Bulletins and News Discussion from April 7th to April 13th, 2025 - Juche With Trumpian Characteristics

Image is allegedly of the note Trump wrote while editing a speech while on the way back from the G20 summit.

The top Russian-Chinese agent, Donald Trump, has decided that the pace of dedollarization and the decline of American financial hegemony is going too slowly. He has therefore decided to put tariffs on everybody; from America's largest trading partners to uninhabited islands. In the process, he is trying to create an autarkic America. Jokes aside, interpretation and analysis of this has ranged across a wide spectrum. I think we can broadly agree that the most idiotic are the "true believers"; those that actually believe Trump's every word, and that this will somehow bring back American manufacturing and whatever other inane promises he has made.

However, there is a much more interesting debate. The first camp are those who believe Trump is acting as an inadvertent accelerationist due to his lack of understanding about how the world economy and dollar hegemony functions (and that this will subsequently ensure that countries flock to China instead). The second camp are those who believe that Trump does know what he's doing, at least to a certain extent, and that the effective result of this period of madness will be countries kowtowing to the United States; renegotiating trade deals to be even more in favor of the US in order to get tariffs reduced. There's even a yet more cynical camp who believes that in fact, this entire trade war is just theater for further national wealth redistributions from poor to rich; that all these monumental international trade wars are more of a sideshow. To quote the linked article: "[...] out of the mountain of tariffs that threaten to turn into a global trade war will emerge the mouse of further tax cuts."

I'm not embarrassed to admit that I have absolutely no idea which one of these is the closest model to reality. We're in new economic and political ground, and even if the tariffs are quickly renegotiated and/or dropped, the impacts will continue to reverberate around the world for years. I'm sure we'll debate this for months to come here, though!

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1.5K comments

Everybody’s been talking about the tariffs, but thoughts on the Iran talks? The military buildup over the last month looks like it was to force Iran to negotiate on their nuclear program. If a deal can’t be reached, I think we’ll see strikes against their nuclear facilities.
- I know Iran is up against a wall here, but this is the same god damn thing over and over again. US says let’s negotiate, US breaks deal, more sanctions, more proxy violence, US says let’s negotiate, US breaks deal…etc etc. I guess Iran feels they need to go through the motions here to avoid immediate confrontation? But it’s also clear confrontation is inevitable. And if they’re not building nukes it doesn’t matter what they’re doing. Really sucks that there’s no power that would unite with Iran to counter the US. I honestly don’t see a point in even keeping up with these “talks.” It’s just theater to create the pretense of going to war
- Any deal would be a stepping stone to their eventual destruction. The US doesn't deal in good faith or win/win.
- Iran is in a kind of Deathspiral currently .. mostly self inflicted by its own Political classes Weakness and its Martyrer seeking Ideology..
  The Strange spectacle where Israel could beat all Irans friend to death while Occasionally Bombing the Embassy, the President , the Honoured Guests and then their funerals -with Iran not taking up the Mantle - was very much witnessed and is understood.
  They named what they DIDNT DO ! "true Promise 2" ... absurd cowardice ... they will kneel i belive .. becuse they promise themself "respite" from their kneeling and we saw them kneel before..

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