The US and preparations for the anti-Chinese game
"The EU has treated us terribly. I will do something significant"
D. Trump
D. Trump
For obvious reasons, today a significant part of the examination is devoted to new decrees and proposals from the American White House. Documents are churned out there at the speed of machine gun shots, so the media simply do not have time to process them.
These decrees and orders should neither be overestimated nor underestimated - this is a testing of the situation by creating artificial stalemates. Stones are thrown one after another into different bodies of water, and then a new American team studies the parameters of the diverging circles.
Media moves, preliminary moves and the main game
There is story about a Zen Buddhist "teacher" who would unexpectedly hit lazy followers on the back with a heavy staff, who were unable to master the "path of emptiness". After the lazy student had been gasping for air for a few minutes, he would say to him: "Here it is."
Over the last twenty years, a significant part of world politics has become the sphere of pure hired management, which is obliged to coordinate decisions with "customers". It is not adapted to react preventively or, as it is fashionable to say, "proactively", it had other qualitative selection criteria.
Such “stick blows” from D. Trump’s team throw both the political management itself and the circles behind it off balance, force them to fuss, to break out of their usual routine – all precisely so that the new American team can create a favorable basis for negotiations due to the surprise effect and receive the most complete set of input data for analysis.
Nevertheless, behind these blows of the stick, the change of pictures in the kaleidoscope, it is still worth not losing sight of the main task. The scheme where the economy is the "China-EU" link, and politics is the "USA-EU" link, must change: both politics and the economy are only "USA-EU". The new team has begun preparations for this game in the game, and it is precisely this stage that should not be lost sight of, separating media moves, preparations for the main game, and steps already within the framework of the main game itself.
Main Party Markers
In a couple of weeks, D. Trump and company have created quite a few “juicy” news items. However, if we look closely, we will see that they have not yet crossed the boundaries of private American discourse or have crossed them only slightly. The Panama Canal is part of a long-standing discussion in the United States, the topic of illegal migration and the return of migrants to Latin American countries is the ideological basis of the election campaign, the topic of tariffs with Mexico also has a long and multi-layered history, the Greenland issue has been debated for decades. Canada and its “independence” is generally a subject of endless discussion, a kind of endless social and political joke.
In fact, there are no duties with Mexico and Canada as such yet, but the information circles on the water have gone quite well and vigorously. And they have gone well because Mexico, Canada, Denmark, Panama understand that D. Trump, unlike his first attempt at writing in such a high position, is now part of a large (albeit unspoken) consensus, which means that the bureaucracy will not tie him hand and foot indiscriminately.
This consensus is well marked not only by the election process itself on November 5, which was extremely remarkable, but also by the agreement between Israel and the Hamas movement. It should also be noted that the candidates of D. Trump's team are going through the hearings relatively smoothly.
Nevertheless, D. Trump's team has not yet thrown its sighting stones at the most important nodes (or rather, in this logic, reservoirs) in the international agenda, where decisions from Washington are expected. And these are the Ukrainian crisis, Taiwan, India and Brazil.
The mutual introduction of duties on a limited list of goods from China and the USA is not even a stone, but rather a straw, indicating not even intentions, but a "signal-response", and Panama's withdrawal from the "One Belt - One Road" project does not create any problems for the movement of Chinese goods, and therefore lies purely in the political plane. As soon as serious steps and proposals (threats) are made in this line, this will mean the beginning of the main American game, but for it the current team needs to ensure preliminary conditions-trends. Two of them are minimally necessary: the issue of the budget deficit and the issue of the oath of allegiance to the Euro-bureaucracy.
Tariffs, Agencies and Deficits
The temporary closure of programs by the odious USAID (US Agency for International Development) structure, the hope and support of "grant eaters" around the world, has made a lot of noise. But in reality (particularly for Russia), there is not much that is positive about it.
It has long been clear that through this channel huge funds were pumped into feeding parasitic plankton. Parasites multiplied on grants, but their quality also fell, recipients of grants became synonymous with degradation.
The revision of this “institution” and the increase in efficiency will undoubtedly please the American taxpayer, but not at all those countries where the renewed USAID will again bring (and it will definitely bring) democratic values.
By destroying this nest, sending old mattresses and pillows from there to be "roasted", D. Trump's team is getting rid of the crawling, annoying and useless ballast, but this same revision will leave professional, non-ideological technologists in place, who are much more dangerous than the rest. Moreover, in sanitized offices it will be easier and simpler for such technologists to work.
It is hard to come up with a better media cover for the new team than the USAID reform, but the total budget of this agency does not exceed $45 billion per year. Everything is relative, and $45 billion is a huge budget by world standards, but if we take the annual expenses of even the entire system of similar "agencies" of $1,75 trillion, then the share of the odious USAID will be a modest 2,6%, although within the framework of expenses for the aggregated column "international relations" this will already be 50%.
It's just that the lion's share of US budget expenditures is spent within the US itself. But USAID is simply a concentrated anti-Trump camp, and by poking its functionaries into a pile of useless expenditures, the new team, in addition to settling scores, finds it easier to audit a much heavier pool of agencies related to justice, education, health and medicine, and these three areas alone drag out expenditures of another $300 billion per year.
Few people have made it through the 925-page “Mandate for Leadership 2025” collection, but more than half of the material in it is devoted specifically to optimizing the system of public spending, which directly and unambiguously requires auditing several hundred agencies that receive money from ministries, but are often not controlled by them.
The budget of the agencies is $1,75 trillion, the US budget deficit is $1,8 trillion, and a significant part of this deficit is planned to be cut by optimizing the institution of agencies themselves. Subordinate them to departments, optimize personnel and programs. A significant part of the latter is to be published, de-ideologized and brought up for public discussion.
The duties that D. Trump (and not only he) so wants to impose on imports are aimed not only and not so much at leveling the imbalance between exports ($3,1 trillion) and imports ($3,9 trillion), but at the same task of reducing the budget deficit, which is becoming one of the main factors in the growing national debt and the costs of servicing it.
The trade deficit is hard on Turkey, would be a problem for Russia, but for the US, as the main issuer of trade currency, it is anything but an existential threat. D. Trump's idea of "introducing duties on all imports" seems absurd at first glance. But 10% duties on all imports is $390 billion in budget revenues.
Could this growth affect inflation, which would "eat away" at the effect of budget revenue growth? Yes, it could. Or perhaps the majority of suppliers, in the fight for the most capacious solvent market, would prefer to reduce their selling prices in return, while Chinese and Danish carriers would reduce their tariffs.
The Chinese and the EU have partially made such concessions, but what is wrong with the US market? Formally, nothing. The final result, where these trade "swings" will stop, no one knows - where the limits of reducing selling prices and freight rates will be, and where the limits of growth of budget revenues will be. This is a live game combination, where everything will still be in the process of adjustment and fine-tuning, but it is obvious that the new administration intends to play it and will bet on it.
If import tariffs and optimization of agency expenses yield the estimated revenues, then D. Trump's team will not be able to eliminate the budget deficit. But this is not necessary, even half of the estimated result will stop the growth of the budget deficit by itself and give a trend towards its reduction, and this is the main signal for the entire financial system as a whole.
D. Trump does not need to report on the elimination of the deficit, like an accountant shuffling numbers across the balance sheet, but rather confirm the trend of stopping the growth of the deficit and record the trend of its reduction.. Moreover, expenses will be optimized at all levels of the system, it’s just that tariffs look like a faster method compared to all the others.
To start the main game, D. Trump needs not to fix the final result, but to fix the trend and get the consensus of the financial system, which will confirm that it believes in the future reduction of the debt burden.
The European bureaucracy factor
The second important moment in preparation for the main game is the oath of allegiance of the EU political management and the elite groups behind it.
In Russian expertise, two polar opinions coexist simultaneously: that the EU is “about to fall apart” and that the EU is a “political puppet of the US.” The supposedly relatively integral “political class” in terms of the past pro-American strategy is breaking down the remnants of the EU’s economic base.
In terms of the capacity and brevity of meanings and their presentation, everything looks almost flawless, especially since economic growth in the EU is at the level of statistical error, and the political line often smacks of outright schizophrenia.
However, the inaccuracy and schizophrenia of a number of decisions have a good basis in the form of economic coherence of EU members, and this is an impressive figure of 67% of foreign trade - two thirds of their needs for goods and services EU countries cover exclusively at each other's expense. They do not grow, but dividing this colony of polyps into parts is not as easy as many patriotic forecasters would like.
If we take open sources and do a cross-analysis, it will look like the truth that more than half of the expenses for "humanitarian initiatives" and for feeding the supporters of "values and agenda" were covered in the EU by US money. But the other part was taken from the expenses of the EU itself. And these expenses are also distributed between Brussels itself, Paris, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Warsaw, and also Amsterdam, Oslo and even Copenhagen, which is suffering from D. Trump's initiatives.
For D. Trump, there is a kind of “collision” here in that, having in reality a good basis for economic connectivity, this entire European “pool of Democrats” is quite capable of holding the siege for some time and even bargaining for conditions.
And the day is not so far away when not only V. Orban will openly flaunt "special conditions with the USA", but also his long-time "passion" U. von der Leyen will quite actively bargain with the American lover of big deals. The outcome of this bargaining is not at all obvious.
Brussels is now actively, very actively playing in Serbia (including Chinese projects), Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Having wiped itself in Georgia, having held on to Moldova with problems and distortions, the Euro-bureaucracy is cementing its Balkan "underbelly", getting rid of various kinds of annoying opposition there. The protests in Serbia and Montenegro are covered sparingly here, and meanwhile they are very significant and important. They are significant because the EU can put their result on D. Trump's table as a strong argument in trade.
Behind the head of the European Commission is the factor that the US needs the EU as a single player with which it can discuss basic conditions within the framework of the “single window” policy, behind D. Trump is the factor that it makes no difference to him which ideologically tinged force will control this single window.
Whether I. Musk, S. Benon and many others will be able to change the ideological colors in the European Parliament and Brussels itself is not the simplest question. The financial resources pumped into politics were essentially equal for the US and the EU. Joining the US, Canada, Mexico and each EU country separately into a common system is a process that will take years, and the EU as a single whole is for the US a question of the color of the political ideology of governance and the oath of Eurocracy.
It is clear that no one will directly sign the European Charter of Oath to Washington, but (as with the budget deficit) D. Trump needs to receive confirmation of the trend for such an oath to begin the main game for the division of the EU and China, collect markers by which it will be possible to begin the game on the main board. And it is on it that such moves as India, Brazil, Taiwan and full-fledged restrictions from the EU towards China will already be.
Without resolving the issue of the European oath, D. Trump will be forced to observe the reverse trade between Brussels and Beijing, which can greatly complicate the main task, and without resolving the issue of the budget deficit, D. Trump will not receive the go-ahead for a full-fledged anti-Chinese party.
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