Never Trumpers: Trump Tariffs are the End of ‘American Empire’

President Donald Trump’s imposition of reciprocal tariffs marks the end of “American Empire,” according to melodramatic claims from one of Bill Kristol’s group of globalist, pro-migration, Never Trump advocates.

 “The age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, [has] ended,” wrote Kristol’s colleague, Jonathan Last. “We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.”

Kristol topped that wild-eyed alarmism by evoking the collapse of European peace in 1914 as Germany triggered World War I, saying in his April 4 “Morning Shots” email:

It was almost 111 years earlier, on August 3, 1914, that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stood with a friend at dusk at a window of his room in the Foreign Office, looking out across St. James’s Park. Seeing the first lights being turned on along the Mall, Grey famously remarked, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

The Liberal statesman was right. World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, Stalin and Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust—these all followed in the space of three decades. The lamps were not to be lit again in Grey’s lifetime. A century of relative stability and peace, of progress and prosperity, was followed by thirty years of chaos and war, of darkness and misery.

Midway through this terrible period, the imprisoned Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci—a very different man from Grey, but as perceptive in his own way—is said to have remarked, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Yet Kristol and his Never Trumpers helped cause the political earthquake that they deem to be a disaster.

For decades of rising public opposition, they did nothing as Americans protested globalism, which helped presidents and globalist investors to hollow out the citizens’ society and families. Since at least 1990, free trade and easy migration have hammered hundreds of millions of citizens while wealth flowed upward to investors and the top one percent. Those ruthless policies shredded the faith of ordinary Americans in the high-IQ elites who were elevated to help balance the trade-offs in a complex society and economy.

Worse, Kristol and his allies cheered on the globalized economy that produced what he now describes as a political catastrophe. 

In February 2017, Kristol, then editor-at-large of the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine, deemed Americans to be disposable and declared that population replacement would be best for the elite’s exercise of national power around the globe:

Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?  [I hope] this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere. Whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse. You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico.

“Immigrants do have more of the old-fashioned American virtues than lots of old-fashioned Americans … they are huge net contributors to the country, to the economy,” Kristol said at the 2017 event at the investor-funded American Enterprise Institute.

This elite blindness is commonplace. For example, Breitbart News’s entertainment editor Jerome Hudson wrote up an anti-Trump tirade by TV talker Stephen Colbert:

At no point in his 13-minute monologue did Colbert, who’s worth an estimated $75 million, offer a single syllable to explain why Trump enacted his sweeping tariff plan — how so-called free trade agreements like NAFTA resulted in the loss of an estimated 4.5 million manufacturing jobs, gutting whole swaths of the middle class in the United States and wiping out generations of earnings for small and rural town working Americans in the process.

But Kristol’s complaint hinted at the cause of his political blindness when he endorsed Last’s explanation for the tariff policy: barely concealed contempt for normal Americans, whom he expects will defend “American empire.” Again he quotes Last, who wrote, “We have a deeply stupid government . . . [and] we have the government we deserve. The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.

“I very much want to believe that this terrible judgment is not true,” Kristol wrote. “But I very much fear that the lamps are once again going out all around us.”