Vivek
Menezes
There comes a moment, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new,” said Jawaharlal Nehru at his poetic best in 1947: “when an age ends” and another begins its “tryst with destiny.” Make no mistake that is what happened this past week, as the United States of America very publicly wrecked its longstanding advantages as the guarantor of the prevailing world order. In just a few rollercoaster days, President Donald Trump’s lurching policies – more threats than actual tariffs – erased trillions from global markets, severely weakened the dollar (but not against the rupee), and picked a fight with China that the Americans very obviously cannot afford or survive. This reversal atop the superpower standings has been long anticipated, but no one thought it could happen almost overnight, in one of the most shockingly incompetent own goals in history.
Part of why everything collapsed, of course, is the shambolic and shameless crony-capitalist-in-chief in the White House, and the highly dubious mixed bag of grifters, fanatics and crooks in his Make America Great Again (MAGA) “movement”. Flying high on their own supply of hot air, they started this term as wrecking balls, and have mostly gotten away with it because – as we have all sadly learned - the USA never actually had sufficient internal checks and balances to prevent the whole-scale destruction of norms and precedents from within. Thus, Trump has been playing the bully with notable success: the universities (mostly) caved, the biggest law firms came crawling, and an entire ecosystem of assiduous sycophants materialized at Mar-a-Lago.
But when similar tricks have been tried abroad, the results have not been what Trump and company expected or promised. They have failed to stop Israel’s unconscionable bombardment of the Palestinians, and shocked the world with their callous cancellation of 92% of USAID foreign aid programmes, including many serving the most vulnerable people across the globe. Meanwhile, we have seen an emergence of Vice President JD Vance – the son-in-law of India via his wife Usha Chilukuri – as an attack dog in international affairs, with each episode going badly wrong: the classless picking on Vziolodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, the absurd arm-twisting of Norway about Greenland. This week Vance was once again both crude and offensive: “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It’s not a recipe for low prices, and it’s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America.”
The thing about bullies, of course, is they’re actually afraid. And once everyone sees it, the game is over for them. This is what played out in real time as stocks plunged and bond yields surged earlier this week, and Trump immediately backed off to “pause” his incredibly ill-conceived “reciprocal tariffs” while doubling down on trade war against China. Here's how the Finance Ministry of China described what happened: “On April 10, 2025, the US government announced that the "reciprocal tariff" on Chinese goods exported to the US would be further increased to 125%. The US's arbitrary imposition of abnormally high tariffs on China seriously violates international economic and trade rules, disregards the post-World War II global economic order built by the US itself, and violates basic economic laws and common sense. It is completely a unilateral bullying and coercion. China strongly condemns this. Even if the US continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer make economic sense and will become a joke in the history of world economy.”
I liked the veteran China analyst (and senior American journalist) Howard French’s contextualization of what has just taken place, in Foreign Policy: “Many Chinese people justified authoritarianism by turning to the familiar argument that the concentration of power in a disciplined executive can get things done in ways that are not possible amid the palaver and chaos of democracy. For years, Chinese graduate students in my classes boasted about this systemic advantage, but that ended with the suffocating atmosphere of Xi’s crackdown and the alarming economic slowdown that came with it. Suddenly, conversations turned to what political theorists call the “bad emperor” problem. As a new generation of young adults bemoaned the loss of an era of nearly certain opportunity, they began to see life under authoritarianism as a matter of sheer luck. In a blink, they realized, a seemingly enlightened dictator could be replaced by a rash and benighted despot.”
French says that “it has become increasingly obvious that the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy now faces the bad emperor dilemma. With each passing week, the United States’ vaunted system of checks and balances has shown itself to be largely impotent in constraining US President Donald Trump’s power.” And, “though Trump may not realise it, his theatrical escalation of tariffs on China, which he raised to 145 percent, will likely be a gift to Xi. Yes, Beijing will face difficulties in the short term—perhaps even the long run—but Trump’s behavior distracts Chinese people from Xi’s own shortcomings and lends force to Beijing’s long-standing propaganda about the superiority of its political system and Washington’s villainous designs in trying to keep China down. To the world at large, China now looks like a more moderate force in the international order oriented toward stability and the status quo. If a country has to choose a superpower to hitch its wagon to, China may loom as the preferable option.”
Here is French’s conclusion: “Bad emperors are not only self-sure and impulsive. They also tend to be badly informed. That is because by the time they have fully subjugated their own political party and surrounded themselves with yes-men, they are rarely exposed to information that contradicts their views. Trump has conflated his sense of his own invincibility with that of the United States. Because no one at home has been able to resist him, he now imagines that no one in the world can, either, [however] not only is China roughly 11 times more populous, but in little more than a generation, it has also become the leading trading partner of most countries, a greater source of finance capital than the World Bank, and a military power of the first rank. The United States will not be able to intimidate China on the basis of tariffs, nor through a bad imperial president’s exaggerated sense of his own power and the nation’s capabilities. It must look at its own weaknesses—not with misplaced nostalgia for a past that is never coming back, but with a positive and demanding agenda for the future.”
(Vivek Menezes is a
writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and
Literature Festival)
Vivek
Menezes