“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” In one form or another, this observation has been made many times over the last century or more.
What is true of people is true of nations. In the past 25 years or so it was often claimed (and , admittedly, often denied) that, in the modern world, the United States was the “indispensable nation”. Whatever the rights and wrong of this claim, it has become obvious that, whether we like it or not, the rest of the world will now have to dispense with the US as a defender of democracy, guarantor of global order, or even (as in Margaret Thatcher’s words about Gorbachev) a state we can do business with.
Anyone whose experience of the US began in the last eleven days would have no trouble recognising an archetypal kleptocracy, like Putin’s Russia or Mobutu’s Zaire (with a touch of Mao madness). The boss rakes off billions in tribute while his cronies scramble to please him, put each other down and collect their share of the loot. Regime supporters commit all sorts of crimes with impunity, while opponents are subject to both legal victimisation and threats of extra-legal terror against which they can expect no protection.
In dealing with such a regime, the only strategy is to buy off the boss, or a powerful underling, and hope that they stay bought long enough to deliver on their side of the bargain This approach is politely described as “transactional”, but without the implication that the transaction will necessarily be honoured. Dealing with kleptocrats can be highly profitable, as long as you get in and out quickly enough, but there’s no possibility of “doing business”, either commercial or political, in the ordinary sense of the word.
The problem is that for nearly everyone who matters, the last eleven days seem like an aberration. For decades, the US has been seen as the central pillar of a “rules-based order”, on which assumptions about the world were largely based. That’as true even for critics who pointed out that the rules were drawn up to favor the US, and that the US often breached them without any real consequences. And it’s true even though you can point to precedents for everything Trump had done.
But all that is over, and can’t be restored.
Trump has already withdrawn from, or effectively repudiated, a large set of international commitments (WHO, Paris, NAFTA) and will probably withdraw from NATO before long. He has imposed massive tariffs on neighbours and allies, and threatened to levy punitive taxes on the incomes of companies from countries whose own tax or economic policies he dislikes.
Trump’s declared intention to acquire Greenland by force if necessary might seem like a joke. But it represents a break with international laws against aggressive war going back to the Nuremberg trials and before. Since 1945, aggressors like Putin have almost always pretended that they are engaged in “special military operations” with the objective of protecting minority populations, reversing supposedly illegal coups and so on. Even the German invasion of neutral Belgium in 1914 was framed as a demand for free passage of troops. By contrast, Trump has simply announced that he wants a piece of real estate and will take it by whatever means necessary.
Even in the unlikely event of a free election returning a Democratic president in 2028, none of this can be undone, at least as long as the Republican party remains a serious contender for power. It doesn’t matter what (say) President Whitmer might promise if a junior Trump could come back four years later.
Where to now? In Europe, there’s a three-way division between those who welcome Trump and Musk, those who see the need for an independent policy, and those who want to persist with Atlanticism while they can. The third group, although well represented in the political class, are already among the walking dead. The Trumpists are doing well politically, but most are nowhere near getting the near-majority support seen for Trump. More importantly, they are likely to find out, like many before them, that loyalty is a one-way street with Trump. That leaves the advocates of independence, who know more or less where they would like to end up, but have no real idea how to get there.
The Australian political class is split between aspiring Trumpists like Dutton and the “eyes wide shut” camp, pretending that nothing has changed. In Penny Wong’s words “the alliance is stronger than ever”. That also seemed to be the hope of other Five Eyes[1] members. But Canada has already had a rude awakening with Trump announcing huge tariffs and not even bothering to issue ransom demands (the purported grievance is smuggling of fentanyl), and Elon Musk is busy trying to overthrow the Starmer government in the UK’ Australian politicians focused on AUKUS will sooner or later be getting the message “I am altering the deal, Pray I don’t alter it any further”
I have some thoughts on possible responses, but I’ll let others have a say first, while I try to clarify my ideas.
fn1. The Five Eyes is the arrangement under which the UK, US, Canada, Australia and NZ spy agencies share intelligence, whatever the governments of the day might think about each other.
{ 19 comments }
John Q 02.02.25 at 12:00 am
Here’s a coincidence for you. I first encountered this quote “the cemetery is full of indispensable men” with reference to Rookwood, the big cemetery in Sydney. Looking for the source yesterday, I found that the cemetery took its name from a 19th century novel by one William Ainsworth.
Today, I started reading a library book, Fraud, by Zadie Smith, centred around the famous case of the Tichborne claimant. ?he central male character (so far) is none other than the very same William Ainsworth. The universe is trying to tell me something, I imagine, but I have no idea what.
Kevin Cox 02.02.25 at 3:12 am
Nixon’s removal of the USA from the gold standard removed one control over banking addiction to capital gains. The control put a notional limit on the money Banks could create for the government with debt.
Banks buy money from the government and rent it out. They pretend they borrow from the government but do not return the repayments. Instead, they cancel the returned money to prevent inflation, and interest remains with the bank as a capital gain for the bank. The cash has miraculously generated more money with time. The correct accounting is for the bank to deduct interest payments from the amount owed on the loan and include interest payments to depositors as a cost. This way of accounting for interest removes the capital gain from loans, as renting money capitalises interest while selling it doesn’t. Changing from renting to selling money with a margin saves the economy the cost of interest in unearned capital gains. On home loans alone, this is about 5% of GDP and is a direct cost to the economy as it means we can reduce the cost of introducing new money into the economy by 5% on home loans alone.
However, it gets worse. Wealthy people do not pay as much interest because they pay off their loans quickly—often instantly—so they buy money for less.
If you thought this was unfair, it gets worse. Since the privatisation of the CBA and the widespread use of credit cards, capitalising interest and other fees has become the standard for loans to most citizens. Capitalising interest and fees is where the bank extends the loan by debiting the loan account, resulting in a credit transaction to put the value into the bank’s capital account rather than a credit transaction to the loan account, resulting in another interest payment.
In the 1960s, Australians’ increase in wealth was pretty much the same no matter their existing wealth, meaning the wealthiest 10% received 10% of the new wealth. Today, the top 10% get 90% of the increase in wealth.
What does this have to do with the USA and Australia? Plutocrats get their power from their wealth, which they obtain from capital gains by getting others to pay for the increase.
Some relatively simple changes to bank accounting practices and enforcement of existing capitalisation rules can prevent Australia from becoming a plutocracy. These would make us highly competitive as investment increases, as we would remove most of the finance costs associated with investment. We could also replace capital markets with local capital markets, where we circulate profits within the market for goods and services. Local capital markets increase the availability of capital because they move capital with the sale of goods and services, making it available for reinvestment.
KT2 02.02.25 at 5:22 am
JQ, serenditpity abounds. You said… “But all that is over, and can’t be restored.”
The dead, and the now erased, not biried, CDC knowledge it seems, will be unable to be exhumed. Only recreated. A disaster if proven. If…
Already a 500 comment thread at Hacker News.
“If this was an order from the President as an official act, no scrutiny can be applied here in any court (broad immunity recently granted by the SCOTUS: absolute immunity for actions within his core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts)… so good luck proving any wrongdoing without any evidence…
“If you go after any of the underlings who executed such order, they are likely getting auto-pardonned by Trump if he gave the order (otherwise it will make it harder to find people to execute his “illegal” orders next). There is no such thing as illegal for this administration. Wake up.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=throw101010
Via
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/01/cdc-dei-scientific-data/681531/
Thomas P 02.02.25 at 8:19 am
Kevin, ” Wealthy people do not pay as much interest because they pay off their loans quickly”
At the contrary, wealthy people often borrow a lot. If you sit on stocks and need cash you can sell some stocks, but then you have to tax for any profit. You can instead borrow money with the stocks as collateral without paying any tax. The “buy, borrow, die.” strategy.
Hugh Ferguson 02.02.25 at 8:24 am
My purely selfish response is that at least we all no longer have to take the USA seriously. I don’t mean not take it seriously as a dangerous, destructive force. I mean not take it seriously on its own solipsistic terms. Such a relief!
Lisa 02.02.25 at 10:06 am
My spontaneous thought at the end of your blogpost was – those in Australia and those in Europe, and those in all other countries who stand for democracy, rule of law, etc., will need to stick together much more. And we’ll need more solidarity internally, so that any economic punishment that Trump imposes on those who stand up against him will not divide them, but lead to a fair distribution of burdens. Maybe it’s cynical to say this, but a common enemy can sometimes work miracles in increasing solidarity among others…
David Mitchell 02.02.25 at 2:00 pm
I wonder how this will affect the AUKUS submarine deal from Australia to acquire SSNs, first from the US and then from the UK. Along the way they would gain the ability to build their own SSNs out side of the highly enriched nuclear fuel. This is a long term effort of several decades that must look very risky to Australia now with Trump/Musk takeover of the US government. I imagine that some in Australia now wish they had gone with SSKs from Japan or SSNs from France.
engels 02.02.25 at 2:53 pm
It’s no one in Britain thought of his before we became a wholly owned subsidiary of Uncke Sam’s combustible fascist clown car dealership.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/04/how-america-bought-up-britain-vassal-state-review
Karen Lofstrom 02.02.25 at 3:57 pm
I first encountered the observation in Middlemarch, George Eliot, 1871.
mary s 02.02.25 at 9:27 pm
I think it’s been coming for a while, but yeah, it’s really over now. As we veered from Bush jr. to Obama to Trump, the US showed that it is erratic and unreliable. Maybe something good will come of all this chaos, if we survive long enough? I am clinging to that hope. I’m a Californian and a Democrat/democrat; the joke about the Golden State joining up with Canada and Mexico has quickly become more like a yearning. In any case, it seems pretty clear that China is now the better trading partner for Mexico and Canada.
Robert Weston 02.03.25 at 1:44 am
OP:
The Australian political class is split between aspiring Trumpists like Dutton and the “eyes wide shut” camp, pretending that nothing has changed. In Penny Wong’s words “the alliance is stronger than ever”.
I’m curious about this one. In response to an earlier post, I commented on how Atlanticism is built in significant part on the emotional attachment European (particularly German) elites feel towards the United States. But I know nothing about Australia’s foreign and security policy community, so what’s going on there? Anglophone kinship, memories of WWII, policy community networks, “chokepoints” as discussed by Farrell and Newman, other?
Crprod 02.03.25 at 2:18 am
I have read The Fraud. That quote from William Ainsworth must be his only writing that has endured.
engels 02.03.25 at 1:46 pm
Oceana is at trade war with Eurasia
https://www.ft.com/content/ba1c81a2-0b5e-4a40-a9f6-35228d958b19
M 02.03.25 at 9:38 pm
Trump has already withdrawn from, or effectively repudiated, a large set of international commitments (WHO, Paris, NAFTA) and will probably withdraw from NATO before long.
Also the JCPOA (aka Iran nuke deal). In fact, taking the US’s (read: GOP’s) unilateral abrogation of the JCPOA along with the similar withdrawal from the North Korea nuke deal, one can’t help but wonder why any country would ever sign a nuclear non-proliferation deal with the US knowing that the US can break the deal at any time for any reason (or no reason) at all with no penalty or adverse consequence whatsoever.
engels 02.04.25 at 1:03 am
One Response to Trump’s Tariffs: Trade That Excludes the U.S.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/business/trump-tariffs-global-trade-blocs.html
engels 02.06.25 at 3:41 pm
FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States
https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-back-and-enjoy-c-1819576375/
KT2 02.06.25 at 11:13 pm
engels, not even The Onion could make this up. Buy off the cia. And doxx every employee. Snow Crash, The Watchmen, Doctorow etc may come close. But this…
“Elon Musk has taken control of government employees’ private data by having his cronies illegally install a commercial server at the Office of Personnel Management.
“Musk and his handpicked associates at the fake “Department of Government Efficiency” are using their ill-gotten access to control federal databases containing Social Security numbers, home addresses, medical histories, and other sensitive personal information, according to journalists Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum at Musk Watch.
“Many of these Musk staffers are young people between 19 and 24, such as software engineer Akash Bobba, an undergraduate student at University of California, Berkeley, and 2022 high school graduate Edward Coristine. At Musk’s direction, these inexperienced underlings now have access to the private information of every federal employee, and even people who have merely applied to federal jobs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-makes-most-terrifying-183451530.html
Ralph 02.08.25 at 12:26 pm
The rush to join BRICS and dump the US dollar will accelerate as more countries view the USA’s capricious behaviour around sanctions and its threats of tariffs and seek to avoid the USA having any leverage over them.
They also don’t want their capital frozen in some New York bank account (like Iran and Argentina) and subject to a US court process that favours US corporate interests.
KT2 02.09.25 at 6:46 am
Ralph @18 said “The rush to join BRICS and dump the US dollar will accelerate” and “They also don’t want their capital frozen in some New York bank account”
Correct. They – the other investment ticket clippers not on the radar, are already banking in… China. Blackrock, Vanguard etc are sniffing, as these notnreally boutique investment brokers will allow for all sorts of capital shifting we here, and I’d say JQ and Ingrid Robyens, never imagined. See 3x papers at end.
An Australian Invest House I won’t name, currently clipping at 0.65%, of our wealthy and superannuation funds, when you read the T&C’s, are banking with a major Chinese bank.
How do I know? Through family I got the “kid” his first job. After finishing 2x degrees, fin & biz, his 2nd job was setting up funds in Oz, US & HK for a very dark rock. And does unwinds of dedunct funds. Tricky. Now he is in charge. And chose a bank in China over the good ol US of A.
This is to me one of the worst examples I can think of re truth IS stranger than fiction. And provides for chaos in the banking space, at our peril. Not only BRICS, we now have several clearing houses competing with SWIFT.
And then… along comes maniacal Musk!
As Prof Scott Galloway, (Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business) wrote way back in 2021, of… “The Martian”
…”The musk of Musk’s influence gets stronger this week. He’s established an informal alliance with Dogecoin, a functioning cryptocurrency that’s also an extended practical joke. In the week leading up to Musk’s SNL appearance, and following his tweet claiming to be The Dogefather, Dogecoin briefly reached $85 billion in market cap, more than Moderna or Airbus. By midweek it had registered an astounding $45 billion in transaction volume in 24 hours. Click here for a detailed, scientific video rendering of what this level of trading actually looks like.”
“Reality Distortion Field
“The theory of relativity dictates that massive objects distort the space-time continuum, and light and matter slide toward it. Musk has become a similar celestial force in our markets — but in this case, the graviton particles are genius, attention, id, and capital.”
“In a healthy market, resources flow where they’ll generate the best return: Workers move to cities with strong job markets, capital flows to companies with robust growth prospects. But in Musk’s case, the power of celebrity in a social media age, a rising class of retail investors with stimulus funds, and our idolatry of innovators have combined to create a vacuum that may cauterize other naturally forming celestial objects.”…
Scott Galloway@profgalloway
Published on May 7, 2021
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-martian/
See also:
“The ‘Musk Effect’ in cryptocurrency markets” by Lennart Ante, Professor, Constructor University and Managing Director, Blockchain Research Lab in April 2021
Lennant Ante et al 2025
Saggu, A., Ante, L., & Kopiec, K. (2024).
“Uncertain Regulations, Definite Impacts: The Impact of the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulatory Interventions on Crypto Assets.” Finance Research Letters, 72, 106413.
The SEC Effect paper is like my blaming my parents for my stupid investment decisions. And a tout for crypto imo. By researchers at a german uni owned by … guess.
“The financing of Constructor University has been the subject of controversy, especially in Bremen” … “In August 2024 was acquired by the EQT investment fund, and you get a perfect synthesis of education, innovation, entrepreneurship, and research.” “The entrepreneur is Serg Bell, a Singaporean born in the former Soviet Union, who in 2021 decided to take over the private university based in Bremen, which has now become Constructor University”.
( startupbusiness dot it en constructor-university-the-university-that-is-also-a-breeding-ground-for-start-ups )
“Serg Bell (born Sergey Mikhaylovich Belousov” … “Bell‘s family office is located in Luxembourg as Arici Lux Sarl.” Wikipedia.
Runa Capital, 1confirmation. Iago’s.
“Runa Capital became a limited partner in the second fund of crypto-focused venture firm 1confirmation.[59]” Wikipedia
“1confirmation
“Blockchain-focused venture fund with $75M+ in AUM founded by Nick Tomaino, former Principal at Runa Capital.
“1confirmation is backed by individuals like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Mark Cuban and institutions like Horsley Bridge. It supports exceptional founders fueling the decentralization of the web and society.”
runacap dot com companies 1confirmation
Musk the Influencer.
3.5 BILLION views is why.
The study by Graham & Andrejevic [1] “A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election”
… shows in Figure 1, view counts of Musk’s tweets, (to me an unbelievable) THREE & A HALF BILLION views. The graph has a little wiggle worm hardly above zero for the rest, and a gaping whitespace (pun intended) with Elon Musk’s tweet views ranging up to 3.5 BILLION views. This paper needs the “further research ” researched futher. Please.
The yawning gap between Musk meme misinformation and lie tweets is where the voters were convinced to install Trump. And chose demigods instead of the status quo, imo. Young men fell into this unLimited information asymmetry. At our peril.
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