Trump's accidental triumph in Beijing

That’s the title of the latest edition of Robert Wright’s NonZero Newsletter on Substack. Rather than summarizing and paraphrasing I’m going to reproduce most, but not all, of it in full below the asterisks. In particular, I’m omitting the very end, which is a series of charts showing bipartisan anxiety for AI. I share that anxiety. The title of one of recent columns at 3 Quarks Daily gives you my attitude: The Paradox of Contemporary AI: Engineering Success and Institutional Failure. The anxiety in Wright’s charts is one reflection of that institutional failure.

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On Thursday the White House issued a social media post that said simply, “American strength back on the world stage.” You might expect such a post to be accompanied by military imagery—maybe an impressive-looking array of soldiers. And this one was. But the soldiers weren’t American. Smartly clad People’s Liberation Army troops, part of the pageantry that had greeted Trump in Beijing, were featured in the opening montage of a video that then showed Trump shaking hands with President Xi Jinping and ended with the two leaders walking side by side on a red carpet.

Apparently the unipolar moment is over. Being one of the world’s two main poles is, these days, the highest geopolitical aspiration of America’s president. “It’s the two great countries,” Trump proudly told Sean Hannity in an interview that aired on Fox News after the US-China summit ended. “I call it the G-2. This is the G-2.”

The US foreign policy establishment was less effusive than Trump about G-2 membership. A Washington Post headline said: “China summit yields Xi’s goal—equal footing with U.S.,” and the subhead added that “the image of peer superpowers during President Trump’s visit displayed a dynamic that analysts say the Chinese have long sought and Americans had resisted.” The analyst quoted by the Post, a Biden administration national security staffer, said that Xi, using “the opulent optics of the visit,” had managed to do something “Chinese leaders have been working toward for decades”—he had made it “clear to the world that China and the United States are the two dominant, equally matched superpowers. There is no going back.”

New York Times reporter David Sanger, the dean of Blob [foreign policy establishment] scribes, also depicted the summit as a kind of comedown for America. Whereas Trump was “conciliatory,” Sanger wrote, Xi was “quietly more confrontational,” projecting a “new level of confidence and authority.” In particular: Xi had, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement, privately warned Trump that “the US must handle the Taiwan issue with utmost caution” if it didn’t want to wind up in a conflict.

Meanwhile, as Xi was drawing red lines, Trump, Sanger noted in a subsequent co-authored piece, was spending his time calling Xi a “great leader” and saying that a garden where the two men strolled contained “the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen.” All of this showed, according to Sanger, “how far he has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China in the wake of his humbling retreat from last year’s trade war. He has thrown aside the adversarial approach of his first years in office, the Biden administration, and the beginning of his own second term.”

Works for me! Then again, I’ve always been a sucker for peaceful coexistence. Besides, the non-zero-sum problems that the US and China need to solve are increasingly urgent, and a pleasant stroll in the garden can be conducive to cooperation. In fact, this week the two nations agreed to start a dialogue on AI safety. For now they’re focusing mainly on ways to keep non-state actors from putting AI to malign uses. That agenda will likely grow as the magnitude of the AI issue becomes more evident and the inherently international nature of many AI threats does, too. But for now it’s enough that, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, “the two AI superpowers are going to start talking.”

I think I’d go even further than Sanger in stressing the magnitude of this moment. Trump has “shifted the foundations” not just of “American policy toward China” but of American foreign policy globally. And at the moment, at least, this shift looks auspicious.

Before elaborating, I should emphasize that I’m not calling Trump a visionary. The new and improved foreign policy that I hope is unfolding will, if it unfolds, be one that Trump has more or less stumbled into—and will be different from the one he was pursuing when he started stumbling. Contingency plays a big role in history, and reckless leaders like Trump are particularly good at illustrating that.

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That’s not the end of Wright’s discussion of the implications of Trump’s accidental triumph. But it’s the main story. I’ll end by quoting Wright’s last two paragraphs.

One thing standing in the way of my dream scenario—a world where the US and China and the world’s other nations cooperate to solve problems they collectively face—is Trump’s aversion to international governance. China under Xi plays a more active role in international institutions than the US under Trump, and Xi talks more about “win-win” outcomes than Trump, who is famously inclined to see life in zero-sum terms.

Still, he emitted fewer zero-sum vibes this week than he often does. Indeed, inherent in the idea of “G-2” is sustained cooperation between the two superpowers. So maybe Trump has more in the way of non-zero-sum impulses than is commonly recognized, and they just need to be nurtured. And maybe it would help if the New York Times and the Washington Post and much of the foreign policy establishment quit giving him negative feedback every time he expresses them.

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BONUS: Check out Wright's recent discussion with Zhengyu Huang, author of the new book Rethinking China.

0:00 Teaser
0:34 Zhengyu’s tech background and new book, Rethinking China
3:00 What kind of threat is China, really?
10:06 How trading with China transformed America
16:51 The stakes of the chip war
22:02 Will tech war lead to real war?
30:33 The US-China escalation spiral and Taiwan
39:13 “Researching while Chinese”: the new Red Scare?
49:46 Heading to Overtime

The hegemon no longer, the USA as one nation among others

I've long thought that the situation of the post-Soviet collapse, with the USA as the dominant hegemon in the world, I've long thought that situation was unstable, a mistake. For one thing, it forces the USA to devote a huge chunk of its national resources to the military-industrial complex, which amounts to burying that wealth in the sand. There are better things to do with those resources, both here and abroad. And it forces other nations into perpetual obsequiousness, which is undignified.

But, how do we get out of that situation? The answer seems to be: Trump. In the process of attempting to enforce America's will on the world, that is, Trump's will, he's forcing other nations to abandon us and stand up for themselves.

Ana Swanson, Rival Nations Seize On Choke Points to Counter Trump, NYTimes, Apr. 2, 2026.

President Trump has unapologetically wielded the power of the United States on the global stage, taking a much more belligerent approach economically and militarily to try to dictate the actions of other countries.

From high tariffs to the war with Iran, Mr. Trump has claimed that this aggressive behavior internationally has only upsides, and that past leaders were fools for refusing to tap into America’s power.

But one clear drawback of the strategy is emerging. While many countries have acceded to the president’s demands, some have found a highly effective new way to fight back. Mr. Trump’s aggression has given them the opportunity to test their control over choke points, threatening the United States and the global economy.

One such choke point is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, which accounts for less than 1 percent of global economic output, has control over the shipping lane that transports a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Its closure since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran at the end of February has blocked shipments of fuel, fertilizer and other goods, sending gas prices sharply higher and spreading anxiety among U.S. farmers and manufacturers.

Another experiment in retaliatory coercion began one year ago on Thursday, when Mr. Trump walked into the Rose Garden and unveiled tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day.” While many governments — even powerful economies like the European Union — complied with U.S. demands, China was a notable exception. Beijing rolled out a licensing system for exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets that has given China unparalleled control over the global manufacturing system.

Whoops! Maybe the sheer complexity of the existing world system is making Trump's hegemonic dreams utterly impossible. It's like the mythical hydra, chop one head off and three more crop up. Are we actually moving toward a really new world order?

There's more at the link.

Will the Iran War change the world like the oil shocks of the 1970s did?

Jeff Sommer, The Oil Shocks of the ’70s Changed the World. Will the Iran War Do the Same? NYTimes, Mar. 28, 2026.

In January 1974, my dad lent me his old gas-guzzling Ford LTD to haul my clothing and books to college in Ithaca, N.Y. A couple of weeks later, when I tried to drive back home to Long Island, I realized that I couldn’t buy enough gas for the 250-mile trip.

The 1973-74 Arab oil embargo was well underway. The price of oil had nearly quadrupled; there were lines at gas stations, and drivers were allowed to queue up only on alternate days. I had picked the wrong day for my trip. No gas for me. So much for freedom of the road.

That was the first of the world’s big oil shocks. By the time of the second one in 1978-79, set off by the Iranian revolution, I was a reporter in New Jersey and it seemed I was constantly interviewing angry motorists stuck in interminable lines. Gas shortages and soaring inflation were just other aspects of life in the United States.

The gas lines ended as the crises ebbed, but it took two recessions, engineered by the formidable Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, to bring inflation under control.

What’s less well understood about that period is that the oil shocks reshaped the world’s financial markets. Money flowed around the globe in new ways — and cemented the status of the dollar as the world’s core currency.

We are experiencing what could end up as the third great oil shock.

Then we get more history and analysis, to end with this:

“Duration is the key question,” he told me. “If this goes on for a long time, it’s a big deal. If the war stopped right now, we might not need to talk about it next year.”

Not every conflict in the Middle East necessarily changes global finance in profound ways. The United States fought two Gulf wars — one that started in the early 1990s, the other a decade later. The first was short. The second one, the U.S.-led war with Iraq, stretched from 2003 to 2011, caused scores of thousands of deaths and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The second war was a big one, but in retrospect, it preserved the status quo in energy markets more than it transformed them.

In every Gulf conflict since the Iranian revolution, U.S. strategists have worried that Iran might one day disrupt the global flow of energy by closing a geographical choke point, the Strait of Hormuz. For the first time, despite the pounding it has received from enormous U.S. and Israeli bombardments, Iran has demonstrated that it can close the strait. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas usually flows through it.

Whether this desperate achievement alters geopolitics substantially may not be known for years.

Trump’s way: America, from leader of the Free World to biggest Thug on the Block

Carlos Lozada, The U.S. Is No Longer the Leader of the Free World, New York Times, March 24, 2026.

We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.

I suspect, I fear, that this is so. If not yet, that’s certainly the direction in which things are headed, and by the time Trump’s term is over, the transition will be complete; the United States will have ceased being the leader of the free world. That may or may not be a good thing, depending of how the rest of the world is. Ideally, I’d like to see a world where there is no “reader of the Free World” because the world doesn’t need one. I’m pretty sure that’s not how the world will be in 2028. Lozada continues:

Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought or strategy, exerting its power because it can. In a matter of months, the Trump administration has captured Venezuela’s president and tossed him into jail in Brooklyn and has pummeled Iran’s theocratic leadership in a war that is ricocheting across the Middle East and upending the global economy; now the president says he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” next. Trump in his second term is like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” settling all the family business.

Nearly two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria, the international affairs columnist, published a best-selling book called “The Post-American World,” which predicted the United States’ relative decline versus other economically ascendant countries, what he called the “rise of the rest.” (Senator Barack Obama was seen carrying the book around during his first presidential campaign, affirming the volume’s elite sway.) The United States would remain militarily and economically pre-eminent, Zakaria argued, but it could take on a new political role, a sort of chairman of the board for the planet, relying on “consultation, cooperation and even compromise.”

Under Trump, the idea of U.S. leadership has indeed been remade — but from authority to domination, from persuasion to bullying, from nurturing alliances to wrecking them.

Later:

This is a historical aberration: a superpower that freely abdicates its leadership role, because it has concluded that leadership is for suckers; one that no longer promotes its values, because it’s decided that those values were fake anyway; one that gives up on the rules and institutions it spent so long building, because it assumes they’re no longer worth the hassle.

If Washington somehow still imagines itself the leader of the free world, that is because it is rethinking who belongs in that world, and because it is defining downward what it means to lead.

The article goes on, and is worth reading (a good deal of history), but I'm going to skip over a lot and come down nearer the end:

There have been plenty of episodes over the past decades that supposedly heralded an end to U.S. primacy. The launch of Sputnik in the late 1950s ushered in early Cold War paranoia that we were falling behind the Soviets. In the 1970s — with Vietnam and Watergate and an oil embargo and stagflation and the hostage crisis in Iran — the country was suffering a “crisis of confidence,” as President Jimmy Carter put it. A decade later, we were told Japan Inc. would overtake us. Then Sept. 11 demolished our sense of physical invulnerability; the Great Recession questioned the premise and the promise of American-style capitalism; and the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 laid bare the fragility of the democratic model we’d long sought to export.

It is possible that the hand-wringing today is just one more Sputnik moment, another instance when pessimists fret that America has lost its way. But it is also possible, as Daniel Drezner, the academic dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, has argued, that this is not just “the latest hymn from the Church of Perpetual Worry,” that this time really is different.

In the past, America’s isolationist, interventionist and multilateralist tendencies checked one another over time, thanks to competing visions of national security embedded throughout the American political system. But as foreign-policy powers became concentrated in the executive and Congress shrugged off its role in world affairs, America grew vulnerable to the rise of an impetuous and unconcerned president. “The same steps that empowered the president to create foreign policy,” Drezner said, “have permitted Trump to destroy what his predecessors spent decades preserving.”

Yada, yada:

Whereas U.S. leaders used to stridently deny that their military interventions abroad were motivated by the desire to secure oil supplies, Trump happily admits it. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” he said after U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro, the president of oil-rich Venezuela. And if war is about seizing resources, so is peace: Countries wishing to become permanent members of Trump’s new Board of Peace must cough up $1 billion each.

If Pax Americana meant fostering an enduring American peace, Lax Americana means America getting a piece of the action. The world’s policeman is on the take.

“The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it,” Kagan warned in January, some 20 years after publishing “Dangerous Nation.” A contemporary equivalent to the multipolar world of the 19th century, he writes, “would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade — redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce and risking global conflict on a devastating scale.” And he wrote that weeks before America and Israel began bombing Iran.

Say what you will about Obama – I thought he was disappointing – America was still leader of the free world when he left office. And he wore his suits well, even the tan one. Trump? His suits, it’s always the same cut, may be expensive; but they’re baggy. And he’s making America over in his own image, toughest thug on the block.

Trump is using Latin America as target practice. This is no way to conduct foreign policy.

Greg Grandin, Trump Picked the Right Stage to Act Out His Imperial Ambitions, NYTimes, Jan 19, 2026.

The article opens:

President Trump has become increasingly entangled in Latin American politics. Less than a year into his second term, he has seized the president of Venezuela, imposed sanctions on Cuba and Nicaragua and threatened Mexico with airstrikes and Colombia with a coup. He has imposed crushing tariffs on Brazilian exports, sent deportees to El Salvador’s infamous supermax prison, pressured Panama to limit China’s influence and meddled in the internal politics of Honduras and Guatemala.

Mr. Trump’s turn toward Latin America isn’t surprising, for often during times of global turbulence, like the moment we now find ourselves in, presidents seek safe harbor there. Latin America was where U.S. leaders have projected power beyond their borders not only with brute force, including all those coups Washington orchestrated, but with moral suasion as well.

For presidents of both parties, Latin America has served as a wellspring of perpetual reinvention and the source of much of their ideological creativity. This is especially true for what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls “reconstructive” presidents, leaders who work to build new political orders and restore political legitimacy after periods of acute crisis.

Grandin then goes on to discuss Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as reconstructive presidents. Then...

Here we are again: a nation turning away from the rest of the world toward Latin America.

Mr. Trump, too, has a story to tell about Latin America, and it isn’t pretty. He likes to play the role of the business cutthroat — a corporate pirate devoid of any ideology, save greed. “We are going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” he said shortly after U.S. troops captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

Such unadorned venality and disdain for diplomatic politesse cramp Trumpism, preventing it from forming the basis of a majoritarian coalition. Roosevelt and Reagan differed sharply in politics, yet both grasped how depicting Latin America as aligned with the United States could convert partisan alliances into durable governing majorities. Turning foreign policy into a mirror of national identity, they renovated Americanism as humane and universal.

Mr. Trump, in contrast, seems unconcerned with transforming dominance into hegemony or with broadening his base. He seeks only raw power in which the United States dominates the hemisphere because it can dominate the hemisphere — where it kills speedboat captains because it can kill speedboat captains. He is using the region to send a message to the nations of the world: Don’t “cross us,” as JD Vance recently said, referring to the Venezuela strike. [...]

Whereas Roosevelt held up the Western Hemisphere as a model of international cooperation for the world to emulate, the Trump administration uses Latin America as target practice. Whereas Reagan’s sunny capitalist Pan-Americanism silenced anti-migrant extremists in his coalition, Mr. Trump’s tribalism stokes them, with a growing number of young self-identified conservatives openly embracing white supremacy, antisemitism and Nazism.

Mr. Trump’s hemispheric turn leads not out of the crisis but deeper into it.

The failure of zero-sum economics, with a note about cognitive ranks

Noah Smith, Zero-sum economics keeps failing, Noahpinion, Jan. 18. 2026.

The biblical story called the Judgement of Solomon isn’t just meant to illustrate what a wise king Solomon was. It’s also supposed to demonstrate a central principle of economics, and of society in general — that the world isn’t a fixed lump of resources waiting to be divided up. In the story, two women are arguing over which one is the real mother of a baby; Solomon proposes to cut the baby in half and give half to each woman, causing the baby’s actual mother to be instantly horrified. The lesson is that a baby is much more than the sum of two halves of a baby.

I feel like modern American leaders and intellectuals often forget this important lesson. There are plenty of thinkers and leaders on both the right and the left who think of society’s main task as slicing up and handing out a lump of “resources”. And yet when they make economic policy based on this idea, it keeps failing.

A prime example is Trump’s immigration crackdown. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and his people swore up and down that kicking millions of illegal immigrants out of the country would result in a bonanza of jobs for the native-born. They probably still believe this. But people are now flowing out of the United States on net, and native-born employment rates haven’t risen:

Smith then presents 2 graphs and 2 tables that make that argument.

If the Trump administration had bothered to ask economists, they would have replied that the overwhelming majority of the empirical evidence indicates that immigration — even low-skilled immigration — doesn’t take jobs from Americans. Immigrants also produce goods and services, growing the pie and creating labor demand that helps provide work for native-born workers. But the only economist they seem to have bothered to ask was George Borjas, a man who has spent his life unsuccessfully trying to prove that immigration is bad for America. The new jobs numbers illustrate the failures of Borjas’ zero-sum economics.

Smith then presents a chart making the same point about tariffs.

Zero-sum thinking failed on immigration because the U.S. economy isn’t a lump of labor. It failed on tariffs because the global economy is not a lump of manufacturing.

Now it’s also probably going to fail Trump on geopolitics as well. Trump recently overthrew the leader of Venezuela, and he has made it clear in speeches and statements that one of the reasons he did this was to seize control of the country’s oil.

And now Greenland:

Or consider Trump’s desire to conquer Greenland. Simply adding a large chunk of land to America’s map would not mean riches for the U.S. economy. The U.S. already has access to Greenland’s natural resources and shipping routes; conquering the island would simply earn the enmity of both the Europeans and of Greenland’s people themselves. The U.S.’s previous relationship with Greenland was positive-sum and cooperative; switching to zero-sum piracy would not be an improvement.

Smith then goes on to criticize progressives and leftists for zero sum thinking as well.

I note that the notions of zero sum and non-zero sum interactions are from game theory, which is post WWII. I’m pretty sure it’s rank 4 thinking, to invoke the theory of cultural or cognitive ranks that David Hays and I have developed. I wonder how far such thinking is distributed in the population. The popular notion of win-win thinking derives from game theory; it’s zero sum games without the technical analysis. One can “get” the idea of win-win situations without understanding the game theory analytical account. But I suspect that such understanding is purely local to the situation and doesn’t lend itself to more general reflection about human affairs.

Anyhow, I recommend reading Smith’s whole column

Understanding the U.S. Strike on Venezuela: Heather Cox Richardson

The Trump administration takes aim at the rules based international order.

Competition with China over AI [American leaders are trapped in projective fantasy]

YouTube:

Trump’s Mammoth Arabian AI Deals | Robert Wright & Paul Triolo

0:00 How significant are the Middle East data center deals?
12:03 Why did AI safety hawks quit talking about international cooperation?
18:38 Why build data centers in the Middle East?
27:20 Microchips and security risks
30:46 The unexamined assumptions of Sinophobia
42:00 What ever happened to peace, love, and understanding?
47:46 AI Czar David Sacks takes on his critics
51:11 Heading to Overtime

The whole discussion is worthwhile, but I want to ook at the material on our relationship with China, starting at roughly 30:46. I've taken the AI-generated transcript, put it below the asterisks, and put in some breaks dividing it roughly into segments spoken by our two interlocutors.

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R. Wright: there's such a consensus on on the China issue broadly that you don't hear people's arguments challenged very oft they're not forced to get back to first principles and so that's why

P. Triolo: they change but the principles change over time yeah no I

R. Wright: I you've written a lot about this how the goalpost change and particularly for industry and then yes a lot of these the justifications for some of these things you know don't aren't really very well examined um I would argue that the AI one is is falls falls into that because the the idea for example that that um we're going to get to some inflection point and and uh and and and you know China would would you would would could get ahead and develop advanced AI and then use it against us you know again I I I'm a little skeptical that that sort of um dynamic is would would necessarily play out in the way some of the the the the some some people think think it would and and interestingly um you know the the the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei has if you haven't read and his his his um

R. Wright: I have

P. Triolo: essay um his

R. Wright: machines of loving grace which has this section on why we have to squash China you know well

P. Triolo: yeah he doesn't he's careful not to say China but it's authoritarian every time he says authoritarian

R. Wright: he refers to an authoritarian block i think we know who he's thinking of as a leader of that and he says he says we have to uh secure and maintain dominance including at one point he used the phrase military dominance I think until they like abandon their anti-democratic ways or something and he doesn't specify what that would mean

P. Triolo: for me I just read it reread it today and his basic argument is we need to dominate so we can show China that we're dominant and then they will change they will change their system which again I I mean I'm sorry but it seems to me a little bit naive um to to think that this is the case and then of course you know then there's the the whole Taiwan issue too which is which is at play here so but but again that's that's the kind of and and if you read that essay you're you know any kind of geopolitical you know great power competition strategist is going to read that and go okay wow you know somebody's in for a rude awakening here if they think that that China is going to you know is going to sort oh go you know bow down to US AI AI dominance and say something you know and and change the system i mean again I'm I just I don't see how we get to that situation

R. Wright: yeah well I think I I think part of his stance may be defensive he's worried he wants to make sure that they can't dominate us with AI and again people really trace out what they're afraid of

P. Triolo: why are they dominating us with 5G right

R. Wright: i mean well I mean this would be different AI is going to be a more important technology than 5G I'd say anyway just sketching out their fear I think i mean one of the unex one of the if I just one of the unexamined assumptions I think is that China would like to convert all other nations to its form of government or something that

P. Triolo: there's no evidence of that

R. Wright: i I know there there isn't but I really think that's behind a lot of this and so I think from from Daario's point of view it's like well okay even if they never bow you know buckle and whatever he wants them to do uh by way of uh paying their respects to democracy even if they never do that at least they won't come uh you know turn us into their slaves which I think is is what he fears again I agree with you there's no evidence that that's their goal but I think that's

P. Triolo: and there's no evidence that that that a Chinese government that that realized that one of its companies had some advantage in the AI space would sort of immediately use that to sort of you know try to blackmail the US to become communist i mean that that's essentially what what um what the US side is asserting here right i mean so anyway I'm I'm just skeptical that that we thought through what it means to get to to that everybody knows that we're at the state where one side is very dominant and then what the the political leadership of either country would do would do knowing they have this capability because most people talk about that as being temporary too it would be so many months then the Chinese would catch up and so the the the debate around that though there's there is no there isn't a whole lot of debate around that it's sort of in certain circles within the US government and think tanks that's just sort of accepted as yes we have to stop China because if they get their first their version of AI whatever or their their decision to use AI will be bad and therefore you know we can't take that chance so that that's sort of what's driving a lot of this again I I really think and and I agree with your your view here that that if that's your if I'm characterizing you correctly is you know that's there's a lot of um there's sort of a lot of unknowns there and a lot of um what I would call sort of almost cavalier treatment of how governments serious governments and serious lead political leadership would deal with a situation like this right i mean that this is not trivial there's a very good if you haven't seen it also this this website called AI 2027 which um is a very and interesting read but it plays out this scenario up to 2027 where essentially you get down to two companies one on each side supported by their governments that are pursuing you know that and trying to get to that to a AGI and again I think there the portrayal there of of of the how the governments might react to that is is it's well done i mean it's a very good attempt at this but it really is sort of not again not necessarily well thought out in terms of okay is that really what would happen um so we're sort of in this weird world where we don't really know how a AGI will manifest and how we'll know this but we're making assumptions about how governments you know who recognize that we're there would react and how they would use that a certain capability which we don't even you know we haven't really defined very carefully so that that's one of my sort of quibbles with or you know major concerns with that because in the meantime you know there's all sorts of risks that we're entailing like we're not going to have collaboration with the US and China and then I've argued as you know um in many cases in many places that you know if China believes that the US is nearing this and they're and they're basing it the hardware bases in Taiwan you know China I think it's again naive to think that China is not going to take action on this you know sooner rather than later force them to act on this

R. Wright: no this is uh you were the first person I found as you may recall who had thought about this seriously uh a fact that if you you know if you take the factories in Taiwan and cut off the flow of advanced AI chips to China but keep the flow going to the west that just alters China's incentive structure in terms of of whether to invade Taiwan i'm not saying it would be the only reason to invade but it's clear how it plays out on the cost benefit side and and also

P. Triolo: also if you listen again let's listen to go back to the Dario Amodei's um essay right so in there he says that he thinks his best guess or his guess is that the current strategy of of denial and export controls and all that is the best strategy um to ensure that that the west or you know dem democracies get AI first but then his he he's pretty clear there that the goal of that is so that they can they can basically use that capability to blackmail China into you know dropping its dropping the communist party you know becoming a democracy so again if chi if you're China and Chinese government and you see that you know here's a here's the CEO of a leading US company saying this you know what are you going to make right i mean it's a pretty big deal and I don't think people really appreciate the the risks that you rightly point out and I pointed out that you know I mean if you're if you're sitting back watching this how do you your calculus on something like Taiwan and its critical role and central role in in the global supply chain you know you're going to it's going to have an impact right you're not going to just just blow it off and and Ben Ben Buchanan in the white the former White House czar in that interview with Ezra Klein seem to seem to believe that oh well China understands the what the export controls are about and they're not going to really they don't you know we should still be able to talk to them about safety and other things and I'm like again I think that there's there's a lot of um sort of misjudgment of China and the Chinese system and how it works and you know what what what's going on here right so I'm a little concerned that that we're um you know again we're sort of sleepwalking at the conflict um based on these these ideas that haven't been very very uh closely examined or well thought out um and the collateral damage you know could be considerable and just one other one other quick item I just ripped a piece on this but you know there's the rare earth too right like in the next couple weeks we might see major companies in the US have to shut down production because the Chinese cut off rare earth because of the export controls right so further collateral damage um of the type that I've been talking about for some time on this So anyway so there's there's a huge sort of cost side to this the benefits are at some future point when we may get to AGI and then we may have some lead over China and then we may you know do something with it right so it but that's the problem is that there's these very different um sort of costs and benefits that are out there and um and then there opportunity costs right because for example we we won't likely collaborate with China or China will not see fit to collaborate with us on AI safety um and so then we're going to be not only in a race but we're going to you know we're not going to probably know ultimately what what what China is doing in the space either just as at some point probably US companies like OpenAI and Antropic will not you know will not be releasing their latest they'll kind of go quiet because they're getting close to something so anyway so it sets up a very dangerous dynamic in my view the whole thing Yeah sets up a very dangerous dynamic that we're not quite in yet but we're sort of in the middle we're like in the first inning of a nine inning game and by the time we get to the seventh inning of this game you know people are going to be running for the exit

R. Wright: and just to drive home something people may not realize in terms of danger uh so all of the most advanced AI chips that Open AI uses and so on they're made in only one place Taiwan there isn't a second factory where Nvidia makes these chips okay and Taiwan is you may have noticed is very close to China china considers it part of Taiwan and in fact the US doesn't even disagree we don't recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation we have a one China policy which means that yeah in some sense they're part of the same polity we just want them to work it out uh peacefully and you know it had been the case that the the fact that these factories are sending these great chips to China was a deterrent to invade because the factories might get blown up and obviously you care a hell of a lot less that they might get blown up if you're not getting the the best chips

Return to the source? Trump makes AI deals with the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia

Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson, Outsourcer in Chief: Is Trump Trading Away America’s Tech Future?, NYTimes, May 16, 2025.

Over the course of a three-day trip to the Middle East, President Trump and his emissaries from Silicon Valley have transformed the Persian Gulf from an artificial-intelligence neophyte into an A.I. power broker.

They have reached an enormous deal with the United Arab Emirates to deliver hundreds of thousands of today’s most advanced chips from Nvidia annually to build one of the world’s largest data center hubs, three people familiar with the talks said. The shipments would begin this year, with the vast majority of the chips going to U.S. cloud service providers and about 100,000 of them to G42, an Emirati A.I. firm.

The administration revealed the agreement on Thursday in an announcement unveiling a new A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi supported by 5 gigawatts of electrical power. It would be the largest such project outside the United States and help U.S. companies serve customers in Africa, Europe and Asia, the administration said. The details about the chips weren’t disclosed, and it’s not clear if they could still be subject to change.

As Mr. Trump traversed the region in recent days, the United States also struck multibillion-dollar agreements to sell advanced chips from Nvidia and AMD to Saudi Arabia. The United States and Saudi Arabia are also still in discussions on a larger contract for A.I. technology, five people familiar with the negotiations said.

There's more at the link.

And remember, mathematics from the Far East made its way to Europe via the Arab world:

The algorithms of arithmetic were collected by Abu Ja'far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizm around 825 AD in his treatise Kitab al jabr w'al-muqabala (Penrose 1989). They received an effective European exposition in Leonardo Fibonacci's 1202 work, Algebra et almuchabala (Ball 1908). It is easy enough to see that algorithms were important in the eventual emergence of science, with all the calculations so required. But they are important on another score. For algorithms are the first purely informatic procedures which had been fully codified. Writing focused attention on language, but it never fully revealed the processes of language (we’re still working on that). A thinker contemplating an algorithm can see the complete computational process, fully revealed.

The word “algorithm” is derived from the name “al-Khowarizm” and “algebra” from “al jabr.”

In what way, if at all, is Elon Musk responsible for "killing children"?

Neil Vigdor, Bill Gates Accuses Elon Musk of ‘Killing Children’ by Cutting Foreign Aid, NYTimes, May 8, 2025.

In his sharpest rebuke of the world’s richest man, a distinction he once held, Bill Gates accused Elon Musk at least twice in the past week of “killing” children in the world’s poorest countries by cutting foreign aid under the Trump administration.

Mr. Gates, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, assailed Mr. Musk for the actions he has taken as the head of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency during interviews with The New York Times Magazine and The Financial Times.

He said that Mr. Musk bore responsibility for gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development, a decision that Mr. Gates argued had undermined decades of progress fighting diseases such as measles, H.I.V. and polio.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Times Magazine last week, Mr. Gates said that Mr. Musk had put the U.S.A.I.D. in “the wood chipper,” a direct reference to remarks made in February by Mr. Musk on social media gloating about cuts to the agency.

Again:

Mr. Gates used more scathing language in an interview published on Thursday by The Financial Times.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he said.

The Rise of the Woke Right | Glenn Loury & Daniel Bessner

0:00 Intro
1:10 Glenn meets the young Marx
2:32 The new wokeness of the political right
8:30 What is the democratic counterpart of foreign policy and national security run by experts?
17:04 Russia’s motivations: Fear of NATO or imperial ambitions
21:41 Danny: Zelenskyy made a huge misstep in the Oval Office
26:12 Does China have global security ambitions?
35:09 Ending the Middle East’s post-Ottoman redefinition
39:42 Danny: It’s gotta be rough to be Peter Beinart
43:46 Why we don’t need Hitler to explain Trump’s authoritarianism
56:29 Danny: We’ve been in the midst of a constitutional crisis since the 1940s 57:58 Can the nuclear taboo hold?

Glenn Loury (Brown University, Self-Censorship) and Daniel Bessner (University of Washington, American Prestige, Democracy in Exile). Recorded April 19, 2025.

Foreign Policy: Among other things, the administration proposes that the United States abandon Africa

Edward Wong, Trump Administration Draft Order Calls for Drastic Overhaul of State Department, NYTimes, April 20, 2025.

A draft White House executive order proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department, including eliminating almost all of its Africa operations and shutting down embassies and consulates across the continent.

The draft also calls for cutting offices at State Department headquarters that address climate change and refugee issues, as well as democracy and human rights concerns.

The purpose of the executive order, which could be signed by President Trump this week, is to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the State Department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse,” according to a copy of the 16-page draft order obtained by The New York Times. The department is supposed to make the changes by Oct. 1.

Some provisions:

The draft executive order calls for ending the foreign service exam for aspiring diplomats, and it lays out new criteria for hiring, including “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision.”

The draft says the department must greatly expand its use of artificial intelligence to help draft documents, and to undertake “policy development and review” and “operational planning.”

Without knowing the nature of that exam, I have no idea whether or not it's a useful tool. As for “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision,” I can see the logic of that, though I've got my doubts about Trump's foreign policy vision. In any event, he's so mercurial that that vision could change between the time a job is applied for and a new employee is on-boarded.

The draft says the department must greatly expand its use of artificial intelligence to help draft documents, and to undertake “policy development and review” and “operational planning.”

Well, OK, given how much I make use of AI in my own work, I can't reasonably object to this. But still, this does give me pause. If I mess up with AI in my own work, the consequences are relatively minor. Sure, I'll make so bad arguments, but no one will die. Peoples' welfare and their very lives are at stake in foreign policy. I have little faith in the ability of Silicon Valley hypemasters to supply competent advice and counsel on this.

One of the most drastic proposed changes would be eliminating the bureau of African affairs, which oversees policy in sub-Saharan Africa. It would be replaced by a much smaller special envoy office for African affairs that would report to the White House National Security Council. The office would focus on a handful of issues, including “coordinated counterterrorism operations” and “strategic extraction and trade of critical natural resources.”

The draft also said all “nonessential” embassies and consulates in sub-Saharan Africa would be closed by Oct. 1. Diplomats would be sent to Africa on “targeted, mission-driven deployments,” the document said.

This is a big mistake. If anything, the African mission should be expanded. Otherwise, we're pushing Africa toward China. You might want to consider the various posts I've gathered under the rubric, Kisangani 2150.

There's more in the article, but that's enough.

The Zelinsky Meeting: What DID happen, anyhow?

Trump vs. Zelensky: The Morning After | Robert Wright & Andrew Day

0:00 Andrew’s new gig (and gifts)
3:15 Play-by-play of the Oval Office blowup
9:06 Zelensky’s and Trump’s obsessions
16:32 What are Russia’s red lines?
26:13 Guaranteeing Ukraine’s (and Europe’s) security
33:26 Heading to Overtime

Discussed in Overtime:

Is Trump trying to oust Zelensky?
How Trump and Zelensky can reconcile
Riding the Trump roller coaster
Can Europe keep Europe secure?
Andrew airs his anti-boomer grievances

A drop in zero-sum thinking, America and beyond

Damien Cave, Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out? NYTimes, March 1, 2025. The lede: “Zero-sum thinking has spread like a mind virus, from geopolitics to pop culture.” Zero-sum thinking: “...the belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another.”

Later:

But nowhere is the rise of our zero-sum era more pronounced than on the world stage, where President Trump has been demolishing decades of collaborative foreign policy with threats of protectionist tariffs and demands for Greenland, Gaza, the Panama Canal and mineral rights in Ukraine. Since taking office, he has often channeled the age he most admires — the imperial 19th century.

And in his own past, zero-sum thinking was deeply ingrained. His biographers tell us he learned from his father that you were either a winner or loser in life, and that there was nothing worse than being a sucker. In Trumpworld, it’s kill or be killed; he who is not a hammer must be an anvil.

Mr. Trump may not be alone in this. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China have also displayed a zero-sum view of a world in which bigger powers get to do what they want while weaker ones suffer. All three leaders, no matter what they say, often behave as if power and prosperity were in short supply, leading inexorably to competition and confrontation..

Until recently, the international order largely was built on a different idea — that interdependence and rules boost opportunities for all. It was aspirational, producing fourfold economic growth since the 1980s, and even nuclear disarmament treaties from superpowers. It was also filled with gassy promises — from places like Davos or the G20 — that rarely improved day-to-day lives.

Deep history:

Zero-sum thinking probably seemed to make a lot of sense for our evolutionary ancestors, who were forced to compete for food to survive. But the mind-set has lingered and researchers have become more interested in mapping its impact.

The most recent work in the social sciences builds on the findings of George M. Foster, an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley. He did his field work in Mexico’s rural communities where he was the first researcher to show that some societies hold “an image of limited good.”

In 1965, he wrote that the people he studied in the hills of Michoacán view their entire universe “as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply.”

From the recent past:

The last time zero-sum thinking guided the world, Europe’s colonial powers of the 16th to 19th centuries saw wealth as finite, measured in gold, silver and land. Gains for one translated to losses for another and empires levied high tariffs to protect themselves from competitors.

Mr. Trump has romanticized the era’s tail end. “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” he told reporters last month. “That’s when we were a tariff country.”

In fact, the United States is far richer now in household income and economic output. But of greater concern may be Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the historical context. Economists say the mercantilism and great-power rivalries of that imperial age hindered wealth creation, advanced inequality and often led to the most complete zero-sum game of all: war.

Possible causes of zero-sum thinking:

Economic inequality fosters such a belief about success. But zero-sum Americans may not really be squabbling over taxes, college, jobs or wealth.

Jer Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who oversees extensive surveys of primal world beliefs, told me the current backlash may be rooted in a zero-sum conviction about something deeper: importance.

Many Americans seem to fear that if some other group matters more, they matter less. “In 21st-century America, the more common, driving fear is not food or resource scarcity, but not enough meaning,” Dr. Clifton said. “We are a people desperate to matter.”

On the bright side, “studies have found that people can be taught to see situations as nonzero sum with deliberation and guidance.”

There's more at the link.

Back in 1999 Robert Wright published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which covers the evolution of human society from human origins to the present. He now has a substack of that title, Nonzero. I discuss Wright’s ideas in a number blog posts, and Nonzero specifically in: Cultural Evolution and Human Progress, from 2010, and A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists [#DH digital humanities], from 2019.

* * * * *

Bonus, from the article: “Mr. Smithson said he often told students in his classes to see him as their opponent so they would collaborate with one another, not compete.”

Fareed Zakaria on Trump's destruction of American foreign policy

Ezra Klein, The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy, NYTimes, March 1, 2025. Klein interviews Fareed Zakaria. Here's Klein's statement of Trump's foreign policy:

Let me try to reflect what Trump’s people tell me. There is this, as people call it, rules-based international order. And the thing that people like Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan and Fareed Zakaria say is that America benefits from that order — and benefits from being part of that order.

There has long been a critique from the left that America, in fact, dominates that order and doesn’t play by its rules. We break international law. We do the things we want to do and then use those rules on others when we don’t like what they’re doing.

But the critique from Trump is that’s not true: Of every country, America, as the strongest, is harmed the most by these restraints, rules and laws. Because we have so much leverage we could be using. We could slap tariffs on anybody for any reason and get them to do what we want. We have the strongest military of all the militaries. Everybody wants to be on our side, and everybody fears being on our bad side.

And what Trump is doing is systematically searching out the strength America has — the ways we can wield our weight and leverage. He’s untying our hands from behind our back.

Zakaria's response:

There is a certain truth to that. The United States does have enormous power. And by the way, they’re even right about the fact that the United States is more open to, for example, the world’s goods and services than the world is to ours. The United States has long practiced a kind of asymmetrical free trade.

After World War II, we decided we would open up our markets to Europe and East Asia, to Japan and South Korea. And the reason we did that was we were trying to build an international system where everyone benefited, where there really wasn’t that feeling of a beggar-thy-neighbor, zero-sum game, where everyone went into a competitive spiral, which then ended up in nationalism and war.

We were trying to build something different. And we thought: We can be a little generous here. Let’s let everyone grow, and we’ll do fine in the process.

And of course, the data is overwhelming. Yes, Europe, Japan, South Korea and places like that grew. But the United States absolutely dominated the world. Because it’s a classic positive-sum game. We created a much larger global economy — much larger trading system, huge capital flows — and we were at the center of it.

The dollar was the reserve currency of the world, which alone gives us incredible advantages. We’re the only country that doesn’t have to worry that much about debt and deficits, because we know that, at the end of the day, the dollar is the reserve currency.

And my feeling is, if you take that system and say: OK, we’re going to look at each bilateral relationship and see if we can squeeze this country for a slightly better deal, you probably will get a better deal. But two things will happen: The first thing is you will end up fracturing your alliances. Because the people with whom you have the most leverage are your allies. [...]

So the result of the Trump doctrine in action has been a war on America’s allies. But the second more important part is: Yes, you’ll gain a little bit here and there by getting slightly better tariff deals. [...] And what you will do, by squeezing each of these individual countries, humiliating them, forcing them to accept renegotiation of terms, is that you lose the relationships that you had built over eight decades, that created this extraordinary anchor of stability in the world, which was the Western alliance. And the gains are not that great.

There's much more at the link. 

Trump says we wants peace, but he's moving toward a world in which war is more likely.

Has America's position in the world changed forever so that the country's word will never again be trusted?

From the Bulwark:

Eric and Eliot bemoan the shameful meltdown in the Oval Office between VP Vance, President Trump and President Zelensky. They discuss Vance’s ambush and whether he executed it alone or in concert with Trump and note that those who are blaming Zelensky for rising to the bait are objectively pro-Putin. They discuss Vance’s dark political views and they consider what Europeans can and should do. They also discuss Trump’s delegation of responsibility to others and his “Trump Gaza” AI generated video. Eric asks only partially tongue in cheek what the odds are on Trump declaring himself a god by the end of the term.

Near the late middle of this podcast Eliot Cohen asks (c. 22:50): Can America ever recover from (what appears to be) the Trump foreign policy. Will America’s word ever be trusted again? Cohen goes on to remark (23:15) that many people around the world are remarking, in effect, “actually we’ve known that for some time, Thank you very much. And they have some reason to say those things.” But Cohen does think (23:30) “this is qualitatively different. [...] Something’s broken, and this is not one you can put back together again.”

Perhaps we’re seeing the conversion of shared knowledge to common knowledge.

Ambush in the Oval Office, Zelinsky’s out, Putin’s in

Heather Cox Richardson, February 28, 2025, Letters from an American, March 1, 2025.

Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office—his attendance at such an event was unusual—in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.

In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.

Zelensky maintained his composure and did not rise to the bait, but he did not accept their pro-Russian version of the war. He insisted that it was in fact Russia that invaded Ukraine and is still bombing and killing on a daily basis. His refusal to sit silent and submit meekly to their attack seemed to infuriate them.

Trump appeared to become unhinged when Zelensky suggested that the U.S. would in the future feel problems, apparently alluding to the new U.S. relationship with Russia. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that,” Trump erupted. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”

Things went downhill from there. After Zelensky had left the room and Trump ranted at a reporter, the meeting ended:

After unloading on the reporter, Trump abruptly ended today’s meeting, saying it was “going to be great television.” Shortly afterward, he asked Zelensky and his team to leave the White House.

This afternoon, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) posted: “Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day—when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”

I have no idea where this is leading, nor does anyone else. What does Trump want? Does he even know?

Does he want to divide the world into three sectors: Trump and his America, Putin and his Russia, and Xi and his China? But that won’t work if Trump doesn’t give up American hegemony. I can’t see him doing that.

I think moving beyond hegemony would be a good idea. Hegemony is expensive, exhausting, and in the end it doesn’t work very well, as America’s wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan made abundantly clear. But Trump lives in a zero-sum, us-against-them, world. He has no choice but to preserve, maintain, and strengthen American hegemony. That’s why he wants Greenland, for example. He doesn’t see it as a hedge against Paraguay, Angola, Sri Lanka, or the Maldives. It’s a buffer against Russian, Putin’s Russia.

This makes no sense.

BTW, there's more at the link.

Trump proposes to make Gaza “the Riviera of the Middle East!”

I kid you not. No, really, the Riviera of the Middle East. Writing in today’s New York Times, Peter Baker opens with:

President Trump basked as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised his “willingness to think outside the box.” But when it came to Gaza, Mr. Trump’s thinking on Tuesday was so far outside the box that it was not clear he even knew there was a box.

Mr. Trump’s announcement that he intends to seize control of Gaza, displace the Palestinian population and turn the coastal enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” was the kind of thing he might have said to get a rise on “The Howard Stern Show” a decade or two ago. Provocative, intriguing, outlandish, outrageous — and not at all presidential.

The idea built on Trump during the day:

Indeed, it seemed to be an idea that grew by the hour as the day went on. In the morning, before Mr. Netanyahu arrived at the White House to meet with Mr. Trump, aides to the president told reporters that it would take 15 years or more to rebuild Gaza after the destructive war between Israel and Hamas and that it would require working with partners in the region to find Palestinians a place to live temporarily.

By the afternoon, as he signed some executive orders, Mr. Trump told reporters that Palestinians would have “no alternative” but to move out of Gaza because it was just “a demolition site.” A little later, he welcomed Mr. Netanyahu to the Oval Office and went even further, saying he wanted “all of them” to leave and that Gazans should “be thrilled” to live someplace better that he expected Egypt and Jordan to provide.

Then at a formal news conference with Mr. Netanyahu in the East Room on Tuesday evening, he took it the final step, declaring not just that Palestinians should leave but that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip” and rebuild it into a prosperous economic destination.

This was not a temporary takeover, but “a long-term ownership position” and he made clear that he had no intention of turning Gaza back over to the Palestinians but would make it a place “not for a specific group of people but for everybody.”

What that meant exactly, he did not say. Nor did he say how this would be accomplished. Even he seemed to grasp how wild the whole thing sounded. “I don’t mean to be cute, I don’t mean to be a wise guy,” he said at one point. “But the Riviera of the Middle East!”

As you might imagine, the idea was not greeted with universal joy and hosannas:

Others saw nothing cute or wise about what amounted to “ethnic cleansing by another name,” as Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, put it.

“The notion that the United States is going to take over Gaza, including with the deployment of U.S. troops, isn’t just extreme, it’s completely detached from reality,” said Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “In what world is this happening?”

Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, said Mr. Trump’s comments were “truly bizarre and incoherent,” raising more questions than answers.

But, just for the sheer hell of it, let’s set those reservations aside, I mean, the idea of forcibly relocating the Palestinians, it’s, it’s,...it’s batshit bonkers. But let’s suspend reality for a minute or three.

World Island?

What could we do with a Riviera of the Middle East? Consider the idea my friend Zeal proposed, and pursued for a number of years (and I helped him):

He proposed to transform Governors Island, a 172 acre former Coast Guard base in New York Harbor, into World Island, which he described as a “permanent world’s fair for a world that’s permanently fair”. Think of it as a combination of the best features of the United Nations, Disney World, a kid’s rumpus room, the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Japanese exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It would cost $25 billion or so and be planted with orchids. Why orchids? Beauty aside, they’re an early warning system for climate change, when the orchids go, we’re not going to be far behind.

I met Zeal in his office a couple days later and he explained.

Governors Island had been a Coast Guard base until the end of the century. Senator Moynihan convinced the government to was sell the island to GIPEC (Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation), jointly owned by New York State and New York City. GIPEC took possession for a couple dollars rather than a price at market rate. Can you imagine the market rate for a 172 acres of developable property in New York Harbor?

Gaza is considerably larger than 172 acres, but then what Zeal envisioned for World Island was a bit much for that site. But in Gaza, in Gaza there’d be room. And, when you consider the thousands of years of conflict that has bedeviled that land, it would be the perfect place to realize Zeal’s vision. Here’s the executive summary of the proposal we submitted to GIPEC: Governors Island as a World Resource Center. Here’s slide presentation that you can scroll through.

World Island, a Global Commons by Bill Benzon

Trump's cultural policy, a speculative proposal 

What will actually happen? Who knows? I certainly don’t, and neither does Donald Trump. But you should read Tyler Cowen’s recent post: Trumpian policy as cultural policy. It’s quite provocative. Here’s a bit:

The Trump administration has issued a blizzard of Executive Orders, and set many other potential changes in the works. They might rename Dulles Airport (can you guess to what?). A bill has been introduced to add you-know-who to Mount Rushmore. There is DOGE, and the ongoing attempt to reshape federal employment. [...]

Imagine you hold a vision where the (partial) decline of America largely is about culture. After all, we have more people and more natural resources than ever before. Our top achievements remain impressive. But is the overall culture of the people in such great shape? The culture of government and public service? Interest in our religious organizations? The quality of local government in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some serious reservations on such questions.

We also see countries, such as China, that have screwed-up policies but have grown a lot, in large part because of a pro-business, pro-learning, pro-work culture. Latin America, in contrast, did lots of policy reforms but still is somewhat stagnant.

OK, so how might you fix the culture of America? You want to tell everyone that America comes first. That America should be more masculine and less soft. That we need to build. That we should “own the libs.” I could go on with more examples and details, but this part of it you already get.

So imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question “does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?” Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import.

Simply pass or announce or promise such policies. Do not worry about any other constraints.

You don’t even have to do them!

After this that and the other:

To be clear, this hypothesis does not not not require any kind of cohesive elite planning the whole strategy (though there are elites planning significant parts of what Trump is doing). It suffices to have a) conflicting interest groups, b) competition for Trump’s attention, and c) Trump believing cultural issues are super-important, as he seems to. There then results a spontaneous order, in which the visible strategy looks just like someone intended exactly this as a concrete plan.

We live in interesting times.

Ezra Klein: Here be monsters. [The state of the world]

From The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2025, ChatGPT summarizes:

The article "The Old World Is Breaking Down. A New One Is Breaking Through" by Ezra Klein discusses the significant societal, political, and technological shifts reshaping the world in 2025. It highlights several key themes:

1. American Politics and Trump’s Return: Donald Trump’s second term in office represents a decline in democratic safeguards, with alliances between Trump and powerful oligarchs altering the political landscape. This situation echoes the erosion of democracies seen in other nations.

2. Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI): Rapid advancements in AI technology have introduced new capabilities but also pose risks due to insufficient understanding and regulation. The global race for AI dominance, particularly between the U.S. and China, underscores its importance in geopolitics and raises concerns about its implications for security and power.

3. Climate Crisis: The worsening climate crisis is evident in record-breaking heatwaves and other extreme weather events. Efforts to transition to renewable energy face challenges, exacerbated by rising energy demands from AI development.

4. Falling Global Fertility Rates: Declining birth rates worldwide threaten societal stability, economic growth, and demographics. This trend is particularly concerning in countries like South Korea and Russia, which face political and social turmoil as a result.

5. Interconnected Challenges: The article connects these issues, suggesting that they collectively mark the collapse of old structures and the uncertain emergence of new paradigms. It warns of a turbulent era, quoting Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

This thought-provoking piece explores the uncertainties and complexities of a transformative era, emphasizing the need for strategic action and global cooperation to navigate these challenges.

Is it over? States and State Systems After Globalism

Christopher Caldwell, This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time, NYTimes, Nov. 28, 2024:

Who could have seen Donald Trump’s resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism.

In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in The New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.

The Rubicon:

But starting in the 1970s, things began to change. Sometime after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, investors got nervous. The economy began to stall. This placed politicians in a bind. Workers had the votes to demand more services. But that required making demands on business, and business was having none of it. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. For a brief while, this maneuver allowed them to offer more to workers without demanding more of bosses. Essentially, governments had begun borrowing from the next generation.

That was the Rubicon, Mr. Streeck believes: “the first time after the postwar growth period that states took to introducing not-yet-existing future resources into the conflict between labor and capital.” They never broke the habit.

The rise of the technocrats:

At each stage of neoliberalism’s evolution, Mr. Streeck stresses, key decisions have been made by technocrats, experts and other actors relatively insulated from democratic accountability. When the crash came in 2008, central bankers stepped in to take over the economy, devising quantitative easing and other novel methods of generating liquidity. During the Covid emergency of 2020 and 2021, Western countries turned into full-blown expertocracies, bypassing democracy outright. A minuscule class of administrators issued mandates on every aspect of national life — masks, vaccinations, travel, education, church openings — and incurred debt at levels that even the most profligate Reaganite would have considered surreal.

Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of something paradoxical about the neoliberal project: For the global economy to be “free,” it must be constrained. What the proponents of neoliberalism mean by a free market is a deregulated market. But getting to deregulation is trickier than it looks because in free societies, regulations are the result of people’s sovereign right to make their own rules. The more democratic the world’s societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate — at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.

I'm ordering the book. There's much more at the link.