We've had massive trade deficits as a lubricant for 'global leadership' for decades. This model stopped working for the American middle class in 1971. Trump is a symptom of its failure. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/us/politics/trump-world-diplomacy.html

Nick Kaldor in 1971 said our trade model will change "a nation of creative producers into a community of rentiers increasingly living on others, seeking gratification in ever more useless consumption, with all the debilitating effects of the bread and circuses of Imperial Rome."

The history of the post-war era is so profoundly mis-taught. American "leadership" was about trading away chunks of the middle class in return for anti-Communist purposes and global stability.

John Maynard Keynes knew this would happen at Bretton Woods when the U.S. stupidly put all the burdens of trade adjustment on debtor nations. Starting the 1960s the Germans and Japanese ripped us off for decades. The Chinese too now.

Vague "national security" goals were the real force behind NAFTA. And China PNTR. And the TPP and Korea FTA. In 1979 Volcker crushed American manufacturing to protect the dollar. This was not at the behest of the U.S. but of Europeans.

So much social discord in America is taught as resulting from innate cultural conflicts without reference to the obvious context of de-industrialization and declining wages that started in the mid-1960s.

Now Angela Merkel is the leader of the destructive self-righteous mercantilists. The love of her politics among liberals was just rancid. I'm a liberal internationalist, which is I think it's clear we have to turn away from this model of sacrificing our middle class.

Anyone interested in this can read Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade or her earlier book Running Steel Running America.