Henry Farrell in Programmable Mutter:
I did the Ezra Klein show last Friday, and it went up on the NYT website this morning. A whole lot has happened in the meantime. The way I think is through talking with other people, and a lot of thinking happened in the conversation. It wove together what happened in the world last week with what is happening in Minneapolis, in ways that I am still trying to work out. So here is a short interim report, written less as a polished essay than an attempt to pull these thoughts together.
What became clearer to me, as Ezra and I talked, is the connection between the limits to US power in the world, and the limits to the Trump administration’s power inside the borders of America. We briefly mentioned a long-ago fight that I had with the late David Graeber, who advanced a theory of world politics in his book, Debt, that described the global economy as a tribute system, and emphasized the awesome power of the United States to terrify the rest of the world into submission. Back then, I disagreed with Graeber’s claims and Graeber took strong exception to my disagreement, provoking a very long response from me. The upshot of my argument was that the United States is incapable of pulling what I called the “Delian League Switcheroo.” Thucydides describes how 5th century BCE Athens transformed its alliance against the Persians, the Delian League, into a protection racket to squeeze allies and turn them into vassals. I argued back then that the US would find it very hard to do this at scale…
More here.
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