According to press reports, President-elect Trump is threatening tariffs if BRICS members do not support the continued use of the US dollar in international trade. I do not know how successful his threat will be over the long haul, but I suspect that it might be useful in the short run. The United States is still the world’s most important market and most countries depend to some extent on trade with us. They have, in the past, also seen holding the US dollar in their treasuries as being the best way to hedge against inflation. Both of these rationales are weakening dramatically with changes that are occurring in this country and in the world around us. Inflation is ravaging the value of our currency, our national debt is mounting steadily, and our work force is much less competitive than it used to be in many areas of the economy.
You and I look at all of this with a jaundiced eye. We tend to see the economic challenge that we face to be governed by policy decisions made in Washington DC. I agree that tactical decisions made in Washington are relevant, but the root challenge is out here in the American heartland. You and I are not the hardscrabble riff-raff that built the world’s most powerful economy. We are the sophisticates that have gotten used to having the world’s most luxurious life-style. We are justifiably proud of the society that we built and we are convinced that, even with all of its injustices, it is the absolute best society in the entire world. In our eyes, the most efficient way to do anything is to mimic us and we are improving on our society every day that passes. We are righting old wrongs committed by people long dead, ensuring equality in bathroom use, and working diligently to ensure that we are not rude to one another. All of this, while the rest of the world stupidly fights with each other over all kinds of less etherial issues - like accumulating enough calories every day to maintain one’s existence.
I hold that America has a range of enemies that want to take us down off of our high and mighty perch, and, because of the invention of nuclear weapons, a couple of them are infinitely more dangerous than any enemy that we have ever faced before. Russia, China and Radical Islam are, in my eyes, the three most difficult - in that order of importance. Russia is an old fashioned threat that we understand better than the other two and we are dealing with their most recent trouble-making in traditional, if ineffective, ways. China is the most dangerous immediate threat, not only because of its growing nuclear capability, but because of the effectiveness, repeat effectiveness of their policies - BRICS being but one of the more immediate challenges to our supremacy. Assuming that we manage to deal adequately with Moscow and Beijing, we still face the challenge of Radical Islam, which is made far more complicated by the fact that Radical Islamists operate with an entirely different world view making it difficult to achieve true consensus on virtually any subject.
What we need is a public ethos that values all human life. We have a better start than any society before us in the entire history of humans on earth, but we are drifting away from the principals that our forefathers attempted to instill in us. Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran are threats, but self-indulgence is what is destroying us. Advances in technology are not going to reverse things. They will, in fact, accelerate the process in a multitude of ways - the technology of nuclear warfare being the easiest to understand, but advances in the art of extending individual lives may be the single most problematic.
If I were influential, I would join with Beijing to perfect our outreach to the underdeveloped world instead of threatening tariffs designed to hold their economy back and I would make it crystal clear that their only alternative to honest cooperation was nuclear war. Very unfortunately, in order to make that threat effective, I would have to divert large amounts of money and human resources to perfecting our military capability. No amount of wishful thinking can eliminate that requirement.
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