Ark of the Lost Angels

USMC AV-8 Harrier aboard the USS Peleliu docked in Hong Kong Harbor, 2014. (Credit: Reddit)

America is currently bleeding itself dry while the world draws closer to war.

The United States’ recent behavior both domestically and abroad is eroding the American hegemony at a breakneck pace. The destruction of a unipolar world order threatens to plunge the world into chaos, and the United States’ alienation of its allies only serves to make the impending conflict much more devastating.

The destruction of the American civil service will ignite shockwaves which will be felt the world over. Without the programs maintaining the world’s strongest economy being handled by federal workers, the ripple effects will cause collapses in other places. From nations where USAID money keeps clinics open to nations whose borders are secured by the presence of US Military forces, the world is in danger of falling to chaos should the United States falter in fulfilling its responsibilities or destroy its capabilities intentionally.

The betrayal of so many allies in recent weeks pushes the United States away from being the dominant controlling interest across the globe.

Soft Power Gone Too Soft

Perhaps the largest problem with the federal budget is that it is not being allocated in a way which offers the best possible return on the investment. For example, USAID plays a vital role in ensuring our economy remains the best in the world. Foreign aid makes up only 1.2% of the federal budget. For a relative drop in the bucket, and consequently not a great deal in savings for these supposed “efficiency cuts,” the US foreign aid budget parlays itself into trade deals, favorable relationships with other nations, and massive stimulation of the American economy.

USAID does a lot of good. More than the material good, however, USAID is vital because it is soft power. It is a way for the United States to go do nice things in other corners of the world so they will do nice things for the USA in return. It means every time there is a dispute with another nation, the first resort to solving it isn’t threatening military action. It means that there are cards to play when two different nations are having a dispute and allows America to broker an agreement. The stronger the relationship between the United States and other countries, the more cards there are to play in geopolitical negotiations. There are things America can take away, or more America can give.

It’s negotiation at its finest. It’s sharing some of America’s insane wealth. 

While Russia is bombing its neighbors, and China builds infrastructure for places only to repossess it because the local nations couldn’t make the exorbitant payments, the US goes and fights AIDS in Africa. Then, when the United States looks to sign trade deals or tries to buy natural resources abroad for its domestic industries, other nations are more willing to give America a favorable deal after they take a look at the nice things America does. Not only that, but it burnishes the reputation of Americans abroad. Kosovo built a statue of Bill Clinton on the boulevard named after him because he ordered military aid to Kosovo during the ethnic cleansing in the 1990s. While military in nature, the fact that the United States sending aid was felt so strongly is truly the best marketing America could hope for.

Donald Trump believes that the only way to negotiate deals is to threaten to bash someone’s skull in if they don’t give him what he wants. It’s all pressure, no honey. He thinks by virtue of it being him, that it’s the best and everyone will spend their hard earned money with him despite getting little to no return on investment. It’s how he bankrupted three casinos, and the contractors who built them still haven’t been paid decades after they opened and about a decade after they closed. In absence of goodwill, tokens of good faith, and a reputation for paying back favors, the only way to survive becomes the judicious application of overwhelming force.

To a man who never showed restraint in his life, “judicious” will quickly become “overkill.”

The erosion of American soft power only serves to heighten the tensions the world is facing. The pivot away from longtime allies to rivals will do more damage. Based on their track record, Russia is not a reliable ally in terms of honoring their agreements. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum saw promises of Russia not invading Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine returning the remaining nuclear weapons from its territory after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Russia broke that agreement in 2014 when it invaded and annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, and the Crimean Peninsula, and doubled down when it launched the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Russian Federation is not a reliable partner in world affairs. If the US stands with Russia, and Russia drags the US into a conflict, the US will then stand alone.

The First Domino is a Stack of Dollar Bills

The ongoing trade wars begun by the Trump Administration are not conducive for fighting back against enemies. The world today is built around free trade, and Donald Trump’s current trade wars are alienating the United States from its longtime allies.

With global supply chains and logistics in such upheaval, Wall Street is tracking the freefall in their usual manners. The stock market is currently in free fall. Investment portfolios are taking major hits, wealth is being wiped out at extraordinary rates, and it will cause everyone to suffer. Donald Trump has taken a flamethrower to the booming economy left by the Biden administration, turning it to smoldering ruins in record time. The danger does not stop there.

Trump’s current economic policies put the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency in jeopardy. It is impossible to state how bad total economic collapse could be. So much of the United States’ power is due to the fact that its currency is what every other nation on earth uses to conduct international transactions. If nations start moving away from the dollar, it threatens to collapse the dollar’s buying power. This will, in turn, eliminate most of the United States’ economic power in a violent fashion. The American economy will see a massive depression. In turn, the resulting economic devastation will ripple across the world and bring humanity to the brink of World War III.

For example, defaulting on America’s debt to China would crater both nations’ economies, leading to mass starvation, riots, and potentially civil unrest which will kill tens of thousands, if not more. With America and China goes the European markets, and the other nations across the globe soon after.

The economic crashes will limit access to resources by every society across the world. Most wars are historically fought over resources, and with so many mouths to feed, nations will be willing to burn their neighbors to the ground in order to feed their people. This attitude will trigger a war somewhere in the world. Even if alliances are fragile, nations will need resources, which will lead to them committing what they have to winning that war on their respective sides. Spiderwebs of alliances will quickly pull in other nations, and before anyone realizes, the whole world is shooting at each other. Such a conflict has the potential to end humanity as we know it should it escalate to the point of using nuclear weapons.

For example, an overwhelming majority of the world’s semiconductor chips required by almost all modern electronics are built in Taiwan. With President Trump calling for the repeal of the CHIPS Act which would spin up production of these chips in the United States, the majority will remain in Taiwan.

Taiwan is currently under an existential threat from China which wants to unify the island with the mainland. Currently, the United States has defense agreements with Taiwan. Pivoting away from these agreements sets up for a global disaster. The Taiwanese have made it abundantly clear that they will not allow the semiconductor production facilities to fall into China’s hands, and the experts will escape to safer locations in the event of an invasion from the mainland. Again, this would have catastrophic effects on global stability and runs the very real risk of sparking World War III.

If the United States chooses to act on its defensive agreements (despite this being unlikely) against Chinese aggression, it would put the US and China in a shooting war with each other. Both nations are nuclear powers, and the threat of two nuclear states facing each other directly is what paralyzed the world for half of the twentieth century, and is the same reason that the United States has not gotten more involved against Russia in Ukraine

The President of the United States is a Russian asset. The wholesale crippling of American strength serves only two entities: Russia and China. These nations have expressed hostility towards the United States for decades. Russia’s imperial desires in Eastern Europe and China’s territorial encroachment across the Pacific have been kept at bay by the United States. Even the President’s stance on Ukraine only makes sense if he is viewed as a Russian asset. A man so pathologically obsessed with appearing strong and being loved would see the chance to bloody the second strongest military in the world and not even break a sweat and leap at it. By using American military force to remove Russia from Ukraine, Trump would secure a legacy as a hero to the people of Ukraine and a strongman who took on the world’s “second most powerful military” in a decisive rout which barely required significant effort from the United States military. In his first term, assassinating the Iranian Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was a move to make him look tough on America’s enemies.

War is not good for business. War results in a massively disrupted economy and a consumer base which shrinks every second a conflict drags on with every drop of blood spilled. Almost every major war in the last hundred years has started because of the ego of a madman. World War II was Hitler’s thirst for Europe. Korea saw two dictators wishing to control the entirety of their shattered nation. The Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War were both started by Saddam Hussein’s ambitions of conquering territory and subjugating people he liked and slaughtering those he didn’t. The War in Afghanistan started because Osama bin Laden wanted to destroy America. The War in Ukraine started because Vladimir Putin’s ego could not handle Moscow being the center of an empire no longer.

The stakes are too high to let America’s madman ignite the tinderbox sitting beneath the world for his own glory.  

Presidents Are Not Kings

Politicizing the civil service in order to justify exterminating it only serves to weaken America. Government workers are hard workers in often thankless jobs. They coordinate the massive moving parts which has made the fifty states of the USA into a cohesive country with the world’s strongest economy and military. To call them lazy is frankly unconscionable and morally repugnant. America would not be the nation it is today without the civil servants. They are underappreciated, underpaid, and forced to contend with impossible standards. Seldom is the good they do recognized, but too often they are pilloried for their mistakes. Lying about their work ethic to justify eliminating their jobs is the act of either a bitter and incompetent fool, or a dangerous enemy sent to destroy the nation from within. In either case, it’s a willful ignoring of the very legal bedrock upon which the nation was founded in the name of finding “fraud and abuse” in the federal budget and rooting it out. Instead, it serves to further the agenda of a man who, without understanding the implications, decries the federal bureaucracy as useless and evil. The justification of “fraud” has not been conclusively proven by anyone in the government before blanket spending cuts have been ordered by a man whom nobody elected. A detailed report with verifiable evidence on this supposed fraud has not been provided to the other branches of the American government nor to the American people. 

Congress holds the Power of the Purse, meaning they pass a law and the money they allot to a certain purpose must go towards that purpose. Cutting a congressionally funded program with no oversight, pushback, on a unilateral basis is nowhere near the President’s purview. The continued usurpation of power by the executive flies in the face of everything the American system of government is supposed to stand for. For decades, Congress has abdicated their responsibility to their offices, the Constitution, and the American people by standing idly by and refusing to act except to cede more power to the Office of the President. They have empowered a madman hellbent on glory for himself or, if failing that, hellfire for everyone else.

The rapid, dramatic fashion in which this move was made will do more harm than good. People all over the world rely on money from USAID are now suddenly without jobs, many of them Americans now moored in foreign countries. People won’t be able to pay their bills, send their kids to school, etc. The United States’ international reputation is damaged, and it will take generations to repair. American military readiness is compromised by its refusal to stay united with its allies, and the retreat from being a global provider creates opportunity for other, even less altruistic, entities to move in.

Maybe cutting programs such as USAID is the right move. However, the massive danger lies in the way this is being handled, not necessarily to the fact that it is happening at all. Without thorough review, planning, and fulfilling the legal requirements to “wind down” federal agencies and cut staff, this amounts to an illegal power grab by a President who dreams of being a king and has appointed a regent from abroad to act in his place, handing his authority and responsibility to a man whom no one elected.

There is a way to make the government more efficient. There is a way to pivot away from providing security from half the world solely to their benefit. There is a way to divest from long term economic partners. None of America’s activities to these ends are doing so in a responsible manner. The President is hacking and slashing the civil service to turn the federal budget into a slush fund for the richest in America to become feudal lords. The President is burning bridges while putting the world on a collision course with catastrophic conflict.

Donald Trump’s “America First” policy of isolationism doesn’t work when defunding the efforts which would make America able to sustain itself. Instead, cutting America off from the outside world will destroy the country. Destroying the civil service will mean America is weakened when it must stand together in the face of a conflict which could destroy the world and kill millions.

He will anoint himself king over nothing but dust and echoes.

Foreign interests are running the White House.

The President is compromised.

This is not a drill.