Pratap Bhanu Mehta, has an article for Time Magazine titled 'Trump, Tariffs, and the Rewiring of the American Empire'. It is foolish. There is no American Empire. There is 'exorbitant privilege'- i.e. the use of the dollar in international trade which gives the US more 'seigniorage- and there is 'market power'- which can be used in line with optimal tariff theory to get the lion's share of gains from trade- and there is military power- in particular transoceanic force projection- and, finally, there is diplomatic power which can be used to reinforce sanctions of various types.
What there isn't is an Empire. There are Treaty based alliances- e.g. NATO. But an alliance only exists if there is commitment. Without it, there is only a piece of paper. Trump is not committed to previous treaties. Thus there is unilateral withdrawal on the one hand and, maybe, the offer of 'Protectorate' status. But that involves loss of sovereignty. It is a fundamental change which goes further than 'realignment'. A 'first among equals' has become the King.
Speaking purely of economics, there can be a shift from a broadly 'free trade plus intellectual property protection' regime to a 'spheres of influence' approach such that there is a 'first world' which has free market based high intra-industry trade, a 'second world' with bilateral swops, and a third world caught between the two which might supply primary products on open markets while following Listian policies and relying on bilateral 'technology transfer' in other fields. Arguably, this was what already existed and the only thing which has been stripped away is an ideological fig-leaf.
Since about 2015 when Sanders & Trump emerged as opponents of TPP, most favoured nation status for China, etc. the US has started to shift back to the older position familiar to Trump- a Wharton Class of '68 alumni. This is a world with optimal tariffs, closed economy Keynesianism, activist industrial policy, etc. When Trump returned to office, he trained his guns on Brazil and India in the hope that they will bend the knee and abandon BRICS, de-dollarization, etc. This will fail but China might not be too keen to sponsor an alternative and, if the new 'G2' reach a modus vivendi, everybody else will have to negotiate transactional but unequal relationships with both US & China.
Mehta ignores all this.
In August 30, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India travelled to Tianjin, a city in eastern China, for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. His presence there, after five years of simmering India–China tensions,
Putin had been trying to get Modi & Xi to kiss and make up. Trump helped make it happen but it would have happened sooner or later anyway.
was widely read as signaling the possibility of a global geopolitical realignment. Modi’s visit came in the wake of the United States imposing 25% tariffs on India, along with additional punitive duties linked to India’s continued purchase of Russian oil. China, for its part, played up the SCO as a display of geopolitical confidence and an alternative pole of attraction.
It went to 50 percent for Brazil and India. Might it go to 500 percent? There are diminishing returns to this. India's growth doesn't seem to have been much affected. The question is whether the US can raise its growth rate. Otherwise it's share of global trade will fall from about 16 percent to the EU's level of 12 percent. As India & Brazil grow, their bargaining position improves. But both must do a lot of internal reform. That must be their priority.
A rival spectacle unfolded in Washington. Over the past several months, a procession of world leaders has made the pilgrimage to placate President Donald Trump in the hope of securing favorable trade deals.
Or to retain some shred of credibility for NATO's Article 5.
Trump, in turn, has announced a flurry of agreements and investment promises with Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, and others. The spectacles in Tianjin and Washington dramatize a world in which major powers increasingly rely on public theatre, transactional bargains, and the symbolism of court-like diplomacy to project hierarchy and distribute favor. The tariff war Trump has unleashed has certainly produced a frenzy of activity.
This was published on Jan 16 2026. Perhaps Mehta wrote the essay 6 months ago and didn't bother to update it thoroughly.
But does it amount to a deeper geopolitical realignment?
Trump was doing 'discovery'. It turned out China had reduced its vulnerabilities and greatly increased its threat points. Trump acknowledged this by speaking of 'G2'- China was now an equal. But a deal hasn't yet been made. Both sides are flexing their muscles. But, if Trump loses the mid-terms, he turns into a lame duck. The Chinese can afford to wait. TACO (Trump always Chickens out) may apply
President Trump’s tariffs have certainly induced a different diplomatic orientation.
Not yet. Maybe, if the EU puts boots on the ground in Greenland and this triggers the dissolution of NATO which in turn means that the EU takes its 12 percent of World GDP and shops around for allies, then maybe there is a 'G3/3.5'. The recent Canada/China deal is interesting. Canadian farmers get relief (and Chinese consumers get cheaper food) while China increases its sales of electric cars. This is asymmetric. The terms of trade tend to fall for the primary producer while rising for the advanced manufacturing country.
States are behaving more opportunistically—bargaining issue by issue, extracting short-term relief, and avoiding long-term entanglements. If part of geopolitics once involved the creation and maintenance of global institutions, that ambition has all but vanished. The world now appears far more fluid.
No. The EU sees it has to act more cohesively. But so do the Latin American countries otherwise every leader is a potential Noriega or Maduro.
As tariffs, export controls, and investment screening become normalized
They were the rule not the exception for most of Trump's life. China only got MFN status 25 years ago.
instruments of statecraft, countries are reordering their economic exposure: diversifying supply chains, seeking new export markets, relocating manufacturing, emphasizing self-reliance, and introducing currency-swap arrangements to make themselves less vulnerable to the fallout of an economic war between the United States and China
This had to be done for other reasons- e.g. COVID, invasion of Ukraine, etc. Currency swaps increased after the financial crisis (another may be around the corner) and because of COVID etc.
Modi’s Tianjin outreach and the processions to Trump’s court in Washington reflect this broader recalibration.
No. They reflect predictable reactions to acts of assertion by what is still the most powerful nation in the world.
States are seeking room to maneuver in a system where economic bargaining, rather than ideology or shared aspiration, shapes behavior.
This cretin doesn't get that states have been such such room from their inception. 'Shared aspirations' are meaningless.
Yet none of this amounts to a fundamental geopolitical realignment.
Alignment is about commitment. Trump has signalled he is not committed to NATO or Quad. The US has unilaterally realigned.
Much of the drama is still best understood as crisis management within an existing hierarchical order.
All drama can be understood as such. One might say Zelensky's disastrous TV appearance with Trump & Vance was dramatic. What has followed it has been 'keeping up appearances'.
The choreography of hedging between Washington and Beijing, while simultaneously adjusting to American pressure, masks a deeper continuity.
No. There is a discontinuity. Previously, China was more vulnerable. Now the US is because POTUS has to worry about cost of living and mid-terms. Chairman Xi does not.
That continuity is anchored in two forces: the domestic constraints that limit the strategic choices of states,
Domestic constraints can't prevent unilateral realignment by a foreign power.
and the pre-existing security architectures that still bind them more tightly to the United States than to any emerging alternative.
Security architecture doesn't mean shit if commitment to it has evaporated
A restructuring of the international trade order was inevitable.
No. Hilary could have won in 2016.
The liberal international order could be sustained only under two conditions: that it generated domestic economic outcomes that shored up the political legitimacy of global integration within major economies,
Nonsense! Had Comey not cost Hilary the election, it would have been a case of business as usual. Obama was still pressing forward with TPP (which Hilary helped negotiate) in 2016. Hilary could have been a two term POTUS. Trump would never have gained ascendancy over his party.
and that the trading system produced broadly shared gains without fundamentally threatening American hegemony.
This is irrelevant. No one trades unless they grade. What threatens hegemony is slower economic growth than the rival.
Both these conditions had been slowly eroding.
They are nonsense.
The United States has worried about the loss of manufacturing and inequality since the 1990s.
Ross Perot & Trump had raised the trade issue back then. Inequality did not and does not matter.
The causes of these phenomena are complex.
No. They are simple. What was not predicted was that Hilary would be a shit candidate or that women would vote for a pussy grabber.
In 2016, the economists David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson popularized the phrase, “China Shock,”
before which was the 'Japan shock' which Trump gassed on about in the Eighties.
attributing a loss of about two million jobs to trade with China. Trade, rather than automation or other factors, became the major culprit.
Sanders had sponsored a bill repudiating China's Most Favoured Nation status in 2005. If Hilary hadn't been a shit candidate, neither Sanders nor Trump could have risen. What made Hilary a shit candidate? She was way better than Kamala. But she did have a vagina. Vaginas scare voters.
This coincided with the recognition that under the existing system, American hegemony could be threatened.
What threatened it was defeat in Vietnam and the end of Bretton Woods.
China had become a genuine competitor
unlike those fake competitors you see on Ebay
challenging American interests.
When did it kow tow to America?
The technology gap between America and China was narrowing, China was flexing power
you either flex your muscles or make a power play
in the Asia-Pacific,
& MENA- e.g. China maintained relations with Hamas- and Africa, etc.
and challenging America in international institutions. The liberal international order was no longer serving the purpose of American hegemony.
The War on Terror destroyed it. You can't be the hegemon if you keep having to withdraw your troops and run away. Obama was so craven he even tried to appease the Iranian.
Maintaining global American dominance needed new foundations.
The thing was gone. Iran dominated Iraq. The Taliban took back Afghanistan. The question was whether America would run away from Europe as well. We don't know the answer yet.
The first Trump Administration began the process of repivoting the world order,
In an amateurish manner
and the Biden Administration continued in that direction.
see above
In October 2022, the Biden Administration unveiled the most expansive export control regime aimed at limiting China’s access to advanced semiconductors.
It failed utterly
As Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden, put it, “we previously maintained a sliding scale approach that said we need to stay only a couple of generations ahead. This is not the strategic environment in which we are today. Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.”
America was asleep at the wheel. The Chinese weren't.
In theory, that American edge could be preserved by tightly focused restrictions on a small number of critical technologies (“small yards and high fences”) and close cooperation with allies. But it was already beginning to be uncertain what the scope and severity of those restrictions would be, and which allies would be considered useful. Therefore, Trump’s tariffs were not some bizarre break from past policy but an inflection point in American approach to economic and technological competition.
They are a bizarre break from the past because they are self-defeating. This isn't optimal tariff theory. It is a senile dude who enjoys raising and lowering tariffs and granting and cancelling exemptions. This is about concentrating domestic power in his own hands while causing supply of imports to become elastic thus reducing the US shares of gains from trade long term. This is a gift to China but Brazil and India too can benefit.
Reorganizing global hierarchies to serve American power requires
magic?
a new mix of instruments: trade as a tool to discipline adversaries and pressure allies; tariffs to protect industries, retain a technological edge, raise revenue, and secure critical resources; and sanctions to achieve political aims.
That may be Trump's thinking but it is stupid. Trade is a weapon only if your market is expanding. Otherwise you just import inflation and shrink your share of the global economy. Productivity matters. Twisting the arms of foreign countries to set up factories is no substitute for Chinese style industrial policy. It is stupid shit. The Taiwanese of Koreans can set up a nice pant but they need hardworking Koreans or Taiwanese to run them. ICE then arrests and deports them. This is slapstick comedy.
The puzzle of why Washington punishes allies,
because it is no longer committed to them. It's like when your g.f. moves in with you and you initially don't charge her rent. However, as your passion for her cools, you start asking to kick in more and more for rent, utilities, your new play-station etc. Finally, you suggest she might be more comfortable moving into the garden shed.
or even potentially friendly states such as India
China can hurt American farmers. They would obviously be interested in India as a comparable market. Anyway, India has a trade surplus with the US. Since Quad was always a pipe-dream, Trump might as well say hitting India is a way to weaken BRICS though, obviously, it will have the opposite effect.
Brazil is a different kettle of fish. Trump wants Bolsonaro released. But Brazil gets a lot of exemptions and can always sell elsewhere. Again this is a
or Brazil, is thus easily explained.
I think Trump wants to be in a position where if he can't remove a Latin American leader he doesn't like, he can at least rescue one who has been deposed or who has lost an election.
This is not a simple shift from free trade to mercantilism.
Optimal tariff theory. The problem is that Trump got addicted to raising and lowering them. This raised uncertainty and thus fed through into prices. Supply has probably already become more elastic. The burden falls more and more on the US consumer. This may cost Trump the mid-terms.
It is a neo-imperial mercantilism
No. It is stupid shit.
that retains the fundamental aspiration of empire:
money, Trump really doesn't want to rule over shithole countries. Greenland is okay because it only has 300,000 people.
ordering a hierarchy around American power.
Mehta is obsessed with hierarchy. But it doesn't arise in this case. America deals directly with other countries, no matter how shitty, rather than through a regional satrap.
The emerging tariff regime represents the consolidation of a doctrine in which the weaponization
that's another favourite word of the brain dead
of interdependence becomes the central technique of imperial management;
even though there is no fucking Empire.
the distinction between friends and adversaries matters less than their willingness to be folded into American objectives.
In I.R, guys who are 'folded in' are friends.
The United States isn’t the only actor reshaping the global trading order. China, on the face of it, had every incentive to preserve the existing system: no country benefitted more from it.
Nonsense! It cheated precisely because it didn't want to get locked into a intellectual property regime which handicapped them.
The multilateral trading framework also conveniently obscured China’s own hegemonic ambitions under the procedural neutrality of its rules.
What is this guy smoking? China cheats like nobody's business. There is no fucking neutrality. The State has 'control rights'.
China used the World Trade Organization to its advantage to gain access to world markets. But at the same time, its model of subsidies, forced technology transfers, developing country status and currency policies often gave it an advantage.
Cheating gives you an advantage. What matters is whether you do it in a smart manner.
For the rest of the world, meanwhile, the system was a mixed bag: exports to China provided engines of growth; China became a major source of infrastructure finance; and the scale of its manufacturing base helped drive down the global costs of the energy transition. But the rest of the world also experienced its own version of the “China Shock” as Beijing’s dominance in exports often came at the cost of other developing countries. This is in, part explains, why there has been little collective action to defend the old order.
The US wanted 'multi dimensional' Trade agreements (stuff like Human Rights etc being added on) because it wanted 'Agenda Control'. This follows from the McKelvey Chaos theorem. Sadly, it doesn't work in practice.
Beijing reads the American turn toward imperial neo-mercantilism as a geopolitical gambit to contain China’s rise.
No. It thinks Trump is a senile fool just like Biden. Obama, however, they considered a monkey. Bush was simply stupid.
And Beijing is responding with clear geopolitical signaling: using tariffs for political purposes, weaponizing chokepoints in supply chains, whether rare earth minerals or critical manufacturing inputs, and granting or withdrawing market access. The premise that China would remain a status-quo power anchored in the old trading order is no longer tenable.
There was never any such premise. It was fucking obvious that China meant to rise and rise. There was some hope that it would fall into a middle income trap or go off a fiscal cliff because of the property bubble etc. But, it has been pretty successful in overcoming internal challenges.
China seems to be following a mixed strategy:
If followed a 'wolf warrior' strategy which succeeded.
a desire to signal resolve against the United States, preserve those parts of the order that continue to serve its interests, and reshape the rest through industrial policy, state-directed capital, supply-chain dominance, and economic partnerships to reflect its own preferences.
Why does this nutter keep talking about 'an old order'? Fuck does he mean? Most countries are hooked on Chinese exports. By the time they find alternative suppliers, China may have taken the lead in quality.
China can be generous when it is costless, as with offering zero-tariff access to African exporters.
Coz Africa is a big rival when it comes to AI chips or electric cars- right?
But it also makes clear that it is fully capable of wielding tariffs, market access, and interdependence as instruments of political influence.
It turned out that Europe's car industry needs Chinese chips. China has countervailing power. Moreover it now has its own EUV lithography machine. What it can't steal it buys and what it can't buy or steal, it reinvents or reverse engineers.
Is this new form of neo-imperial mercantilist competition likely to produce geopolitical realignment?
The US has realigned. It has bluntly told the EU that it has shrunk in economic importance and, moreover, because of Islamic immigration, is no longer a 'civilizational' partner. Imperialism and neo-imperialism ended long ago though admittedly the French were late to get the memo.
Unless trade disputes in this time of economic nationalism spill over into outright war and hostility, a realignment is still a distant prospect for four reasons.
Realignment has already occurred. The EU knows it is on its own. India knows there is no longer any pretence of Quad. Latin America knows it has to make its own deal with China or remain vulnerable to the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine which is 'when we tell you to jump, ask 'how high'?'
First, the extent to which global trade will actually be restructured remains uncertain.
Global trade gets restructured anyway depending on who is growing fast and who is growing slowly.
The tariff wars were driven partly by the perception that globalization had lost domestic legitimacy.
Legitimacy is another one of those meaningless words shitheads like to use.
Yet those very domestic constraints now limit how far states can shift toward neo-mercantilism. In the United States, concerns about inflation have already placed limits on how aggressively policymakers can wield tariffs as a weapon.
That is a side-show. What matters is AI. If China does it almost as well but much more cheaply, then the bubble bursts and you have a financial crash. Worse yet, the strategic picture changes. Cheap AI enhanced drones might cancel out America's massive lead in force projection platforms. Russia mops up Ukraine, with Chinese tech, and moves on to Poland and the Baltic. Meanwhile the cartels might get hold of nukes. Putin had hinted that he might do nuclear proliferation into Latin America. Meanwhile, Trump loses the mid-terms and faces impeachment hearings and criminal indictments. SCOTUS deserts him because he is a lame duck headed for the slammer under State law (for which Vance can't give him a Pardon). Some Mamdani-type nutter becomes the next POTUS. America implodes on racial and partisan lines. Europe, meanwhile, becomes more and more divided with parts of it being depopulated and other parts Islamicized.
China faces its own dilemma: its economy depends on exports, access to markets and customers.
No. It needs raw materials- which it has already secured and can always sell to emerging markets as the West declines.
China already dominates manufacturing across the board—from cheap textiles to advanced electronics. But, as economists Arvind Subramanian and Shoumitro Chatterjee point out, the challenges for other developing countries could intensify if China tries to compensate for slower domestic growth by increasing exports.
They can export low value-adding jobs plus infrastructure. What matters is whether they can do innovation rather than 'catch up'. It looks as though the answer is 'yes'. Meanwhile the US has hired a shithead like Mehta to teach at Princeton.
So while developing countries welcome China, they are also wary of what Chinese overproduction might mean for them.
They aren't stupid. They know the Chinese will off-shore the low value adding shite.
For most countries, the dominant strategy is not to realign or choose sides between the United States and China, but to treat both as indispensable economic poles, to extract concessions, and avoid the wrath of the two superpowers.
This isn't a strategy. It is called crying yourself to sleep every night.
Second, geopolitical alignment continues to be driven by security and hard power. Even where countries desire greater autonomy, they remain constrained by existing security arrangements. States formally allied with the United States, or dependent on it for security guarantees, from Saudi Arabia to Japan, have far less room for maneuver than their diplomatic gestures imply. Their sovereign capacity to realign is circumscribed by the very architectures that protect them.
Architecture doesn't protect. The Saudis still have money and that buys them security. Japan has to nuke up or shut up. So does Taiwan. I suppose Europe will get round to forming an army but their real problem is internal. So is that of the USA. If foreigners are taking over your cities, fuck you care about force projection on distant borders?
Europe is the classic case: reliant on the United States for security, yet dependent on China for trade and technology.
No. Europe failed to recover from the crash and trade creation within the EU has lagged exports because of compliance burdens. It is sclerotic. It will probably simply give up and grow old- or yet older- gracefully.
Even India, which zealously guards its sovereignty, has moderated its Russian oil imports in response to Washington's demands. But it will also remain more preoccupied with its security concerns over what the United States does over Pakistan.
Not really. It will simply go in for tit for tat terrorism. That is also the best course against China. I suppose India will have to do an H bomb test- perhaps in collaboration with Israel. But internal reform has to be the priority. Shitheads like Mehta have to be disintermediated.
Third, domestic political economies severely limit dramatic repositioning. Countries are deeply embedded in production networks, supply chains, financial systems, and technological ecosystems that cannot be reconfigured at will. Domestic coalitions, business interests, labor, commodity exporters, and technology sectors pull governments in contradictory directions. Leaders must respond to anxieties about vulnerability while preserving access to both China and the United States. The result is a characteristic ambivalence in much of the world: rhetorical assertions of realignment paired with limited room for meaningful action.
This is an entirely meaningless paragraph. Was Mehta always stupid or did his brains rot away in rural Haryana? I know the answer to that. He was always stupid.
Fourth, no alternative structure exists that could absorb the geopolitical weight of a realignment. The United States may no longer be trusted. The prestige of its domestic institutions, once a pillar of American hegemony, has diminished. Yet China, for all its economic might, has not built a security architecture or normative order that other states trust. Its partnerships remain bilateral and transactional; its political and financial systems opaque; its ambitions ambiguous. Few states are willing to place their futures within a Chinese-led system. But this is also not a moment where the Global South can exercise collective leverage over either China or the United States.
This is nonsense. Russia has found it can trust China. But the Pakistanis could have told them that for free. The Global South has never had any fucking leverage.
The stubborn truth of this moment is this:
There has been global realignment because the US is withdrawing from various commitments.
Trump’s tariff wars are generating uncertainty, pockets of economic dislocation, an erosion of trust in the United States, and a more difficult environment for the provision of global public goods.
Like the 'War on Terror'? Which fucking planet has this cunt been living on?
They are also amplifying the risks inherent in China–U.S. competition.
What risk? China will continue to rise but it might plateau at less than what the US has now in terms of global force projection. But, equally, the reverse may happen. China may take the lead in some new type of tech which turns their Belt & Road into a straitjacket for the rest of the world.
States might feel more resentful but they continue to operate within a security and economic order they cannot meaningfully escape.
Also, human beings will have to live in this galaxy, not Andromeda.
This paradoxically makes the world more dangerous, since Trump thinks he can engage in price discovery without risking major geopolitical alignment.
He isn't utterly stupid. He knows that realignment has been continuous since the time of ancient Sumer.
Trump’s confidence that no country or coalition of countries is in a position to significantly push back,
unless- like China, Russia, India, Brazil etc- they actually do push back
at least in the short run, is making him more overtly imperial in other domains as well.
Which ones? He did to Maduro what the first Bush did to Noriega.
Far from being isolationist or sticking to a sphere of influence, America is now firmly on an imperial trajectory: extracting a head of state from Venezuela, launching military operations in Syria and Nigeria,
Obama founded AFRICOM. True, he didn't try to remove Assad, but neither did Trump.
threatening Iran,
he isn't backing regime change. It looks as though the crisis has been defused.
and demanding Greenland.
that's new. But then he was also demanding Canada. Maybe the whole thing will blow over. Currently, mineral extraction from Greenland is too expensive. Anyway, the Europeans are offering a share of the profits in case the thing takes off.
Chaos and uncertainty lie ahead.
Till the mid-terms.
Major geopolitical realignment does not.
It has already occurred. If Mehta's wife moves in with her lesbian lover, she has realigned herself even if she hasn't sued for divorce. That's what America has done. If you are a net importer, you don't need to protect overseas markets. Guys with dollars have to spend those dollars buying stuff America makes.
The world is simpler than Mehta realizes but it takes a bit of grey matter to understand that simplicity. Gassing on about the weaponization of hierarchical Neo-Imperial mercantilism is the task of a pedant who teaches shite
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