Key Points
Trump’s battleship plan clashes with decades of U.S. naval strategy and technology shifts
Experts described it as a “prestige project,” a “bomb magnet” and said that “this ship will never sail.”
Even if it were technically feasible, the cost of building the battleship would be prohibitive.
In other words: the idea of a battleship is as outdated as the idiot in the White House who had it.
The obsession with a Navy that can fight three different wars on opposite sides of the planet is outdated and the product of paranoid, reactionary, imperialist foreign policy.
Our biggest trading partners are increasingly our biggest geopolitical rivals. At some point, we either need to reconcile these contradictions or surrender intentional trade as a possibility into the next century
The easiest way to deal with the US at this point is simply to drop US bonds on the market. That could easily destroy what Trump has not yet destroyed of the economy.
That’s… debatable. Unless you’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth, nobody is really going to complain when you feed a valuable commodity to the secondary market at a discount.
The real pain the US has felt comes from the crimps in the Supply Chain. Yemen shutting the Suez Canal has done incalculable harm to US trade. If we saw similar pressure in Panama and Singapore?
Even beyond that, climate change is going to hit North America extra hard over the next few years. Probably the meanest thing a foreign country could do right now is whisper in the ears of every Great Lakes resident “They’re coming for your water”.
I’m not talking about you or me doing this. But Japan, China, the UK and the EU are holding trillions of US debt…
Individuals and organizations within these countries hold this debt, but they hold it as collateral against their own debts and liabilities. They hold Treasuries because of the guaranteed valuation and ROI. And you’ll be hard to find anything comparable to replace Treasuries with.
Now, should the ECB start issuing “Eurobonds” that function the same way as US Treasuries? Should the Pacific Rim organize as a regional financial block independent of the US Federal Reserve and Wall Street? Absolutely.
But simply dumping US Treasuries onto the open market doesn’t get you there.