Making America Irrelevant – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 18th March 2025, 11:32 am

Playing King of the Mountain can be fun when you are 10 years old, but it takes more than one person to play. The current administration in America wants to play King of the Mountain on the world stage, jamming its vision of American preëminence down the throats of the other 194 nations in the world. Paul Krugman is an economist who is a Nobel Laureate (2008). He was a columnist for the New York Times for many years, but left to start his own Substack channel after the last election, distraught over the Times‘ decision to roll over and play dead when it came to opposing the authoritarian polices of the incoming president. I found his post on March 17, 2025 entitled, Destroying America’s Brand —  Losing the world’s trust and a lot of money too, worthy of sharing with CleanTechnica readers. Here are the relevant parts of that article.

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Last week Mark Carney, having won the Liberal Party’s leadership election, became Canada’s Prime Minister. And it looks possible that he may hold that position for a while. Not long ago the Liberals seemed headed for an electoral wipeout, but they’ve seen an amazing surge in the polls. The secret behind that surge is, of course, Donald Trump, who has not only imposed tariffs on Canada without any justification but keeps doubling down on his completely insane demand that Canada become the 51st state. Every time Trump or his minions repeat that demand, they strengthen Carney’s hand against Pierre Poilievre, the Bitcoin-loving, Trumpy-sounding Conservative leader.

One of Carney’s first policy moves as PM was to order a review of Canada’s plan to buy a substantial number of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets. This means that Canada is joining European nations that are similarly reconsidering their dependence on U.S. weapons. This turn away from military dependence on the U.S. is understandable. America is no longer a reliable ally to the world’s democracies; indeed, between Trump’s turn toward Putin and his talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, we don’t look like an ally at all. Rumors that U.S. jets have a “kill switch” that would allow Trump to disable them at will are probably false, but sophisticated military equipment requires a lot of technical support, so you don’t want to buy it from a country you don’t trust.

How much economic damage will America suffer because it has become a rogue nation? Becoming a nation that can’t be trusted to honor agreements or follow the rule of law has to have monetary as well as political and diplomatic consequences. How big are these monetary consequences? [Based on the available data], US exposure to foreign revulsion looks quite large.

Start with those military sales. US sales of defense equipment to foreign governments have gone up a lot since Russia invaded Ukraine. Much of the increase has gone either to Ukraine or to European governments supporting Ukraine, but there is also a general trend toward rearmament as we learn that the world is a more dangerous place than we realized. Pre-Trump that rearmament meant a lot of U.S. exports. In 2024 US military exports were $318.7 billion — roughly 15 percent of total U.S. goods exports. It was also almost twice our agricultural exports. How much will these sales shrink now that foreign governments know that we can’t be trusted? Given some time to find replacements, the likely answer is “a lot.”

Military hardware isn’t the only export likely to suffer from our new rogue nation status. Our trade deficit in goods is partly offset by a surplus in services trade, but several of our major service exports will definitely be hurt by America’s turn to the dark side. One of these is education. Many foreigners come to America to study, attracted by the quality of our colleges and universities. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, they spent more than $50 billion. But if you were a foreigner considering study in the US next year, wouldn’t you be worried that you might find yourself arrested and deported for expressing what the current administration considers anti-American views? I would. So we can expect a hit to higher education, which, although we rarely think of it this way, is a major U.S. export.

Personal travel — basically tourism — was even bigger at more than $100 billion. But you can be sure that we’ll be seeing a lot fewer Canadians this year and next, and it won’t just be Canadians reconsidering their plans. Salon reports that “A number of tourists from European countries have been detained by ICE in recent weeks when attempting to enter the United States, their planned vacations instead turning into long stretches in detention. Experts say their arrests are an apparent escalation in enforcement action as…..Trump’s immigration crackdown rages on.”

Just to be clear, I’m much more worried about the threat Trump poses to democracy than his bad economic policies. And even in purely economic terms, self-inflicted damage from tariffs and deportations, plus explicit foreign retaliation, are probably more important than the costs imposed by foreign loss of trust. Yet those costs are real. One way to think about this is to say that Trump is doing to America what Elon Musk is doing to Tesla, destroying a valuable brand through erratic behavior and repulsive ideology. Did I mention that Tesla sales in Europe appear to be cratering?

True, there are differences between a private business and a nation-state. I don’t think people visiting Tesla showrooms are subject to random arrest, or that Musk will kill your car if you say something he doesn’t like. On the other hand, Tesla depends a lot more on buyer goodwill than the United States as a whole does. Still, Trump’s belief that America holds all the cards, that the rest of the world needs access to our markets but we don’t need them, is all wrong. We are rapidly losing the world’s trust, and part of the cost will be financial.

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Making America Irrelevant

From our perspective here at CleanTechnica global headquarters, the money is a secondary concern. In all the years I have been privileged to write for this publication, I have reported on dozens — maybe hundreds — of research papers published in scientific journals and I have always been struck by how many of the scientists writing those reports have Asian names. Many of the scientists doing critical research here in America are now persona non grata, thanks to the insanely paranoid policies that the US government has put in place.

This week, we learned of the wholesale cancellation of funding for researchers in dozens of fields, including those studying changes in Antarctica. Many of them will take their skills and specialized knowledge to other countries, making America the biggest loser. BYD claims to have 150,000 engineers developing new technologies. Just this week, it announced a new Blade battery that with a 10 C charge rate and a new electric motor with 780 hp that can spin to over 30,000 RPM. Have you heard of similar announcements from Ford, GM, or Stellantis? If not, what does that suggest for American competitiveness in the future? What it suggests to me is that hiding behind tariffs walls is guaranteed to make America irrelevant. While we spend time telling ourselves how wonderful we are, the rest of the world will move forward into the future and leaving us to stew in our own juices.

When my daughter was young, we spent a lot of time watching Sesame Street together. Today’s leaders may think that show is a bunch of  “woke” nonsense, but maybe we all could learn something from its simple but sophisticated messages — like this one.