Vasily Kashin: What Kind of Empire is Trump Building, and What Will Be Its Relations with Russia and China

Another essay from the Russian Journal Profile

Vasily Kashin: Director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies (CCEIS) at the Higher School of Economics, Chief Research Fellow at the Center for Comprehensive Chinese Studies and Regional Projects at MGIMO, Associate Professor at the Department of International Security of the Faculty of World Politics at Moscow State University. Ph.D. Worked at the Vedomosti newspaper and the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. In 2010-11, he was deputy head of the RIA Novosti representative office in Beijing.

First time appearance for this Russian thinker at the Gym. His Profile essay published on 5 March was again seen by RT, mutilated and republished on 8 March in English whereas my effort is all of his original essay. The difference is again obvious from the start as RT retitles it, “A new American empire: Trump, Russia, and the end of globalism: The US is resetting, but not how the world expected.” The obvious question is what other group has touted the “Reset” as a requirement—Davos, Soros, WEF, and its Globalist allies. Over the last several days, Trump’s domestic and foreign agenda has become clearer as the initial obfuscations melt away. But before I get into that, let’s read what Mr. Kashin has written:

Donald Trump's return to the White House has all the features of a political revolution. The new president is trying to quickly thin out the ruling elite, change the principles of domestic and foreign policy, and carry out a large-scale purge of the state apparatus. For the Trump administration, as well as for all revolutionaries who have gained power, the priority is the destruction of the old order and the consolidation of radical transformations in the country. The actions of the team of the 47th president of the United States in the international arena are almost entirely subordinated to the logic of the domestic political struggle.

Apparently, Trump and his entourage believe that the most important task is to exclude the possibility of returning American policy back to 2024, even if their opponents win future elections. Trump is trying to make change irreversible. The former principles of foreign and domestic policy of the United States are purposefully destroyed or discredited. Some of them have been adhered to by presidents from both American parties for more than a century. Many departments of the federal government are being defeated.

Dirty secrets from past years are being brought to light, which were suspected but for which there was no evidence. More of them will appear in the coming months in connection with the appointment of Trump's associates as heads of intelligence agencies. The confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence of the United States is of the same nature as the appointment of Vadim Bakatin as chairman of the KGB of the USSR in August 1991—she will have to forever change or dismantle the supporting structure of the "deep state".

Any revolution is a consequence of the contradictions that have accumulated in society. But the United States has been developing as a global empire over the past 100 years. The structures designed to ensure imperial expansion (military, intelligence, diplomatic, and financial) have grown during this time and have begun to exert a decisive influence on American domestic politics. Therefore, Trump cannot solve the problem of retaining power at home without revising the US global strategy of recent decades.

The American liberal empire occupies a unique place in the history of mankind. The United States practically abandoned territorial expansion in the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, at a certain point, it began to reduce the territory directly controlled by it, gradually renouncing direct control over the Philippines, and at the end of the 20th century, over the Panama Canal Zone. These "losses" were many times higher than the U.S. gains in the Pacific Ocean at the end of World War II.

Instead of land gain, expansion was carried out in the form of the extension of American legal norms, values, standards, financial influence, and military presence to new regions. The financial and military-political elites of the American empire were a product of this strategy of global domination, interested in maintaining this strategy even as its costs began to clearly exceed the benefits.

The inevitable consequence of the strategy of domination through control of global finance, trade, institutions, and the humanitarian sphere was an overvalued dollar and open borders. As a result, the United States faced a crisis in the competitiveness of its industry, which it tried to overcome by maximizing its technological leadership—something that seemed possible in the 1990s, amid the economic revolution brought about by the advent of the Internet. But then it turned out that U.S. technological leadership was not strong enough to ensure the sustainable superiority of American companies over competitors.

In the 21st century, the global model of American leadership faced a series of painful blows from outside and from within. The internal impasse of the American model became obvious after the financial crisis of 2007-2008, from which the United States never fully recovered: all subsequent growth was the product of inflating budget deficits and statistical manipulations. At the same time, in the international arena, the empire has faced growing resistance since the late 1990s. Here, the turning point was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing costly war on terror. The United States spent more than 10 years in this struggle, and by the end of it, it was discovered that China and Russia, two powers that were not taken seriously as opponents at all in the late 1990s, had built up their military potential and did not share the American vision of the world order.

Maintaining the empire began to require more and more defense and foreign policy expenditures and an increasing number of costly compromises with allies. These funds had to be found with a dwindling resource base. Discontent grew both among the population and among some of the major economic players. The empire still had a significant margin of safety, and the imperial elite was ready to continue the struggle for the survival of the previous model. This chance was missed due to a series of gross domestic political mistakes and, ultimately, the corruption and arrogance of the leadership of the US Democratic Party.

Trump and his supporters intend to stop the great experiment that was the American liberal empire of the 20th and early 21st centuries. They want to take American strategy back more than 100 years, to the presidency of William McKinley (1897-1901). Trump loves McKinley, mentions him in interviews and describes his era as the golden age of the United States. Trump's America, like the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, should not spend a lot of money to maintain a system of world rules and institutions. The new America will rely on its natural advantages–-the world's best geographical location, a huge domestic market, high resource endowments, developed industry and the world's largest technological potential.

This country will pursue a mercantilist economic policy, not only protecting the domestic market, but also aggressively using political and military tools to promote its trade interests abroad (recall the negotiations with Ukraine on natural resource deposits). At the same time, the new American empire is not at all opposed to preserving some of the gains of the old one–-hence Trump's threats against countries that dare to abandon the dollar in foreign trade.

Theoretically, the combination of the gigantic advantages available to the United States and the reduction of unproductive spending could lead to an economic breakthrough. In reality, the transition to a new model is fraught with a huge number of risks and shocks: we do not know how today's high-tech and globalized economy will react to experiments in the spirit of the 19th century.

American investment in its global military and political presence will be sharply reduced: such a presence will remain only where it brings clear economic benefits. And even in this case, it will be severely limited. At the same time, a much tougher policy of pressure and control will be carried out with regard to the states of the American continent than before, including the use of military tools, since the situation there directly affects the internal situation in the United States.

If for Biden's America the Chinese presence in the soft underbelly was a cause for concern, then for Trump's America it is unacceptable and they will fight it using the traditional arsenal of American policy in this part of the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Trump's statements about the return of the United States to the policy of territorial expansion in the spirit of the 19th century (Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone) are serious, well-thought-out and strategic. Their immediate consequence is the irreversible destruction of the foundations of American policy that developed in the 20th century. A country that talks about annexing the territory of its closest allies, justifying it only on the basis of profit, will never again be able to claim the role of creator and guarantor of the "rules-based world order." Even if Trump's party is defeated in the subsequent internal political struggle, there will be no turning back.

For the two main opponents of the United States–-Russia and China–-the changes were a serious shock. Moscow has found itself in a situation where important areas of American foreign policy, which have served as irritants in bilateral relations for decades, are being eliminated by Washington on its own initiative.

An example is the defeat of USAID, a structure that spent billions to finance instruments of political influence in the post-Soviet space, causing extreme discontent in Russia. Paradoxically, Trump was more interested in the collapse of USAID than Vladimir Putin. This structure has long been banned on Russian territory, but in the United States, its resources, as it turned out, were actively used for domestic political propaganda by Trump's opponents.

If the United States returns to the foreign policy paradigm of the 19th century, then the overwhelming number of reasons that pushed Moscow and Washington to conflict disappear. Throughout the 19th century, the Russian Empire and the United States maintained mostly friendly relations, although they were not each other's priority economic partners. In the current conditions, the threats of intense competition and contradictions between the two countries are likely to be concentrated where they touch territorially, in the Arctic. Russia will have to pay additional attention to strengthening its presence in this strategically important region.

China, on the contrary, remains an adversary and a threat to the United States. China's strategy of building a developed economy by 2049 through an active state policy and an innovative breakthrough is incompatible with Trump's mercantilist aspirations, just as it was incompatible with the preservation of Biden's liberal global empire. China cannot realize its development goals without a major redistribution of world markets and a global economic presence, including Latin America.

However, the confrontation will take place in new conditions. Trump is ready to play tough against China and intends to concentrate American resources to defeat it. Trump expects to achieve this with the help of new advantages associated with the development of the economic and technological potential of the United States. But he undermines the basis of the previous American anti-Chinese strategy–-the global system of alliances. This is especially true of the key area of Chinese diplomacy in recent years–-the European one.

Beijing's policy towards Europe since the mid-2010s has been in many ways reminiscent of the Russian model of the 1990s and 2000s. The Chinese tried to use the tools of economic diplomacy to weaken political coordination between Washington and Brussels, liberalize investment cooperation and trade between China and Europe, and ultimately open up opportunities for Chinese companies to implement large-scale projects in the EU in the field of energy, infrastructure, communications, and the like. As a result, China hoped to strengthen its presence in one of the world's largest markets and maintain access to the Western technological base.

The struggle for Europe was turning into a key front in the US-Chinese global confrontation, and the main problem that arose for the PRC in connection with the Russian NWO in Ukraine was, as one could repeatedly hear from Chinese colleagues, "the weakening of Europe's strategic autonomy and the growth of its dependence on the United States."

Now Trump is destroying relations with the EU with his own hands. Vice President J.D. Vance's Munich speech was, in fact, interference in the internal politics of the EU and showed that the United States seeks to bring its ideological allies from the far right to power in key European countries. In such a situation, the contradictions become insurmountable–-Trump will either break Europe, subjugating it, or, more likely, lose a significant part of the American influence on the EU that existed in the past.

New prospects may open up for Chinese policy in Europe. The potential for rapprochement between the EU and China should not be overestimated–-certain aspects of China's industrial policy and trade strategy cause the same fear in Brussels as in Washington. But there will be no talk of the previous level of coordination between the United States and the EU. It is quite possible that some restrictions on cooperation between Europe and China, imposed under pressure from the Biden administration (for example, on the supply of advanced equipment from the Dutch company ASML for the Chinese microelectronics industry), will be lifted in the foreseeable future. Europe's approach to the "globalization of NATO”-–the process of activating the Alliance outside its traditional area of responsibility, including in the Pacific, which began several years ago, may also change.

The situation with U.S. alliances in Asia is not so clear-cut. Trump, on the one hand, is likely to seek to strengthen the military-political component of these alliances. On the other hand, his protectionist measures may reduce America's attractiveness as an ally for many Asian countries trying to implement export-oriented models of economic growth. The United States may develop a more active partnership with the developed economies of Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore), but there may be difficulties in relations with some of the less developed ones.

Despite the fact that Washington's relations with Beijing and Moscow will follow different paths, the fantasy that the Americans will undermine the Russian-Chinese partnership is not being realized. At the heart of Russian-Chinese relations are such factors as a huge land border, the presence of significant military power in both countries, including nuclear weapons, as well as the highest complementarity of economies. The preservation of partnership relations is necessary for the survival and development of both China and Russia. In addition, by defeating the PRC, the new American empire may again approach world domination. And in the role of world leader, it threatens to turn out to be much more terrible than the old, liberal American empire.

Probably, as a result of the ongoing revolutionary changes, Russia and China will switch places: China will be at the forefront of confrontation with the United States, while Moscow will pursue a policy in the spirit of China in the 2000s. At the same time, Russia will move away from the policy of confronting the United States and undermining American positions wherever possible, which it has pursued until recently. At the same time, Europe will remain a problematic area of Russian foreign policy, where there is no reason to expect a return to constructive cooperation with the EU and Great Britain even after the end of hostilities in Ukraine. [My Emphasis]

It’s very difficult for people not living within a nation to understand what’s happening domestically, and this is very true for Trump since much of what he says isn’t what he does. Trump and his allies’s goal is to return to the conditions of the Gilded Age when the administrative state and its regulatory agencies didn’t exist. It must be recalled that it was Conservatives who enabled those agencies—the administrative state—and established what’s known as the Progressive Era. McKinley was a ChristoImperialist and saw savages everywhere. The 1890-1912 time period in US History offers many What Ifs, although the domination of state and national politics by Plutocrats and Trusts was rife and moving towards a nascent version of Fascism. Trump’s agenda is driven by the Heritage Foundation which is a longstanding faction of the Deep State, and it must be noted that the author’s term “revolution” is inaccurate since Trump has very little following for what he’s actually doing, which goes against what he pledged.

To conquer Canada and Greenland, Trump will need more assets than he has in his control. The forever wars that were sparked by the 911 false flag have bankrupted the federal government, although they’ve certainly aided the Zionists who helped plan it. The global Empire of Bases costs about $1.2 Trillion annually to support, and that doesn’t include the costs of combat in Syria and the just severed support for the 2014 war on Ukraine and Russia. The lesson Trump seems incapable of learning is that the Outlaw US Empire was unable to defeat Russia—although it destroyed Ukraine—and that defeating China will be far more difficult since China has all the advantages of geography and is now militarily superior. One other advantage both China and Russia possess is their superior industrial plant, which the Empire has mostly offshored. Additionally, that deindustrialization has also eliminated the human capital needed to operate Trump’s reindustrialization dream—the core of his MAGA pledge. Trump is also destroying the main support mechanism for the US military—the Veteran’s Administration or VA. Despite its many problems, the VA was proven to be vital at retention of servicepeople to reach senior leadership levels and the proficiency only obtained by 15-30 years of service time—those deciding to make the military a career knew the VA would be there to support their retirement and their families while serving. Destroying that institution sends the military back to its 1890 status where nothing existed to support a professional military. With today’s heavy reliance on technology, you need people to remain enlisted for 10 years minimum to properly operate what are very sophisticated and very complex systems and then train new recruits. This action by Trump disproves the notion that his policies are “well planned.”

Trying to reduce China’s trade will be an impossibility. The amount of trade China has with the Empire amounts to only 3% of its GDP and can function fine without access to its market. For the Empire, however, that’s a different story. Trump’s fantasy of attaining trillions of dollars in revenues via his tariff regime will drastically reduce the US public’s spending power since those trillions will come from their pockets, not foreign nations, since Trump has no idea how tariffs function—they are a domestic tax. To run his Imperialist program, Trump will need trillions he doesn’t have. Many are opining that Trump’s aim is to make the Outlaw US Empire leaner and meaner. If NATO and the Empire of bases are abandoned, all that would do is lessen the budget deficit, not create trillions of dollars to invest in rebuilding US industry. What domestic corporations does Trump see providing billions to his MAGA? All the major corporations are mostly financialized except for some portions of the tech sector. Trump wants to see shipbuilding return. Good luck with that for reasons already stated. Same with his reincarnation of Reagan’s Missile Defense and dreams of Mars. The Military Industrial Complex has a multiyear backlog of contracts to supply Ukraine with weapons and munitions because it refused to expand its production. And as many know, those weapons didn’t work very well. NASA has essentially been privatized to Musk’s Space-X and has none of the capabilities required to get to Mars. let alone the Moon or to construct another space station.

As for the European portion of Eurasia, Biden’s policy colonized it, while Trump seems wanting to increase its economic dependency. Europe’s problem is its so-called leadership’s fanatical obsession with defeating Russia—they’ve swallowed whole their propaganda while Trump has repudiated that Narrative, although he hasn’t come right out and confessed it was the Outlaw US Empire that started the war in 2014, or even earlier when it comes to broken promises and NATO expansion. No NATO nation—not even the Outlaw US Empire—has the financial and industrial might capable of continuing the war. It may take some years for Europe to regain its senses, although there are exceptions. However, if it has any hopes of reindustrializing, it must make amends with Russia since anyone running the Outlaw US Empire will rape Europe for as much as it can extract, with Trump being no exception. What Europe needs is a return of “left” political parties to confront the EU-Globalists: There’s plenty of room for a Nationalist Left to fill the current political vacuum.

Returning to the author’s question in his title, what will be Trump’s Outlaw US Empire’s relations with Russia and China be like. Frustrating is easy to see as the Outlaw will continue to be an Outlaw. Unmentioned by the author is Trump’s continuing abetting of the gross Zionist criminality in Palestine. Wang Yi has already provided China’s answer that’s the title of my report. Both nations will try and coax Trump to cease the Outlaw behavior and finally join the global community of nations. Trump, however, like all previous US presidents will likely continue to behave unilaterally with little regard to what the global community or international law has to say. Domestically for Russia, I see it very unlikely it will enter into any contractual agreement of a strategic nature, although it might allow US-based companies to reenter Russia’s consumer market with their brands. Neither will bend to US bullying, and that would extend to BRICS. China has already pushed back hard in its own strategic manner to Trump’s trade aggression. It will also fight the illegality of the so-called Monroe Doctrine which is implicit interference in the domestic affairs of other nations. The bottom line is relations will not improve until the Outlaw ceases being an Outlaw, and I don’t see that happening with Trump 2.0, nor do I see that changing while the Duopoly remains.

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