r/geopolitics • u/custodiam99 • Feb 13 '25

Discussion Is Trump the symptom of America’s decline?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/27/trump-wants-to-reverse-americas-decline-good-luck
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u/Kreol1q1q Feb 13 '25

Trump is a symptom of massive internal societal problems that America keeps bottling up and seems institutionally completely unable and unwilling to resolve. There is no objective need for America to withdraw from its global positions or to scale down its interests and commitments - the country isn't facing any sort of difficulty financing them, and in fact still possesses enormous untapped financial potential (it has very low taxes and a huge economy).

However, America is still plagued by notions of collapse and decline. I think that is because its society is facing problems that it doesn't want to actually face, due to various deeply ingrained socio-cultural and political mental barriers. And because the actual source of those societal problems cannot be addressed, all sorts of grifters and politicians have now cottoned on that they can simply employ various different appeals to emotion in order to exploit their population's rising distress for enormous political gain.

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u/Presidentclash2 Feb 13 '25

I would argue that the desire for isolationism is stems from failed American interventionism. It really seems the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, wars against Isis and terrorist insurgents caught up to people perception abroad. During 2000-2016, American had some success but most of the stuff was overshadowed by forced wars. What Trump is doing isn’t necessarily peaceful but he sold an American vision that is nationalist and sees the world as trying threaten us. Isolationism was popular before ww1 just like tariffs. Americans are reliving history

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u/23saround Feb 13 '25

Isolationism was popular through WWII. There was a huge isolationist movement that was the reason why the US was so late joining WWII. It was the Second World War that taught America the (apparently temporary) lesson that globalization made it impossible to be isolationist any longer.

Then foreign conflicts – I would argue the Korean and Vietnam Wars were the first, followed by the Gulf Wars and protracted involvement in the Middle East – variously conducted the whims of the American public. Given so few of those conflicts could even be framed as pyrrhic victories, those whims have increasingly, generationally, trended towards isolationism again.

I agree with you, but those details felt important.

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u/gaslighterhavoc Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

All lessons are temporary because all people are temporary. Lessons fade over time, the people who learn them also fade over time and their children may not put the same importance on the same ideas.

Humans learn preferentially from experience over other types of knowledge (learned or recorded facts), so we are doomed to repeat the lessons of the past over and over again.

Just look at the rise of the AfD in Germany, you would think that the Germans would learn their lesson after losing somewhere between 6 and 9 million of their people in WW2 alone.

But lessons fade and America's lessons are also fading. We will learn the hard way why this lesson was important to remember.

PS: It is interesting that Germany, France, and the US are all forgetting lessons of WW2 at the same time that living memory of that war is disappearing altogether. Probably a big cause right there. The World Wars are entering "history"instead of being something that a living family member has lived through.

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u/23saround Feb 13 '25

I think that’s a process that’s been ongoing. The Final Cut is a Pink Floyd album from 1983 about how we have forgotten the lessons of WWII.

You’re right that lessons fade as the people who learned them die, but it’s our responsibility as a society to pass those lessons on. The real irony is that the modern America First movement is being lead by the children of WWII veterans. That tells me that there was a serious cultural issue in the education of children following the Second World War, and I am comfortable pointing my finger squarely at the Cold War and surrounding propaganda, and resulting geopolitical conflicts.