Mini-roundup: DJT'S creative destruction of the international order

[Winehole23]

Focus on the mideast:

“We have made some big moves and everyone in the region is on their toes which is where they need to be for real change. Our goal can’t be to keep things stable and as they are, our goal has to be to make things significantly BETTER! Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things in order to get there.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ew-world-order


Yanis Varoufakis:

Armed with the exorbitant privilege that owning the dollar presses affords him, Trump then takes a look at the trade flows with the rest of the G7 and comes to an inescapable conclusion: he cannot possibly lose a trade war against countries that have such high surpluses with the US (eg Germany, Italy, China), or which (like Canada) will catch pneumonia the moment the American economy catches the common cold.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-will-stop-him

The world shouldn’t view the breakup of the existing system as a negative — provided, of course, that it is replaced with something rather than nothing. A world of interlocking webs of connection, as Anne-Marie Slaughter has noted, could be much more resilient and stable, and if Trump in his bluster and tone-deaf ability to offend and pick unnecessary fights hastens that outcome, all the better.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/11/...ational-order/

[RandomGuy]

This will give new impetus for the EU or China to press for abandoning the dollar as a reserve currency.

If that ever happens, the US will be a world of hurt.

[Winehole23]

what are the downsides for the EU and China if they do that?

[koriwhat]

the rest of the world!