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Trumpismo vs minilateralism

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal

As November Kelly has pointed out, the weirdest thing about Trumpismo is how the man seethes and rails against a game that is thoroughly rigged in America's favor, because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

Before Trump, the deal was that everyone would pretend that we had a "rules-based international order" in which every country got a fair deal, even as America cheated like hell and sucked the world dry. It's really impossible to overstate how advantageous this was to America. By pretending to be a neutral interchange spot for transoceanic fiber cables, it got to spy on the world's internet traffic:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

By pretending to have a neutral currency, it got to exercise "dollar dominance" through which the nations of the world sent America the things they dug out of the ground or built in their factories, in exchange for America making small adjustments to a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve. And by pretending its tech exports were neutral platforms, America got to raid the world's private data and bank accounts, spying and looting to its heart's content.

When Trump kicked off his campaign of incontinent belligerence – putting tariffs on the exports of countries populated only by penguins, trying to steal Greenland – it became impossible for the world's leaders to carry on this pretense.

This led to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – the world's most Davos man – standing up at this year's World Economic Forum to denounce the whole post-war settlement as a bullshit arrangement, announcing that we were in a period of "rupture" and promising a new world of "variable geometry" in which "middle powers" would exist in overlapping webs of alliances, without the USA:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it

Now, thanks to Trump's America First agenda, America's many advantages are collapsing. The dollar is in retreat, with Ethiopia revaluing its national debt in Chinese renminbi:

https://fidelpost.com/ethiopia-and-china-move-toward-final-stage-of-debt-restructuring-agreement/

Even worse: Trump's disastrous war of choice in Iran is heading for a humiliating defeat for the dollar, with Iran announcing that any peace deal will require a $2m/ship toll to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a toll they're already collecting, payable only in renminbi:

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-tehran-toll-booth-forces-tankers-pay-millions-leave-strait-hormu-rcna265258

(I really hope Trump's plan to rename it the "Strait of Trump" catches on, so that his name in invoked with every tanker that traverses the strait, weakening the dollar and America's power – a very fitting legacy.)

For the past quarter-century, I've fought the US Trade Representative in various international fora, as the USTR piled all kinds of conditions America's trading partners that made it impossible to pursue any kind of technological sovereignty:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Every now and then, I think about how furious the USTR must be, watching Trump blunder through all the subtle traps they wove around the planet.

Take the "digital trade agenda," a set of policies that the US has made its top priority for a decade. Countries that succumbed to the digital trade agenda had to agree not to pursue "data localization" (rules that ban companies from moving or storing data about the people of your country outside of its borders), and they had to agree to duty-free status for digital exports like apps, music, games, ebooks and videos.

Today, the digital trade agenda is in tatters. Data localization is the top priority, with projects like the Eurostack and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium breaking all land-speed records to build on-shore apps and data-centers that will keep data out of the hands of American companies and the American government:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic

And this week, duty-free status for digital assets hit the skids when a meeting of the World Trade Organization saw America's demands for a 10-year renewal of a global deal fail because Brazil wouldn't agree to it. Brazil has good reasons to mistrust the digital trade agenda, after Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down a high court judge's online life in retaliation for passing sentence on the Trump-allied former dictator, Jair Bolsonaro:

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0211

Brazil blocked the 10-year renewal of the duty-free status of digital exports, worldwide. In its place, the US got a two-year renewal – meaning that US companies' ability to export their digital products after 2028 will depend on whatever Trump does in the next two years, a period during which we know Trump is going to be a raging asshole (assuming he doesn't have a stroke first).

Even more interesting: Brazil struck a "minilateral" digital duty-free deal with 66 non-US countries, including Canada and the EU:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0331/EU-and-Canada-lean-into-a-new-world-role?icid=rss

Now, the US is a powerhouse exporter of digital goods, and has been since the start. This was such a given that in Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, Stephenson imagined a future where the US had all but collapsed, save for the three things it did better than anyone else in the world: "music, movies and microcode":

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015147/Music-Movies-Microcode-High-Speed

Today, America's media and software industries are dying, and Trump is holding a pillow over their faces. He stole Tiktok and gave it to his buddy Larry Ellison, whose failson's acquisition and merger of two of the five remaining studios Trump also waved through:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/28/golden-mean/#reality-based-community

Game studios are ensloppifying their flagship products, alienating their most ardent customers, and are laying off thousands of programmers and artists following incestuous mergers that leave them hopelessly bloated:

https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/activision-blizzard-layoffs

Meanwhile, there's a global cultural market that's sweeping away American media: from K-pop (and K-zombies) to Heated Rivalry to Brazil funk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_carioca

Now, thanks to Trump, there are just a couple of years until America's wilting cultural exports will face high tariffs from markets where international media is surging.

This is how the American century ends: not with a bang, but with a Trump.

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