Sh*tting BRICS: Trump, Dollar Primacy, and MultipolarityIf you think Trump’s foreign policy is going to be neither imperialist nor primacist, then you’re ignoring the evidence staring you in the face.
Trump just announced a big, paranoid threat against the BRICS+ nations on his new favorite social media platform:
This actually reveals a lot about the direction of Trump’s foreign policy. Dollar primacy—aka dollar hegemony, aka dollar supremacy, aka dollar dominance, aka dollar imperialism—is a bad deal for the working class, but it matters to Trump because it’s a big deal to Wall Street financiers and to the national security state. More importantly though, dollar supremacy is a key site of contradiction in the Trump/MAGA/NatCon project, and the first step to making US foreign policy less evil is working out those contradictions. Let me explain. The Root of |
This is not wrong—there is no BRICS currency in the making. But it’s also overly sanguine—dollar supremacy is currently in decline. To say that 58% of global transactions are dominated in US dollars is to say that close to half of global transactions are NOT denominated in US dollars. More importantly, Setser betrays an ideological blind spot.
Brad Setser, who is not a dummy, lives in a bubble that mystifies America’s role in the world. He thinks extreme American power-hoarding is a good thing, and he largely takes it for granted. Put differently, he and his ilk do not acknowledge that US primacy is actually the strategy.
But primacy is about using state power to hoard power, which means actively keeping others down and snuffing out threats prematurely. This is the same reason the national security state hate-fetishizes China. It’s not that China is an actual threat to the US; it’s a threat to US dominance, and an exaggerated one at that.
So the fact that Trump would be paranoid about the emergence of alternative power centers is very much what primacy is about. Let me rephrase this as crisply as possible: Trump is a primacist and his stance on BRICS currency is smoking-gun proof that.
Having said that, primacy comes in shades and I think the Trump variant will prove to be ethnonationalist and imperialist. But it’s primacy all the same. And if you don’t believe that, you will struggle, like Setser, to make sense of why Trump would be mobilizing against a non-existent alternative currency.
A Site of Contradiction
It’s important to acknowledge that Steve Bannon, Erik Prince, and the NatCon intellectuals all believe that 1) multipolarity is a dominant trend of our time, and 2) the diffusion of power that multipolarity represents necessarily means the death of dollar supremacy.
That’s a contradiction.
They wish to prolong American dollar primacy—hence Trump’s threat against the BRICS—even though they recognize that a world moving away from dollar primacy (a multipolarizing world) is both inevitable and a good thing for their larger counter-revolutionary project.
There’s a second contradiction at play here too. Primacy and nationalism are only compatible as imperialism. The ideological rhetoric dressing up American power under Trump is that of a white, Christian, patriarchal nationalism—ethnonationalism, America style. Part of being against global institutions is being for the supremacy of the nation-state.
But nationalism cannot logically function as a principle of international order if your nationalism imposes power restrictions on—and refuses to respect the sovereignty of—other nations. Your ordering principle in that case is not nationalism; it’s American exceptionalism. And that is the source code of American empire since the days of Woodrow Wilson.
It’s also worth mentioning that the contradictions associated with Trump’s BRICS threat are not new, only heightened. One of the contradictions in Bidenomics was always that dollar primacy kept the value of the US dollar relative to other currencies high, which in turn priced out US exports in green tech (EVs, solar panels) and semiconductors from global consumer markets. The failure of Biden’s economic statecraft was overdetermined, and a key reason for that was an unwillingness to decide between American primacy and economic growth.
Getting Real About the BRICS
There is a final contradiction here more profound than the others, and it exists because primacy has given rise to a delusion. As I said last year:
BRICS+ is, at its most promising, just an anti-hegemonic bloc. It’s both a sign of multipolarity and a collective wish-cast for multipolarity. And it’s not—I repeat, not—a threat to the US.
And as the great Pankaj Mishra also commented:
the “vision” that BRICS countries, including its newest members, have in common, amounts to little more than a cynical expediency: to increase their bargaining power in the trade, technology and military deals that they will continue to vigorously pursue with the United States and Europe.
That’s a good thing…unless your goal is to enforce global hierarchies of power and wealth. So that, then, is precisely what Trump and the NatCons find threatening about BRICS as an idea. They want domination, and so any possibility of non-domination emerging is a threat to their project.
What they fail to see is that their choices—just like primacy itself—are accelerating American decline. As Immanuel Wallerstein observed:
To maintain hegemony, the hegemonic power must divert itself into a political and military role...its use of military power is not only the first sign of weakness but the source of further decline.
BRICS+ is in no position to develop an alternative currency, and it’s not really even trying to. But faced with bullying from Trump, there is no question that’s about to change. The ultimate contradiction in Trump’s threats is that they are meant to shore up American power but inevitably erode it. America, once again, brings its rivals together.
In Iraq alone, “Conservative estimates indicate that at least two million people died as a direct result of the sanctions.”