“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.” Marcus Aurelius

If you have made even a cursory study of empires of the past, there are a number of signs of the flaws of those empires that are reasonably common, generally when they are in decline, but not always. Among those failures that presage the fall of empires are a vast growth of state debt, the contracting out to others of the functions that made the empire powerful, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and the consequent loss of commitment to the empire by the majority and the propensity for the coming to power of leaders who are either insane, mentally incompetent or psychotic or all three.

While Caligula was emperor near the beginning of the Roman Empire, he can be taken as the kind of leader that epitomises those who generally emerge at the end of Empire. Wanting to appoint his horse a pro-consul in the Roman Senate is a case in point.

A series of equally demented decisions by Donald Trump are modern day equivalents of such perversity. At the micro-level, banning the use of paper straws because they “become soggy” or at the macro-level wanting to buy Greenland and presumably its citizens from the Danish government or to making Canada the 51st State of the US or to simply stealing the Panama Canal from Panama are illustrative of such incompetence and absurdity. Similar are the decisions to place tariffs on a range of countries and their exports to the US in the quixotic belief that these will lead to America becoming great again. The vast gaps in logic and economic grasp are evident to any with the slightest knowledge of what the consequences of such actions will be.

He seems to be under the impression that tariffs are a tax on other countries, giving the US the opportunity to re-industrialise and regain its place as the manufacturing hub of the world. Apparently none of his advisers (and I use that word advisedly), have either had the knowledge or the common sense to advise him that it is actually a tax paid by Americans. Given that the US has over the last 30 years almost totally and deliberately de-industrialised, the manufacturing capacity and competencies have largely disappeared from the US.

That will take similar decades to rebuild to the time it has taken to be destroyed and will require vast expenditures on infrastructure, plant and equipment, research and education and the training of a new generation of industrial managers. Given the current levels of US national debt standing at around $36,000,000,000,000 (trillions that is) and the increasing reluctance of overseas Central Banks to hold US debt, favouring instead the Chinese yuan and gold, it appears pretty unlikely that they will be able to borrow the sums involved and pay the inflated interest costs they will incur to get buyers for those Treasuries.

Trump will undoubtedly be expecting that putting these tariffs on imported goods will make US goods more competitive. There is just one small flaw in that view. Much will still need to be imported in the meantime and the tariffs that will be imposed upon them will vastly inflate the cost base of US organisations that use those goods as inputs into their production, making them totally uncompetitive in overseas markets and will dramatically increase inflationary pressures in the US.

Another thing making any remaining US industry uncompetitive is the appalling state of US infrastructure. Nearly $2.6 trillion over 10 years is needed just to bring US infrastructure back to an operational level, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Multiples of that are needed to bring it up to the standards of the world’s leading industrial nation, China.

Under the privatised health system in the US, employers pay the bulk of the health insurance of their employees. The private health insurers are among the most profitable companies in the US and that is because that insurance is notoriously expensive and benefits to the employee are minimal. That adds an additional cost burden to US companies that companies in competitive nations like China, Germany, France, Japan and Russia do not have to bear. That simply furthers the lack of competitiveness of US companies, making their revival even more unlikely.

Trump and his polyglot band of amateurs are incapable of even understanding the problems of reviving America, let alone being able to undertake it. The truth is that America will remain one of the major countries on the planet and will retain the diplomatic clout that comes from having a nuclear arsenal that could end all life on Planet Earth and over which they have claimed the right to first use. It is also the only nation on earth to have used nuclear weapons in war.

But the right it has claimed since 1945 to tell every other country on the planet how, and who, should run them is now gone. Its use of sanctions, illegal under international law, on up to 70 countries and the willingness to weaponise its currency (the current international currency) against those countries who will not obey them, is rapidly running out of steam as the BRICS+ countries find increasingly sophisticated ways to get around the sanctions and to work to develop alternatives to the use of the dollar. Continued claims by US elites, including the simpleton Trump, that the US is “exceptional” and “indispensable” no longer attract awe, but derision and contempt. Compared to today’s America it seems Caligula was not so insane as we all thought!!