[DaftDank]

He says that, but what do you call being aggressive and hostile to allies -- i.e. threatening military force to take the Panama Canal and Greenland -- while aligning with Russia and China, who play the long game and will pretend to be friendly until the moment they see an opening and take it?

[naasking]

1. People think he's crazy, so he's taking advantage of how they underestimate him.

2. He's taking advantage of anchoring bias: he makes a completely outrageous first offer which then makes any subsequent offer seems more reasonable, even if it was higher than you would otherwise accept. He does this all of the time, and it's a standard negotiating tactic in general, but it sometimes works well for Trump because of how people see him (see point 1).

[mrtesthah]

How is undermining America’s alliances in security and trade with other democracies advantageous? How does that ultimately help us as a county?

[naasking]

Yes, he's of the opinion that the alliances in security and trade have not been a net benefit to the US. Is that shocking to you? He's literally been saying that for years. And thus, he's acting to change those agreements to make them more advantageous and to stimulate domestic production to compete with foreign labour (that's ultimately what tariffs do). He's going about it in his usual bombastic and ham-fisted way of course, but he's doing exactly what he's always said he wanted to do.

[mrtesthah]

Well that’s certainly the opinion, but the point is that no evidence has been presented to support it.

[naasking]

It's completely self-evident that lots of manufacturing has left the US due to trade agreements. This has resulted in certain classes of cheap goods but also made the US vulnerable in key goods (like electronics), and inhibited automation.

It's also not at all obvious that the US has been more secure in its role as world police. Arguably, it led directly to 9/11 and decades of pointless death in the Middle East.

All of the arguments that the status quo was more secure and better economically are weak, at best, given the complexities of the counterfactuals.

[mrtesthah]

I think the arguments in favor of a globalized economy, as well as the transition to a knowledge economy, are abundant and pervasive. I’m not going to argue in favor of them because they are already so powerful and obvious.

If people conflate their current economic misfortune with a US foreign policy of encouraging global cooperation and participation, then they haven’t thought much about cause and effect.

Someone who cared to address the newfound lack of upward mobility in our society would insist on domestic policies that ensured economic surplus was explicitly invested toward the public good.