Opinion | How Trump Is Trying to Recast American Power

You’ve called what we’re doing the [EXPLETIVE] of American power. Tell me about that idea. OK, so this is a term which we are taking very directly from Cory Doctorow. And so he uses this to talk about the way in which the platform economy works. Over time the platform has these incentives to get [EXPLETIVE] and [EXPLETIVE] and [EXPLETIVE] for the user. So our argument is that if you look at the ways in which United States power and United States hegemony works, it’s kind of like a similar system, that is, we are seeing the increased [EXPLETIVE] of all of these platforms that the United States provides that the world relies on. So the dollar clearing system, we’ve already talked about — the way in which the U.S. is able to use the dollar in order to leverage its advantage against other countries. We can also think about weapon systems as being very similar. Once you buy, for example, a fifth-generation fighter aircraft, you are not just buying the aircraft. You’re buying into this extensive platform, which you need to support the aircraft to provide the information that allows you to figure out where to target things, all of these other bits and pieces, and the United States can possibly shut that off. So I think that the United States did not set this up as a deliberate kind of honey trap. This is not a world in which the United States decided: We are going to pull everybody in. And then, once we pull everybody in, we are going to figure out ways to screw the maximum amount of money and tribute out of them that we possibly can. So I think — but I do think that this very much is the way in which Trump and the people around him view the world. And I kind of feel like the last year or so, Donald Trump has been doing everything he can possibly to prove that it is a tribute system and to try and figure that out.