Saturday 4 August 2018

What Trump does not get... is that I can't take any more of his crap.


When I draw this, he still hadn't worn me down.

 I think that the biggest problem for Trump is his very experience as an entrepreneur...
He is used to operate in a big market, with thousands of operators, where news of his bad habits can get lost in the noise, and in a structured society with rule of the law, where using superior lawyers firepower can effectively intimidate most counterparts.
He seems to think that the same tactics and strategies that he used in his career as a real estate mogul can be translated effectively in international diplomacy.
He misses some fundamental differences between the two markets...
On Earth, there are less than 200 sovereign nations.

The "big ones" that counts for most of, well, everything and anything are a maybe a quarter of that number, and each has a professional community dedicated to track what the others do.
Trinidad y Tobago may get away with something, Iceland would already have problems, and every fart of the U.S. is analyzed, dissected and extrapolated by every other government on the planet.
In his private and professional life, Trump has always used lawyers and lawsuits as threats, especially to control the narrative about his endeavors. Needless to say, nothing even remotely similar is possible for the president of the U.S. - the other international players have their own information systems which routinely flaunt little details like the treasonous behaviors required to their sources, and decades worth of information on any associate of a target government.
Also, lawyers are not really that much of a threat in and by themselves - the result of trials must be enforced, and in a rule of law state there is a whole sector of the government that is dedicated to this.
Now, imagine to live in a society that had no police forces whatsoever.Would suing and winning in courts of law mean much? No, right.
While the U.S. may have prided themselves to act as the world's policeman, there is really no such thing as a world's policeman.
Imagine a village populated by two or three hundred thugs, each one more than willing to cut someone else throat at the smallest slight, and many of them organized in small crime families, more or less secret.
Now, take a breath, and consider this - that is the world, seen at the level of governments and other international policies actors.
A village of thugs, each knowing to the number of panties in the closet the affairs of the other, each ready to cut the necessary throats for reasons of "national security" that, by the way, they devise themselves.
If the "thugs" images seems excessive to someone, consider that here is virtually no government on the planet that does not disregard some individual rights of their own citizens when it suits its needs, starting with the usual host of discrimination policies against this or that undesired minority, and up to the occasional secret assassination. As for the non-citizens, they are usually seen as non-entities whose extermination is avoided just because they usually are citizens of other thugs, and bad P.R. is bad P.R..
It is a far cry from the Manhattan where Trump grew up, and a lot more akin to Corleone or Casal di Principe... (famous Italian mafia towns).
In the last 70 years, the U.S. has tried to inject a bit of rationality in this otherwise deplorable state of affairs, fostering a host of international organizations created to act as mediators among the various thugs - pardon, governments - so that there was some intermediate steps to try, before cutting each other's throat - go to war.
Contrarily to Donal's vision of things, the U.S. has managed to steer the rules of these organizations so that they were slightly favorable to them, and thus rip their share of benefits - not an excessive one, of course, as that would have provoked the widespread resistance of the other thugs.
Let's say, the "right" one - organizing things costs effort and produce value, so it is only right that it is rewarded, even though a number of players have gone along rather grudgingly.
Of course, a disproportionate part of said profits has been gobbled up by the country's ruling class, leaving the underclasses more or less destitute, but that is mostly a problem of internal policies of the U.S. being excessively biased toward the improvement of The Weatlhy's lot in life. 
But it rests that the US profited of the erstwhile world order that it had built - any other government on Earth would likely have crumbled by now, under a spiraling exterior debt, for example.
In little more than a year, Trump has more or less undone it.
And he is not going to replace it with any "new system", simply because he has thrown away an awful lot of political capital and demonstrated that he is not a reliable partner.
From now on, even when the U.S.A. will manage to get to some kind of negotiating table, it is going to be for show - because tomorrow the Dude can wake up and undo everything. Al the while, the thugs are going back to their old habits... which include chronic backstabbing disorder, trade war, war war and other fun pastimes.    
The question is now not whether China will overtake the U.S. as hegemonic super-power before crumbling under the burden of its own set of internal problems (not the least of which is Xi Jinping's authoritarian instincts already schlerotizing its policy discourse - Xi, China needs good ideas, not more censors), but when it will do.

Chances are the world is going to be stupendously interesting and exciting, when I'll be old.

I love boredom... please, world, let me be bored to my heart's content.

You know what? I do not care about the guy any more.

I just hope that the "deep state" manages to keep it [sic] from tumbling the world fully into 1932-like chaos.



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Feel free to point me out conceptual, orthographical, grammatical, syntactical or usage's errors, as well as anything else