Make America Solvent Again
Why voluntarily give up hegemony? The answer is hidden
from political scientists, but obvious to economists. This year, for the first
time, one trillion dollars will be spent on redeeming U.S. government bonds.
Debt redemption has already become an unbearable burden for America.
As the Anchorage meeting recedes into the distance, the
world has more and more questions for the United States. Russia, naturally, has
the most questions. The main one is this: is it possible to negotiate with
Trump at all? Is it possible to take on faith not only his words, but also the
statements of his team?
Elon Musk’s Starlinks are still being used in the Ukrainian
war and remain one of the most important elements of the Ukrainian Armed
Forces’ operational command system. Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently visited
Kiev, after which there were confirmations that the product of this American IT
company is actively being used in attacks on various targets deep inside
Russia. In the spring, Ukraine received a large batch of cheap but quite
effective American Hornet drones with onboard AI, created by the company of former
Google CEO Eric Schmidt. And so on.
If one also looks at the biographies of the Trumpists,
“everything about these Americans becomes clear.” Treasury Secretary Scott
Bessent began his career in Soros structures, and for that reason alone should
be placed among the suspects. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has always been
called an Atlanticist; he too may be “planted.” And finally, the new head of
the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, former vice president and executive director
of Morgan Stanley, flesh of the flesh of Wall Street.
Perhaps everything, including the U.S. National Security
Strategy, an officially approved and published document, is one enormous
disinformation campaign, a clever plan. Is it even permissible to trust Trump’s
words? Not, of course, the words intended for a broad audience, where his
position changes three times a day. We know examples of politicians, including
domestic ones, where the public speaker and the author of analytical memoranda
seem like two different people. The question is whether what he says in closed
negotiations should be taken at face value.
Let us recall Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson
in February 2024. The journalist asked the Russian president whether he
understood how the decision-making system in the United States works. The
answer was: “I don’t know. America is a complicated country...” Carlson’s
question hinted that Biden did not possess real power. But, supposedly, if some
strong-willed figure became president, everything could change; the new head of
state would take the bull by the horns and restore order. President Putin, as
his answer showed, avoided Carlson’s framing at the time.
So the strong-willed figure has arrived. But what about the
bull? Has it been taken by the horns?
Not only ordinary people, but also some experts make a
mistake when discussing the behavior of the American president. They write and
speak about him as if he were an autocrat. But Trump has never had as much
power as is sometimes attributed to him. In fact, no American president ever
has.
When the United States was created at the end of the
eighteenth century, the so-called system of checks and balances was adopted as
a basic principle, fully in accordance with Montesquieu, who was so revered by
the Founding Fathers. The principle of separation of powers built into the
foundation assumes that if one branch goes off the rails, usually the
executive, though it can be the legislative or judicial as well, the other
branches must have mechanisms to bind the runaway branch hand and foot. And as
for informal ways of preventing work from being done, they are countless.
American presidents, of course, like to portray themselves
as rulers of the world. It is a whole genre. Usually it consists of rhetorical
piles of general phrases about democracy, freedom, and so forth, with nothing
solid to grab onto. Actor Ronald Reagan loved giving such performances: the
“evil empire,” and everything in that spirit. The second type of speech
contains a little more concrete detail. Outwardly, it looks as though the
mechanisms of power obey the president’s will. This makes reality easier for
the masses to digest. In reality, if some semblance of clarity is visible, it
means the text has been coordinated at least with the leadership of one of the
parties in Congress, the party through which the speaker ran for office. In
years when the Republican Party was difficult to distinguish from the
Democratic one, presidents coordinated their declared position with an even
wider circle of people.
So the American president is not a sovereign whose opinion,
once expressed, sends everyone snapping to attention and rushing to execute
orders.
Trump’s first term proved this. At the time, he
“self-elected” and began acting willfully. That excess alone already testified
to a severe crisis. The system mostly ignored the president, sabotaged him, and
drowned him in the swamp of bureaucracy. Those four years became a kind of
pause. During that pause, incidentally, all the many problems worsened and
finally tied themselves into a Gordian knot. Even if Trump really came to clean
out the Augean stables during his first term, his election produced the
opposite result.
In those years, speaking with a lame duck was certainly
pointless. Trump could not fulfill a single promise.
The second term is different. This time, there is clearly a
powerful force behind him, and in that sense speaking with him is reasonable.
But it is necessary to understand what exactly this force is doing.
It is dismantling the American empire.
Why voluntarily give up hegemony, you ask? The answer is
hidden from political scientists, but obvious to people who understand
economics. This year, for the first time, one trillion dollars will be spent on
redeeming U.S. government bonds. Before the unscheduled increase in Pentagon
spending, debt service, again for the first time, became the largest item in
the budget. Now the Ministry of War has been given additional billions so that
it can order more weapons from the military-industrial complex and thereby
stimulate production.
But bond redemption has already become an unbearable burden.
Interest payments alone will make up almost 14 percent of the budget this year.
Thus, the United States has found itself in the company of Italy at 13 percent,
Lebanon at 15.2 percent, and the Philippines at 15.3 percent. Moreover,
according to the forecast of the Congressional Budget Office, if nothing
changes, in 2036 the United States will spend $2.1 trillion on this line item,
or 19 percent of the budget. America will find itself in the company of Uganda
and Gabon.
Yes, some large economies have an even worse indicator.
Brazil, India, and Egypt spend a quarter of tax revenues on debt service. But
these countries are not issuers of the world’s reserve currency. And they do
not proclaim themselves the “world’s policeman.”
Could the United States continue living this way? Yes, by
printing money. That is, by repeating the trick performed during the crises of
2008 and Covid again and again. If Kamala Harris had become president, that
would most likely have been the option chosen. But such behavior resembles a
spring. The longer you stretch it, the harder it snaps back. The more damage is
done to the structure of the economy.
But do the globalists really not understand what is
happening? These are, after all, such great lovers of Excel. They understand
everything perfectly and have written off the United States, preferring to
squeeze it dry and then move the center somewhere else, say New Zealand. For
now, they have temporarily relocated headquarters to London, but that is
clearly an intermediate stop, since Britain is in equally bad shape.
Such a plan, however, is pure fantasy. Money without
armed support is worth nothing. For decades, the United States provided the
coercive component. It provided the ideological one as well, with its “American
dream” exported to the world. The project of relocating the globalists to a new
financial center has zero chance of success.
In fact, the first signs of serious U.S. problems were
already visible in a number of indicators, for example in the ratio of net
profit to market capitalization, during the dot-com crisis in 2000. Something
should have been repaired even then. Now the choice before the American
authorities is simple: a horrible end, or horror without end.
The Trumpists chose the horrible end.
In a year and a half, Bessent has done nothing to save the
global financial system. Quite the opposite: he has taken many steps against
it. Rubio tells NATO members in plain language about the gradual dismantling of
the alliance. In a major interview before taking office, Warsh stated that his
choice was between a bad scenario and a very bad one, and that his task as head
of the Federal Reserve would be to minimize losses from the coming supercrisis.
In other words, he openly acknowledges that this supercrisis is coming.
Sweetening the pill slightly, he says that the Federal Reserve must, after all,
cooperate with the government, rather than resist it, as under the previous Fed
chairman, as can be read between the lines, and must also support the real sector,
meaning the reindustrialization so beloved by Trump and Vance.
During the 2008 crisis, Warsh served as a coordinator among
the Federal Reserve, the government, and Wall Street, so he knows the situation
from the inside. In recent years, he sat on the Fed’s board. That is why he
speaks of the coming catastrophe as something already decided. It is precisely
the inevitability of collapse that produces such a large number of renegades
among the Atlanticists. Choosing between the United States and the dollar,
these particular people have chosen the former. For now.
But, by no means, have all done so. Under the carpet, the
bulldogs are fighting savagely. What is there to say, if Biden’s wife wrote in
her recently published memoirs that in December 2024, the White House seriously
believed civil war would begin in January 2025, and therefore decided to
decorate the building for Christmas as modestly as possible.
In such an environment, “coordinating the position” is
impossible. That means that even in closed negotiations, Trump can speak only
on behalf of one faction of American power, not all of it as a whole. And if he
says he is proposing some joint projects, he is being slippery. The only place
where he can more or less answer for anything is North America. With major
reservations, Central America. No farther.
So, the United States is winding down the empire.
But this does not mean that it desires peace and prosperity
in the territories it is leaving behind. Quite the opposite. While the United
States is “regrouping,” and it believes it can do this quickly, although the
probability of such a development is small, chaos must reign across the globe.
In the specific case of the Ukrainian war, the plan is to crash the EU against
Russia. This does not mean that Russia, out of spite toward America, must
immediately stop the war. Rather the opposite, given the suicidal behavior of
the Europeans. But Russia will correctly assess American motives. And there would
be no surprise at Starlink, Palantir, and Hornet operating in Ukraine.
The people working tirelessly to dismantle the American
empire are nobody’s friends. And nobody’s partners. They are thinking only and
exclusively about how to save themselves while sitting in the captain’s cabin
of this sinking Titanic.
Trump’s task is to create a smoke screen. The thicker the
fog, the better.
His second role is to become the scapegoat when everything
collapses.