you really must ask a serious question. Is Trump really this stupid or is the whole world been hornswaggled.
We are starting to see the consequences of his Global Tariff War. It may well see the actual partial dissolution of the Union itself and a global reassembly of middle powers led by Canada, capturing a population in excess of one billion and if joined by India, emerging as the RAJ itself represetning half the world.
Suddenly none of this is unthinkable and recall that Q reads the future as well which directs planning along effective channels. Something is afoot and it is not chaos.
President Donald Trump as Founding Father of the Newer World Order
Ron Unz • September 8, 2025
Thirty-five years ago this Thursday, President George H.W. Bush gave an important speech entitled “Toward a New World Order.” Wikipedia has excerpted a few of its central elements:
Until now, the world we’ve known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict, and the cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the genuine prospect of new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a “world order” in which “the principles of justice and fair play … protect the weak against the strong …” A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.
Bush’s public address before a joint session of Congress emphasized the successful conclusion of our decades-long Cold War against Soviet Communism, a struggle ending in a complete victory for the West.
A year earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Warsaw Pact established by the USSR to counter NATO had collapsed. The Soviet Union itself was on the verge of disintegrating seven decades after its original creation, leaving behind a shrunken Russian successor state that included only half that previous population. Moscow would soon be reduced to ruling territories far smaller than those held by Peter the Great in the early 18th century.
During that same summer of 1989, enormous pro-Western demonstrations by students and workers had filled Beijing’s central square, and although the Chinese government had successfully suppressed those Tiananmen Square protests with considerable loss of life, the Communist regime seemed to be tottering, widely expected to follow its Soviet counterpart onto the ash-heap of history.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama also published his famous article “The End of History?” describing what seemed to be a sweeping and permanent ideological triumph for the Western system. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he dropped his question mark and expanded that analysis into a bestselling 1992 book of the same title.
Not only did America tower over the entire world politically and economically, but nearly all of the other large and successful countries were numbered among its longstanding allies, with Japan and the members of NATO looking to Washington’s leadership. And although the Japanese had seemingly challenged American economic dominance during the 1980s, that country had already entered a decade of economic stagnation, soon eliminating any such prospect.
Just a few weeks before Bush’s speech, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded and occupied Kuwait, and many of our president’s statements regarding international law addressed this situation even as he began assembling a powerful coalition to defeat the aggressor and expel it from the territory it had seized. The ultimate result was a complete military triumph in February 1991, with the large and experienced Iraqi army being totally destroyed by our advanced weaponry with negligible American loss of life, further demonstrating that our power was completely unmatched by any possible rival.
So that same year saw both our sweeping victory in the Gulf War and the final collapse of our longtime Soviet rival. America entered what soon became known as the unipolar moment, with both our hard and our soft power entirely supreme across the globe.
No previous country in the history of the world had ever achieved such total dominance across so many different sectors, whether political, economic, ideological, or technological. Educated individuals from around the world received much of their information from American media outlets even as their populations were entertained by Hollywood productions. The children of the world’s ruling elites eagerly sought to enroll at American academic institutions, as did so many of the best and brightest youngsters of every country, thereby allowing America to shape the minds of the world’s next generation of leaders.
President Bush himself was one of our most establishmentarian political figures, someone who had spent the bulk of his entire career in public service, and he probably regarded the declarations in his speech as the final fulfillment of America’s longstanding political goals, the culmination of two generations of effort. In his mind, the New World Order that he hailed merely represented the proper functioning of the United Nations and other postwar international organizations. He assumed that America would play a dominant role in those institutions, but hardly a unilateral or dictatorial one.
As it happened, Bush’s choice of phrases was rather unfortunate. Both he and his speechwriters came from entirely mainstream backgrounds, so they were probably unaware that for decades the term “New World Order” had inspired severe paranoia in far right political circles. Such individuals believed that it represented the plotting of evil globalist elites to destroy American freedom and sovereignty and create a one-world government under their nefarious control.
Gary Allen, an influential figure in the conspiratorial John Birch Society, had published several books with that theme, often including “New World Order” in his titles. Many Republican grassroots organizations were dominated by the right-wing followers of Christian televangelist Pat Robertson, and in 1991 he published The New World Order, a book that expressed very similar fears and became a major bestseller. Indeed, that much demonized term became so widespread in such ideological circles that it was often abbreviated as the acronym NWO, associated with the dark, Satanic forces of the world.
If President Bush had been deliberately trying to provoke a popular right-wing revolt in his own Republican party, his speech could not have done a better job. The resulting ideological backlash probably contributed to his unexpected reelection defeat in 1992, as large numbers of fearful and angry conservatives flocked to Pat Buchanan’s insurgent challenge in the primaries and then pulled the lever for Ross Perot in November. As a third party candidate, Perot drew nearly 19% percent of the national vote, an astonishing total for someone who had never held any political office.
Although Bush was replaced by Bill Clinton in the White House, the foreign policy positions of the two administrations were not so very different, and America’s commitment to the existing international structures that it had created and dominated remained strong.
But today our country is run by Donald Trump, a very different sort of American leader. If the world has spent the years since 1991 mostly living in what Bush once called the New World Order, the actions of our current president are overthrowing and replacing that international system with what might be called the Newer World Order, one that largely reverses many of its major elements.
According to some contemporaneous wits, the heavy-handed policies and political blunders of King George III played such a crucial role in inspiring the American Revolution that the British monarch should probably have been regarded as one of our founding fathers, perhaps even more important to the creation of our country than George Washington or anyone else.
In a very similar manner, day by day and week by week President Trump has been overturning the existing system of American global dominance that has endured for the last thirty-five or even eighty years, dismantling it brick by brick in ways that would have been far beyond the capabilities of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or any other American rival.
Although Trump’s actions are now producing the final destruction of American hegemony, the underlying trends responsible for this development actually stretch back for decades, beginning before Trump had even opened the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City, his first important real estate project,
The central factor in this changed international landscape has been the economic and technological rise of China, which since the late 1970s has advanced far more rapidly than any other major country in the history of the world, and I discussed this in a 2012 article.China’s Rise, America’s Fall
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 7,000 Words
Three years later, Graham Allison, the longtime founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, published a seminal 2015 article describing the high historical likelihood of a geopolitical clash between a reigning power such as the U.S. and a rising international competitor such as China, a confrontation that he described as “The Thucydides Trap.”The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed
Graham Allison • The Atlantic • September 24, 2015 • 3,700 Words
Allison then expanded this same idea into Destined for War, a national 2017 bestseller that attracted almost unprecedented praise from influential American policy-makers and intellectuals as it persuaded our ruling DC foreign policy elites that a global geopolitical clash with China was almost inevitable. Similar concerns were held by former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who had been a career diplomat with decades of deep personal expertise on China, and he expressed these in his 2022 book The Avoidable War, bearing the grimly accurate subtitle “The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China.”
Even earlier, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer had released an updated 2014 edition of his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, adding a long last chapter on the rise of China and the strong likelihood of a clash with America.
In his historical analysis, Mearsheimer explained that the usual geopolitical approach followed by American strategists had been to form a balancing coalition against a rising regional rival. In the case of China, he naturally assumed that this loose alliance would include Russia, India, and Japan, as well as smaller powers such as South Korea and Vietnam. Any rational American leaders would have taken this approach.
But as I explained in an article a couple of years ago, the Neocons running the foreign policy of the Obama Administration were remarkably arrogant rather than rational. The same year that Mearsheimer released the book outlining his China containment strategy, they orchestrated an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, immediately followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and ongoing fighting in the Donbas, all of which permanently poisoned our relations with Moscow. Not long afterward, Mearsheimer gave his prophetic talk on the looming future risks of a NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine, a presentation that has now been viewed some 30 million times on YouTube, perhaps more than any other academic lecture in the history of the Internet.
As I wrote in 2023:
Thus, by the time Allison published his 2017 book, any possibility of an American-Russian alliance against China had evaporated and Russia scarcely featured in his discussion. These trends continued and a year ago Rudd’s book already characterized China and Russia as strategic partners, mentioning that Xi had described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “his best friend” and that the two countries regularly collaborated on a variety of different political, military, and economic issues. But Russia still remained a minor factor in Rudd’s analysis, with its role discussed in just a couple of pages together with scattered references elsewhere in his text.
The outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war completely changed everything, as did the unprecedented wave of resulting Western sanctions targeting Russia and the massive amount of financial and military aid provided to Ukraine, already totaling $120 billion, a sum far larger than the entire annual Russian defense budget. Over the last year, American-led NATO has been fighting a proxy-war against Russia on Russia’s own border, a war that many American political leaders have declared can only end with Russia’s defeat and the death or overthrow of Putin. The Hague in Europe has already issued an arrest-warrant against the Russian president for alleged war-crimes.
Just prior to the beginning of the Ukraine war, Xi had held this 39th personal meeting with Putin, and had declared that China’s partnership with Russia “had no limits.” The subsequent all-out Western assault on Russia has inevitably produced a tight alliance between the two huge countries.
China’s industrial strength is enormous, with its real productive economy already larger than the combined total for America, the European Union, and Japan. But add to that the huge energy supplies and other natural resources of its remarkably complementary Russian neighbor, and the two together probably outweigh the power of America and its allies.
Allison himself fully recognized the momentous importance of these new developments and how they had drastically changed the geopolitical landscape he had assumed in his 2017 bestseller. I quoted portions of the important analysis he presented in his 2023 Foreign Policy article:
An elementary proposition in international relations 101 states: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” By confronting both China and Russia simultaneously, the United States has helped create what former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called an “alliance of the aggrieved.” This has allowed Xi to reverse Washington’s successful “trilateral diplomacy” of the 1970s that widened the gap between China and the United States’ primary enemy, the Soviet Union, in ways that contributed significantly to the U.S. victory in the Cold War. Today, China and Russia are, in Xi’s words, closer than allies.
Since Xi and Putin are not just the current presidents of their two nations but leaders whose tenures effectively have no expiration dates, the United States will have to understand that it is confronting the most consequential undeclared alliance in the world.Did the Neocons Save the World from the Thucydides Trap?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 18, 2023 • 6,400 Words
Thus, over the last decade the irrational hostility and political recklessness of our Neocon foreign policy establishment has driven Russia into China’s arms, producing a new geopolitical alliance probably strong enough to completely frustrate any American efforts to contain China’s rise, thereby disarming the Thucydides Trap.
But in recent months, the far greater recklessness of the Trump Administration has now been doing the same with more and more other major countries, effectively creating a worldwide anti-American alliance.
Once our American foreign policy establishment convinced itself that containing China should be one of its central goals, they sought to draw India, the other Asian giant, into their anti-China coalition, directing a decade’s worth of diplomatic efforts towards that end.
Then a few months ago, Trump unleashed an all-out trade war against China, raising tariff rates against Chinese goods to an astonishing 145%, producing something close to an outright embargo.
India was the lynch-pin of the intended anti-China coalition and Trump was particularly warm to that country and its leader Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Therefore, the Indians naturally expected to become major beneficiaries of Trump’s new tariff policy, hoping that much of the industrial production displaced from China would shift to their own country, just like Apple had done with some of its iPhone factories a couple of years ago. But matters have moved in exactly the opposite direction.
The Chinese gave absolutely no ground to Trump’s harsh economic bullying and instead raised their own retaliatory tariffs on American goods to comparable levels. Moreover, while most of the products that America sold to China were simple commodities that could easily be replaced by numerous other countries, Chinese products often had few other suppliers.
Even more serious was the realization that China possessed a near-monopoly in the processing of rare earths and the creation of magnets made from those materials, with those small industrial components being absolutely crucial for the production of many of our goods, including important military systems. American factories were soon on the verge of shutting down due to the loss of those special Chinese magnets.
The combination of these factors led to a crushing American defeat in Trump’s trade war against China, with our president soon forced to remove the very high tariff rates that he had so recklessly imposed. And perhaps partly as a means of saving face, Trump then decided to instead launch economic attacks against other major countries around the world that he regarded as easier targets.
Brazilian courts were prosecuting former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly plotting a coup in order to remain in office. These charges might or might not be true, but this was obviously an internal Brazilian matter to be decided rightly or wrongly by the Brazilians themselves.
However, since Trump liked Bolsonaro and found his prosecution disagreeable, he immediately imposed a huge 50% tariff against Brazilian goods. This naturally outraged Brazil’s current president and most ordinary Brazilians, who hardly took kindly to such heavy-handed American bullying regarding domestic Brazilian politics. Trump seemingly regarded himself as king of the world, freely using his tariff cudgel to beat those foreign countries that failed to follow his orders.
Even more remarkable was Trump’s use of tariffs to support his failing Russia policy with regard to the Ukraine war. During his presidential campaign, Trump had boasted that once in office he would make peace between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours, but more than eight months later the war continues, with Russia unwavering in its objectives and refusing to surrender to Trump’s demands.
Trump therefore announced that he would put pressure on Russia by seeking to cut off that country’s financially important oil sales around the world. He especially focused on India, threatening to impose enormous tariffs on its products unless it stopped buying Russian oil, utterly bizarre demands that appeared to be issued by the world’s supreme autocrat. While heaping crude insults upon the economy of the world’s most populous country, Trump imposed huge 50% tariffs, tremendously alienating that country’s proudly ultra-nationalistic government.
Thus, as a chart in this week’s Economist shows, India and Brazil now face some of America’s highest tariff rates, while China’s are among the lowest. In recent years, India and Brazil had sometimes wavered in their support of the BRICS group but Trump’s outrageous tariff attacks have completely stiffened their resolve.
The cover story of that same Economist issue also devoted a half-dozen pages to a magazine-length article providing the details of the attempt to overthrow Brazilian democracy.
With American tariffs against Indian products now several times higher than those against China, any hopes that India had of gaining from Trump’s trade policies have completely evaporated, and the Indian leadership regarded Trump’s huge tariffs as a treacherous stab in the back, an unprovoked attack that could not easily be forgiven. According to media reports, Indian Prime Minister Modi has repeatedly refused to take personal calls from our American president, demonstrating the depth of his outrage.
A few days ago the opening paragraphs of a major article in the New York Times summarized the momentous geopolitical consequences resulting from Trump’s economic attack against India:
At the Capitol in January, India’s foreign minister was seated in the front row for President Trump’s inauguration, a sign of the deepening ties that a generation of American presidents have attempted to forge with the world’s most populous nation.
Now, just months later, Mr. Trump is publicly lamenting that India has abandoned him for the embrace of China, Washington’s strategic rival.
“Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning, as he posted a photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The three leaders met in China earlier this week.
“May they have a long and prosperous future together!” he wrote.
It was a rare acknowledgment that Mr. Trump’s attempts at blunt-force diplomacy, not to mention punishing tariffs, were having some unintended consequences. The uneasy partnership to create an alternative to the West’s global leadership that began with China and Russia, then expanded to North Korea and Iran, may now be about to incorporate — at least episodically — India, the world’s largest democracy.How Trump’s Blunt-Force Diplomacy Is Pushing His Rivals Together
Some of President Trump’s pressure tactics appear to have backfired, sending would-be allies into the embrace of China.
Luke Broadwater and David E. Sanger • The New York Times • September 5, 2025 • 1,600 Words
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has spent nearly four decades as a leading international economist. As a consequence of that long and distinguished career, probably few if any other American academics can match the breadth and depth of his longstanding personal ties with top-ranking political leaders from across the world, nor the remarkable candor of his frequent public remarks on policy matters.
In a recent interview, he explained that earlier this year he had cautioned his high-ranking Indian friends that America and the Trump Administration were simply too erratic and irrational to be relied upon in economic matters. Within weeks his warnings had proven correct, with that reversal occurring far more quickly than he had ever thought likely. In numerous discussions, he has described Trump as the great global unifier, someone who has now successfully united nearly the entire world in opposition to our own country and its totally outrageous behavior.
Aside from Japan, South Korea is our most important remaining Asian ally, a major economic and technological power, but late last week our relations may have suffered a severe blow.
For the last several years, our government leaders have pressured the South Koreans to invest billions of dollars establishing new American factories, but on Friday our immigration service staged a huge raid on the Hyundai-LG plant in Georgia, arresting hundreds of its South Korean nationals as illegal immigrants, with their harsh treatment producing waves of public outrage in that country. I find it very difficult to believe that the employees of two of South Korea’s leading industrial corporations or their major subcontractors would have violated our immigration laws in any serious way, and incidents such as this may result in drastic changes in South Korean attitudes towards America.
The best means of assessing the impact of these geopolitical shifts is by examining the economic power of the different countries involved and the CIA World Factbook has now been updated to include the 2024 statistics. This has allowed me to similarly update a comparison table that I have regularly published over the last year or two, providing information on the world’s largest economies.
Although GDPs using nominal exchange rates are often casually quoted, most sensible people prefer to focus upon statistics adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) or “real prices” as much more accurate measures of economic strength. For example, over the last six months the value of the dollar has fallen by over 9%, so America’s nominal GDP has dropped by nearly $3 trillion during that period, but neither our standard of living nor our PPP-adjusted GDP have shown any such huge swing.
More controversially, I also think it is very helpful to follow the suggestion of Jacques Sapir, director of studies at France’s prestigious EHESS institute, and focus on the productive economy, excluding the contribution of the service sector. Obviously, many services are an absolutely legitimate and crucial component of any modern economy, but many other services probably are not, and given the nature of such employment it is relatively easy to manipulate the size of the GDP service sector, especially in the case of non-tradeable services.
Here’s the simplest and most obvious means of seeing this. I think almost all government workers are part of the service economy, and what many of them do probably isn’t particularly useful. Now suppose our government suddenly doubled the salary of all government employees, or even increased their salaries by a factor of 10x. The result would be a very substantial rise in our national and per capita GDP, but obviously our country wouldn’t have become any wealthier since all those individuals would be doing exactly the same jobs as they did before.
Considering this interesting metric provides some surprising economic results. Not only is the size of China’s real productive economy already more than three times larger than that of the U.S., but it is actually larger than the combined total of the entire American-led bloc—the United States, the rest of the Anglosphere, the European Union, and Japan. Moreover, the combined real productive economies of India and Brazil substantially outweighs that of the entire European Union.
Here’s the table listing the world’s largest two dozen economies, including their nominal, real, and real productive figures. All this data is drawn from the CIA World Factbook, which conveniently provides estimates of the real PPP-adjusted GDP for the countries of the world, as well as the most recent figures for the nominal GDPs, the economic sector composition, and the national populations.
| 2024 GDP | 2024 GDP ($Millions) | Per Capita Incomes | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Country | Nominal | Total PPP | Productive PPP | Nominal | PPP | Productive PPP |
| China | 18,744,000 | 33,598,000 | 14,547,934 | 13,237 | 23,727 | 10,274 |
| European Union | 19,423,000 | 24,441,000 | 6,525,747 | 42,989 | 54,095 | 14,443 |
| USA | 29,185,000 | 25,676,000 | 4,673,032 | 85,345 | 75,084 | 13,665 |
| India | 3,913,000 | 14,244,000 | 5,825,796 | 2,777 | 10,108 | 4,134 |
| Japan | 4,026,000 | 5,715,000 | 1,685,925 | 32,678 | 46,387 | 13,684 |
| Germany | 4,660,000 | 5,247,000 | 1,395,702 | 55,398 | 62,376 | 16,592 |
| Russia | 2,174,000 | 6,089,000 | 2,033,726 | 15,438 | 43,239 | 14,442 |
| Indonesia | 1,396,000 | 4,102,000 | 2,128,938 | 4,958 | 14,569 | 7,561 |
| Brazil | 2,179,000 | 4,165,000 | 1,120,385 | 9,902 | 18,927 | 5,091 |
| France | 3,162,000 | 3,732,000 | 705,348 | 46,245 | 54,581 | 10,316 |
| United Kingdom | 3,644,000 | 3,636,000 | 629,028 | 53,229 | 53,112 | 9,188 |
| Mexico | 1,853,000 | 2,883,000 | 1,020,582 | 14,173 | 22,051 | 7,806 |
| Italy | 2,373,000 | 3,133,000 | 742,521 | 38,924 | 51,390 | 12,179 |
| Turkey | 1,323,000 | 3,018,000 | 950,670 | 15,728 | 35,877 | 11,301 |
| South Korea | 1,713,000 | 2,607,000 | 865,524 | 32,890 | 50,056 | 16,618 |
| Spain | 1,723,000 | 2,361,000 | 519,420 | 36,442 | 49,937 | 10,986 |
| Saudi Arabia | 1,238,000 | 2,213,000 | 1,046,749 | 33,877 | 60,557 | 28,644 |
| Canada | 2,241,000 | 2,341,000 | 629,729 | 57,765 | 60,343 | 16,232 |
| Iran | 437,000 | 1,486,000 | 734,084 | 4,944 | 16,812 | 8,305 |
| Australia | 1,752,000 | 1,635,000 | 461,070 | 65,449 | 61,078 | 17,224 |
| Thailand | 526,000 | 1,558,000 | 6 35,664 | 7,523 | 22,282 | 9,091 |
| Egypt | 389,000 | 1,958,000 | 906,554 | 3,497 | 17,600 | 8,149 |
| Taiwan | 611,000 | 1,743,000 | 658,854 | 25,895 | 73,872 | 27,923 |
| Poland | 915,000 | 1,649,000 | 478,210 | 23,615 | 42,559 | 12,342 |
| Nigeria | 188,000 | 1,318,000 | 659,000 | 794 | 5,567 | 2,784 |
| Pakistan | 373,000 | 1,390,000 | 604,650 | 1,478 | 5,508 | 2,396 |
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