America.
While both Russia and America talk about their love of the common man, for the former it’s just talk, whereas for the latter it’s reality.
America actually is what Russia purports to be: a country dedicated to the elevation of the common man. Common men around the world sense that and respond with sympathy, if not always with love. Many had the same feelings for communist Russia, having swallowed her canard about equality. However, eventually Soviet beastliness helped most people see through Soviet lies.
But Trump’s economic broadside against the world, including the 20 countries with which America had a free trade agreement, makes his Millwall-like claims more credible. Traditional friends of America are being turned into her enemies and, even worse, friends of China.
The only major country Trump didn’t hit with new tariffs is Russia, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained that the US didn’t do business with that sanctioned rogue. That’s not quite true: last year the US did about $3.6 billion’s worth of trade with Russia, but Bessent and his boss can only think in trillions, not paltry billions.
Anyway, my title above suggests that I’m going to talk not about the two nations’ similarities but their differences. These are numerous, but one that seems apposite today is that the Russians are historically used to a life of deprivation and the Americans aren’t.
Such habits have had a formative effect on both national characters, with the austere Russians (en masse, that is) satisfied with having the bare necessities of life and prepared to tolerate even their shortage. Americans, on the other hand, are as different in that respect as different can be.
A country dedicated to the elevation of the common man will inevitably be defined by materialistic desiderata, the prime of which is a guarantee of ever-growing comfort. This is the implicit promise of America, and she can only ever break it at her peril. (The promise first came across in the Declaration of Independence that identified “the pursuit of happiness” as an “unalienable [sic] right.”)
Acting on that promise consistently has produced a hedonistic culture of instant gratification spreading over an infinite number of instances in eternity. That’s why, and not just because of the wily foreigners’ chicanery, Americans tend to consume more than they produce, and that’s why, in the 10 years leading up to the 2008 crisis, personal indebtedness in the US was three times as great as personal income.
This critical difference between the two nations has seeped into the collective DNA. As a result, the Russians are better prepared to accept the message of what we in England call ‘jam tomorrow’, a promise of a bright future offsetting a guarantee of penury at present.
In his Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote a poem lampooning that mass psychosis in the Soviet Union.
It starts with this verse: “Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,/ Beasts of every land and clime,/ Hearken to my joyful tidings/ Of the golden future time.” And, in the penultimate verse, “For that day we all must labour,/ Though we die before it break;/ Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,/ All must toil for freedom’s sake.”
Orwell would have a field day looking at Trump’s assault on the global – and specifically American – economy. In essence, Trump is making the same jam-tomorrow promise to Americans: you’ll have to suffer in the short term for basking in untold riches tomorrow.
The exact timing of that tomorrow is rather hazy: some time in the future. Well, if you insist, ten years or so. Maybe less, maybe more. This is underpinned by the claim that brings back the fond memories of my Soviet youth.
As a child, I was told that the Soviet Union stands alone against her enemies that include every non-communist country in the world and also at times some communist ones, such as Yugoslavia, Albania and above all China. The worst of them are the US, Britain and other ‘capitalist countries’ that all try to exploit Russia, possibly even occupy and colonise her.
As an old man, I’m hearing similar noises, mutatis mutandis, from the US President. Possible occupation and colonisation haven’t yet been mentioned, but exploitation is the buzz word.
The world is out to “rip off” and “screw” America, as evinced by all those “pathetic freeloaders” having a positive trade balance with the good old US of A. Actually, the Donald forgets to mention that such disparity exists only in goods – the US trade balance in services is hugely positive.
In any case, I’ve often argued, along with Messrs Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and every other conservative economist on record, that a negative trade balance is a sign of a healthy economy. It means that the country can exchange a small amount of exports for a large amount of imports – something akin to a butcher exchanging £10 worth of his meat for £15 worth of a greengrocer’s vegetables. Thus, there exists an equal if not better justification for saying that America is ripping off the rest of the world.
Then Trump came up with a bogus formula derived from trade deficits that supposedly shows that all other countries levy extortionist tariffs on US goods. Now, even if true, the same economists I’ve mentioned agree that, above all, tariffs are a tax that hurts the country’s own consumers. That’s why they advocated no retaliation leading to a trade war.
Trump hasn’t read those economists. Neither, by the looks of it, have his foreign colleagues who, with the exception of Britain, have all hit back with retaliatory tariffs. A full-blown trade war has broken out, and it has already claimed huge casualties.
Economic growth is grinding to a halt, inflation is about to climb high, world markets (including US ones) are in meltdown. The Dow has lost over 2,000 points, the FTSE 280, markets in Asia have registered similarly catastrophic drops. Altogether, in just two days some nine trillion dollars were wiped off the world economy (five trillion of it in the US), and personally I can’t even count that high.
Those losses were registered even before China responded with tit-for-tat tariffs on US goods. What we looking at is the worst crash in history, rivalling the market collapse of 1929. It’s useful to remember that at that time only about two percent of all Americans owned any shares, and foreign trade accounted for only two per cent of a largely autarkic US economy.
Still, when the Hoover administration introduced its Smoot-Hawley tariffs, that became the last straw that tipped the country from a stock market crash into the Great Depression. I don’t want to make apocalyptic predictions, but today some 62 per cent of all Americans are invested in the securities market, and 27 per cent of US GDP comes from international trade.
I rather doubt America will have another Great Depression, but every economist worth his salt is predicting that the world, including the US, will slip into a prolonged recession spiral. Americans (and the rest of us) will be paying more for computers, I-Phones, clothes, food – well, for just about everything.
It’s predicted that the average household income in the US will go $3,800 down. That’s hardly a famine of Holodomor proportions, but then, as I suggested from the start, Americans aren’t Russians.
Part of the reason for the American trade deficit in goods is the rapacious spending of US consumers, an activity they seem to regard as their God-given right. One doesn’t need a crystal ball or any other fortune-telling appliances to predict a backlash.
One intimation of that has already come in Wisconsin, a solidly pro-Trump state, where the Republican Supreme Court candidate lavishly financed by Musk lost the election. What do you know, $20-odd million can’t even buy a lousy State Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin, and Trump is just getting started.
It’s a distinct possibility that newly impoverished voters (impoverished by American standards, that is) will before long take away Trump’s majority in both Houses, turning him into a lame-duck president – or else, perish the thought, a dictator.
One way or another, the consequences of Trump’s ill-conceived actions are unpredictable and therefore exceedingly dangerous. People who call him a conservative should look up that word in a dictionary.