The Dive, 3/1/25
Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends
Quote of the Month
"The attempt to turn back the wheel of history will be futile. We Social Democrats know that one cannot undo the facts of power politics with mere legal protests. We see the power-political fact of your present rule. But the people’s sense of justice is also a political power, and we shall not cease to appeal to this sense of justice... In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible." - Otto Wels, parliamentary leader of the German Social Democratic Party, March 23, 1933
What I’m Reading:
1. How Trump is a weak strongman
Why you should read it: Historian Timothy Snyder explains on his Substack why Donald Trump is a weak strongman and what that means for America and the world.
“Americans have a certain idea of freedom. We are fine just the way we are and the only problem are the barriers in the outside world. In this mental world, Musk’s hollowing out of the government can seem justified. Trump’s betrayal of friends and destruction of alliances can seem convenient. We will be great again by being all alone, with no one to trouble us… Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world… The strongman is weak because no one beyond the United States has anything to want (or fear) from the self-immolation. And weak because Trump submits to foreign aggression, putting waning American power behind Russia.”
“The weak strongman undermines the rules, but cannot replace them with anything else. He creates the image of power by his rhetorical imperialism: America will control Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Gaza, etc. From there, it is hard to say that others are wrong when they invade other countries. The weak strongman is left endorsing other people’s invasions, as with Russia and Ukraine. He lacks the power to resist them. And he lacks the power to coerce them. And, ironically, he lacks the power to carry out wars himself. He lacks the patience, and he lacks the instruments… Trump plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But the strength consists solely of the submissiveness of his audience. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it, Trump will get rid of our problems, and then we will be free. And of course that kind of Nosferatu charisma is a kind of strength, but not one that can be brought to bear to solve any problems, and not one that matters in the world at large. Or rather: it matters only negatively. As soon as Trump meets someone with a better dictator act, like Putin, he submits. But he can only enable Putin. He can’t really even imitate him… It’s an obvious point, but it has to be made clearly: no one in Moscow thinks that Trump is strong. He is doing exactly what Russia would want: he is repeating Russian talking points, he is acting essentially as a Russian diplomat, and he is destroying the instruments of American power, from institutions through reputation. No American president can shift an international power position without policy instruments. And these depend on functioning institutions and competent civil servants. In theory, the United States could indeed change the power position by decisively helping Ukraine and decisively weakening Russia. But that theory only becomes practice through policy. And it is not hard to see that Musk-Trump cannot make policy.”
Why it matters: “A weak strongman brings only losses without gains. And so the descent begins. Destroying norms and institutions at home only makes Trump (or rather Musk) strong in the sense of making everyone else weak. In our growing weakness, we might be all tempted by the idea that our strong man at least makes us a titan among nations... But the opposite is true. The world cannot be dismissed by the weak strongman. As a strongman, he destroys the norms, laws, and alliances that held back war. As a weakling, he invites it.”
2. Why China’s trade surpluses are bad, part II
Why you should read it: Council on Foreign Relations international trade expert Brad Setser details the ways China under Xi Jinping is making the world pay for its own domestic economic policy mistakes.
“But [Donald Trump] is not the only danger the world economy faces and may not even be the biggest. That may be President Xi Jinping of China, whose more strategic and calibrated industrial and economic policies are fundamentally distorting and harming global trade… Over the past six years, China’s imports of such [manufactured] goods increased by an average of only $15 billion a year, essentially no change at all when inflation is taken into account. Its manufactured exports, on the other hand, have grown more than 10 times as fast, by over $150 billion a year… China now dominates global manufacturing, and its trade surplus dwarfs the biggest run by Germany and Japan during their eras of postwar export supremacy. Countries around the world get cheap Chinese products, but they can’t sell nearly as many of their own to China. Their export sectors are hurting — see Germany — and not hiring.”
“The roots of the problem go back to the global financial crisis of 2008. The crisis caused Chinese exports to fall. The government could have offset this by strengthening the ability of Chinese consumers to buy the country’s products through policies that support household incomes and by reducing the hefty taxes on low-wage workers and domestic consumption that finance China’s state… Chinese leaders opted instead to funnel the country’s huge household savings into an immense investment boom. New bridges, roads and, above all, apartments were built, and all of that construction and related economic activity allowed China to rely a bit less on exports for growth. But this created a real estate bubble, and when Mr. Xi responded by cracking down on the housing sector in 2020, he triggered a deep property slump that has persisted… In other words, Mr. Xi is making China’s trade partners and competitors pay for the government’s misplaced bet on real estate and its longer-term failure to strengthen the spending of Chinese households.”
Why it matters: “All told, Chinese export volume is growing three times as fast as global trade. This means China’s success is directly coming at the expense of manufacturers in other countries, which increasingly cannot compete and face pressure to abandon sectors that China targets. With China’s real estate market still in the doldrums, the pattern shows no signs of changing. This points to a world economy in which China has no need for the industrial inputs of other countries while leaving those countries dependent on Chinese-made goods — and vulnerable to Beijing’s political and economic pressure.”
3. Why Trump is a very pro-China president
Why you should read it: Politico diplomatic correspondent Nahal Toosi contends that, his anti-China rhetoric notwithstanding, Donald Trump has proven to be a president quite amenable to Beijing’s interests.
“…Trump has started his second term looking like the U.S. president Beijing has long wanted… In less than three weeks, using everything from threats of war against allies to freezing foreign aid, Trump has arguably done more to weaken America’s standing in the world than in his entire first term. He has given China’s communist regime a chance to strengthen itself just as it was facing economic headwinds.”
“Since taking office on Jan. 20, Trump has frozen U.S. foreign aid in numerous countries while taking steps to shrink the U.S. Agency for International Development, endangering humanitarian and economic aid for millions in places where the Chinese government has sought to increase its influence. He has weakened his shot at convincing allies to move away from China by taking steps to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada, two of America’s friends, neighbors and top trading partners. He has allowed tech mogul Elon Musk to take steps to gut the U.S. federal workforce, a move that tosses out an enormous amount of expertise in fields such as fighting Chinese propaganda. He has mocked the rule of law and Congress in a way that reinforces Beijing’s top-down leadership structure. And he has threatened to invade other countries, including U.S. partners — rhetoric that could embolden China to further menace Taiwan… At the same time, he has sought to safeguard the Chinese-owned company TikTok, invited Chinese leader Xi Jinping to his inauguration (Xi declined) and made it a point to seek out a call with him.”
Why it matters: “But the lesson other countries are learning is not necessarily to obey America, multiple foreign diplomats told me. Instead, foreign officials say they are now more likely to take that call from the Chinese foreign minister, get tea with the Russian ambassador, or show up to meet with the Turkish commercial attache.”
4. Why people sanewash Trump
Why you should read it: On his Substack, Tufts political scientist Dan Drezner ponders the question of why so many people seem so eager to sanewash Trump’s most bizarre and deranged mental gestures.
“There three distinct tribes that are currently rationalizing this particular batshit insane idea. First, there are Trump’s sycophants and media enablers of those sycophants. These are the anonymous White House insiders and White House reporters who rely on these insiders as sources… This sort of sanewashing is the most amusing, because it is basically a variation of someone saying, ‘crazy… or crazy like a fox?!’ It requires the person doing the sanewashing to constantly invoke business cliches like ‘outside the box’ to convince their interlocutors that world politics can be solved using the same business principles that forced Trump to declare bankruptcy multiple times. It rests crucially on the logic of ‘surely things can’t get much worse, why not try this?’ when the truth is that bad situations can always get worse.”
“The second category of sanewashers are Trump’s contrarian pundits and colleagues. These folks almost always start their political conversations with ‘I didn’t vote for Trump, but…’ and then proceed to defend his strategic acumen for the next hour… Even dumb statements from Trump can be reframed as ‘he’s just asking questions.’ For the pundit, this has the added bonus of enraging and attracting sophisticated eyeballs by bravely declaring that Donald Trump is either right about something that everyone else thinks is rubbish, or asking the uncomfortable question that everyone else is too afraid to raise... My point, however, is that sanewashing is vital to sustain the premise that Trump is a secret political genius.”
Why it matters: “The final group of Trump sanewashers are policy advocates weaponizing Trump’s words to advance their own agenda… This is the sanewashing that matters the most, because it leads to real-world consequences. Trump subordinates will be incentivized to implement policies they wanted to implement anyway by using Trump’s words as an intellectual pretext. Indeed, this move is a win-win: the subordinate can praise the Great Leader while executing their own policy agenda at the same time.”
5. How Trump and Musk are assaulting the foundations of American power and prosperity
Why you should read it: In MIT Technology Review, contributor Karen Hao delves into the ways the Trump-Musk attack on America’s scientific research and technological development agencies will cripple American power and prosperity.
“Ever since World War II, the US has been the global leader in science and technology—and benefited immensely from it. Research fuels American innovation and the economy in turn. Scientists around the world want to study in the US and collaborate with American scientists to produce more of that research. These international collaborations play a critical role in American soft power and diplomacy. The products Americans can buy, the drugs they have access to, the diseases they’re at risk of catching—are all directly related to the strength of American research and its connections to the world’s scientists… That scientific leadership is now being dismantled, according to more than 10 federal workers who spoke to MIT Technology Review, as the Trump administration—spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—slashes personnel, programs, and agencies. Meanwhile, the president himself has gone after relationships with US allies.”
“The US currently has the most top-quality research institutes in the world. This includes world-class universities like MIT (which publishes MIT Technology Review) and the University of California, Berkeley; national labs like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos; and federal research facilities run by agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Defense. Much of this network was developed by the federal government after World War II to bolster the US position as a global superpower… The return on these investments is difficult to measure. It can often take years or decades for this kind of basic science research to have tangible effects on the lives of Americans and people globally, and on the US’s place in the world. But history is littered with examples of the transformative effect that this funding produces over time. The internet and GPS were first developed through research backed by the Department of Defense, as was the quantum dot technology behind high-resolution QLED television screens. Well before they were useful or commercially relevant, the development of neural networks that underpin nearly all modern AI systems was substantially supported by the National Science Foundation. The decades-long drug discovery process that led to Ozempic was incubated by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institutes of Health. Microchips. Self-driving cars. MRIs. The flu shot. The list goes on and on… Beyond fueling innovation, a well-supported science and technology ecosystem bolsters US national security and global influence. When people want to study at American universities, attend international conferences hosted on American soil, or move to the US to work or to found their own companies, the US stays the center of global innovation activity. This ensures that the country continues to get access to the best people and ideas, and gives it an outsize role in setting global scientific practices and priorities. US research norms, including academic freedom and a robust peer review system, become global research norms that lift the overall quality of science. International agencies like the World Health Organization take significant cues from American guidance.”
Why it matters: “…dismantling the behind-the-scenes scientific research programs that backstop American life could lead to long-lasting, perhaps irreparable damage to everything from the quality of health care to the public’s access to next-generation consumer technologies. The US took nearly a century to craft its rich scientific ecosystem; if the unraveling that has taken place over the past month continues, Americans will feel the effects for decades to come.”
6. Why DOGE’s incompetence is a feature, not a bug
Why you should read it: Wired reporter Brian Barrett observes that the stunning incompetence displayed by Elon Musk and his clique of young cybercriminals running DOGE is a feature of their efforts, not a bug.
“This is just the truly dumb stuff, the peek behind the veil of DOGE, the confirmation that all of this destruction is, in fact, as specious and arbitrary as it seems. When in doubt, tear it all down, see what breaks, assume you can repair it—maybe with AI? It’s the federal government; how hard can it be?… This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things.”
“It doesn’t work like that. Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all time; when he turned to baseball in 1994, Jordan hit .202 in 127 games for the AA Birmingham Barons. (For anyone unfamiliar with baseball stats, this is very bad. Embarrassing, honestly.) Elon Musk is the undisputed champion of making money for Elon Musk. As effectively the CEO of the United States of America? Very bad. Embarrassing, honestly… It takes a certain swashbuckling arrogance to propel a startup to glory. But as we’ve repeatedly said, the United States is not a startup. The federal government exists to do all of the things that are definitionally not profitable, that serve the public good rather than protect investor profits. (The vast majority of startups also fail, something the United States cannot afford to do.)”
Why it matters: “There are two possible explanations for this mess. One is that Musk and DOGE have no interest in the government, or efficiency, but do care deeply about the data they can reap from various agencies and revel in privatization for its own sake. The other is that a bunch of purportedly talented coders have indeed responded to a higher civic calling but are out here batting .202.”
7. Why DOGE will backfire
Why you should read it: University of Michigan public policy professor Don Moynihan argues in The Atlantic that DOGE will fail due to its contempt for public service and public servants.
“President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting… For all of Trump’s and Musk’s talk of efficiency, their policies will likely slow down the government. The state needs capacity to perform core tasks, such as collecting revenue, taking care of veterans, tracking weather, and ensuring that travel, medicine, food, and workplaces are safe. But Trump seems intent on pushing more employees to leave and making the civil service more political and an even less inviting job option. He bullies federal employees, labeling them as ‘crooked’ and likening their removal to ‘getting rid of all the cancer.’ A smaller, terrified, and politicized public workforce will not be an effective one.”
“To start, let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending… If the federal government should, then, rightly be focused on hiring, it is quite obviously doing the opposite, but the manner in which the Trump administration and DOGE are forcing workers out will only compound the error. Ten thousand USAID employees, for example, were recently placed on administrative leave. Employees on leave must still be paid, so little money will be saved in the short run. And if they’re rehired, the agencies will have to incur the costs that resulted from the disruption in their work. The USAID inspector general’s office has said that the agency has almost entirely lost its ability to track $8.2 billion in unspent aid. (The inspector general was fired the day after his office made that announcement.) Projects such as drug trials and medical treatments have been abandoned.”
Why it matters: “We rely on public employees every day, usually not noticing how they make our lives better. The costs of dismantling agencies, dramatically politicizing state capacity, and demeaning the idea of public service will still be counted long after Trump has departed the scene.”
8. Why DOGE amounts to an artificial intelligence coup
Why you should read it: For Tech Policy Press, Eryk Salvaggio writes that DOGE’s wire-stripping of the federal government amounts to a coup against democracy on behalf of the purveyors and propagandists of artificial intelligence.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology for manufacturing excuses. While lacking clear definitions or tools for assessment, AI has nonetheless seized the imagination of politicians and managers across government, academia, and industry. But what AI is best at producing is justifications. If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability to disappear, you simply say, ‘AI can do it.’ Then, the conversation shifts from explaining why these things should or should not go away to questions about how AI would work in their place… The Trump administration frames generative AI as a remedy to ‘government waste.’ However, what it seeks to automate is not paperwork but democratic decision-making. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are banking on a popular but false delusion that word prediction technologies make meaningful inferences about the world. They are using it to sidestep Congressional oversight of the budget, which is, Constitutionally, the allotment of resources to government programs through representative politics… In contrast to Musk and his acolytes' ongoing claims of ‘existential risk,’ which envision AI taking over the world through brute force, an AI coup rises from collective decisions about how much power we hand to machines. It is political offloading, shifting the messy work of winning political debates to the false authority of machine analytics. It's a way of displacing the collective decision-making at the core of representative politics.”
“Amidst the chaos in Washington, Silicon Valley firms will continue to build their case that they are the answer. We can expect another industry announcement of a radical new capability for AI in the near future. OpenAI may once again claim to reach PhD-level intelligence (as in September 2024 and again in January 2025), or DOGE may launch a new chatbot trained on government data… To serve its purpose, any generative AI deployed here wouldn't have to be good at making decisions or even showcase any new capacities at all. It merely has to be considered a plausible competitor to human decision-making long enough to dislodge the existing human decision-makers in civil service, workers who embody the institution's values and mission. Once replaced, the human knowledge that produces the institution will be lost… By shifting government decisions to AI systems they must know are unsuitable, these tech elites avoid a political debate they would probably lose. Instead, they create a nationwide IT crisis that they alone can fix.”
Why it matters: “The AI coup emerged not just from the union of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It is born of practices and beliefs now standard among Silicon Valley ideologues that are obscure to most Americans. However, the tech industry's weakness is that it has never understood the emotional and social complexity of actual human beings… The AI coup depends on a frame of government efficiency. This creates a trap for Democratic representatives, where arguing to keep government services–and government employees–will be spun as supporting government waste. But this is also an opportunity. AI achieves ‘efficiency’ by eradicating services… Do not fall for the trap. Democratic participation and representative politics in government are not ‘waste.’ Nor should arguments focus on the technical limits of particular systems, as the tech elites are constantly revising expectations upward through endless promises of exponential improvements. The argument must be that no computerized system should replace the voice of voters. Do not ask if the machine can be trusted. Ask who controls them.”
9. How Trump resembles Mao Zedong
Why you should read it: Long-time China scholar Orville Schell makes the case that Trump resembles no other figure more closely than Mao Zedong, whose talent and penchant for nihilistic disruption produced the calamity of the Cultural Revolution.
“…there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong. While Mao, who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology, or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection… Mao’s abiding belief in the power of resistance led him to celebrate conflict. ‘Without destruction, there can be no construction’ (不破不立), he proclaimed. Another vaunted slogan of the time declared: ‘World in great disorder: excellent situation!’ (天下大乱形势大好). This impulse to disrupt or ‘overturn’ (翻身) China’s class structure proved massively destructive. But Mao justified the resulting violence and upheaval as essential elements of ‘making revolution’ (搞革命) and building a ‘New China.’”
“The Trump administration has an equally voracious appetite for disruption and chaos. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose co-founder Peter Thiel is also a Trump acolyte, recently described the new president’s overhaul of the United States government as a ‘revolution’ in which ‘some people will get their heads cut off.’ And this revolution’s executioner-in-chief would appear to be the world’s richest person, Elon Musk… Musk is more than a little reminiscent of Kuai Dafu, who was deputized by Mao himself to lead Tsinghua University’s Red Guard movement. Kuai not only brought chaos to his campus, but led 5,000 fellow Red Guards into Tiananmen Square shouting slogans against Liu and Deng, before attempting to lay siege to the nearby leadership compound, Zhongnanhai – much as Trump’s own version of the Red Guards did at the US Capitol in 2021.”
Why it matters: “Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness. Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.”
Odds and Ends
How Musk’s cuts to the National Science Foundation have already disrupted the U.S. Antarctic Program…
The first new royal tomb to be discovered in Egypt since Howard Carter found King Tut over a century ago…
Fifteen songs from the legendary and deeply idiosyncratic 1960s and 1970s rock and funk musician Sly Stone…
On a strange rash of “dinosaur” sitings in the Congo…
How a recently-unearthed woodhenge in Denmark may be connected to Stonehenge and similar monuments in England…
What I’m Listening To and Watching
Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) takes up the red-white-and-blue vibranium shield as the title character in the entertaining and enjoyable superhero thriller Captain America: Brave New World.
Paradise, an excellent post-apocalyptic thriller involving a Secret Service agent (Sterling K. Brown) unraveling the mystery surrounding the murder of the president (James Marsden) and the possible role of a tech oligarch (Julianne Nicholson) in a cover-up.
The second season of School Spirits, a supernatural murder-mystery series which finds high-school student Maddie (Peyton List) trapped in limbo (and the grounds of her high school) as she seeks answers to her own demise.
The essentials of legendary mid-century jazz musician John Coltrane, at least according to the good algorithms over at Apple Music.
“The Song is Over,” a deep cut from the Who’s seminal 1971 album Who’s Next.
Image of the Month
