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America self-destructs
Shlomo Ben-Ami
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The US has cut funding for research and development and declared open season on the scientific institutions that have made it the world’s leading innovation powerhouse.
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The US has cut funding for research and development and declared open season on the scientific institutions that have made it the world’s leading innovation powerhouse.
US president Donald Trump is not known for respecting science and history. From promoting unproven treatments for Covid-19 to insisting that any discussion of shameful elements of America’s past is “divisive,” he prefers to manipulate them for political ends.
One wonders whether he realises, when he waxes nostalgic about America’s historical “greatness,” that he is usually referring to times when the US was a geopolitical weakling.
Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is a case in point. When President James Monroe asserted in 1823 that the Western Hemisphere was solely the domain of the US, America was far from establishing itself as a global power. And while it has been used to rationalise US intervention and imperialism since then, Monroe’s original vision was focussed on keeping European colonialism at bay.
It certainly would not justify Trump’s ambition to assert US sovereignty over Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, even as his embrace of geopolitical spheres of interest effectively legitimises efforts by other powers – Israel and Turkey in Syria, Russia in Ukraine – to seize territory by force.
Similarly, Trump justifies his embrace of high tariffs by pointing out that they were a feature of the Gilded Age, when rapid industrialisation fuelled prosperity in the US. But, again, he is referring to a period – the late 1870s to the early 1900s – when America’s global clout was relatively modest.
While the US was already a rising economic power, it was not yet “at its richest” by any means. Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product per capita is around six times higher today than in the 1890s – which was also a period of peak economic inequality.
Moreover, after the McKinley tariffs of 1890 – named for their Republican architect, then-representative William McKinley – increased average duties on all imports from 38% to 49.5%, the party was soundly defeated in that year’s midterm elections, in one of the biggest partisan swings in US history. The tariffs also indirectly contributed to the Panics of 1890 and 1893, which, at the time, was the worst economic downturn the US had ever experienced.
Invoking the era before 1913, when the federal income tax was introduced, Trump has also floated the idea of using tariffs to finance the entire US government budget.
This reflects not only a gross misunderstanding of how tariffs work – commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said it would amount to “let(ting) all the outsiders pay,” even though tariffs are paid by importers – but also a total disregard for historical experience and mathematical reality.
Tariff revenues could not cover the US government’s expenses in the early 1900s, and they certainly could not do so today, no matter how many civil servants the unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his department of government efficiency fire, or how many agencies they gut or programmes they defund. After all, America’s biggest budget items are Social Security (enacted in 1935) and Medicare (created in 1965), which Americans have no interest in losing.
The foreign-aid commitments, responsibilities to Nato and other allies, and investments in scientific research that the Trump administration decries amount to a much smaller share of the US public budget. More importantly, they bring tremendous dividends, in the form of US global influence, stability, and prosperity.
In fact, the Pax Americana that reflected and perpetuated American “greatness” was always based on a broadly beneficial, but primarily self-serving, system of economic, military, and cultural projection – precisely the system that Trump is now destroying.
The Trump administration has effectively declared open season on the scientific institutions that have made it the world’s leading innovation powerhouse.
It has subdued Ivy League universities, purged the department of health and human services, and moved to slash funding for world-renowned scientific research institutions, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the department of energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
As the US cuts funding for research and development, China is pouring money into it, having invested US$52 billion in R&D last year – up 10% from 2023.
Moreover, the Trump administration is dismantling US foreign-aid programmes, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a leading tool of US soft power. Trump has also withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement, while embracing coercive bilateral deal-making, such as his effort to control Ukraine’s endowment of critical minerals.
The US appears eager to turn even Europe, its closest partner, into an enemy, potentially driving it to pursue deeper engagement with China. In light of its plans to borrow heavily to finance increased defense spending, the European Union might even find itself sharing China’s desire to dethrone the dollar as the leading global reserve currency.
If the dollar does fall, however, it will be the Trump administration, not Europe or China, that pushed it. Already, Trump’s tariffs are fuelling a crisis of confidence in the greenback, reflected in rising yields for US Treasuries.
For years, commentators have been fretting about the so-called Thucydides Trap: When an incumbent hegemon (the US) fears a rising challenger (China), war becomes inevitable. But Trump has now turned the concept on its head. Far from fighting to uphold the system that it leads, the US is taking a wrecking ball to it. China just needs to sit back and watch.