Title: Is U.S. Global Dominance Eroding? w/ Alfred McCoy
Show: The Deep Focus Show
Date: 2026-02-13
URL: https://youtu.be/iN56bHhDu5Q
Duration: 50:00

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[00:03] He's declared a unilateral retreat and defeat in this new cold war. He's pulling us out. And instead of this United States contending with other two powers and maneuvering and maximizing its alliances and its diplomacy and its economic leverage uh to maintain some kind of stable balance [music] like we did during the cold war and its aftermath, he's pulling out completely and he's got a kind of different very different vision, a kind of trontinental vision.

[00:38] Welcome back to another episode of Deep Focus. If you followed the news lately, and I know you do, [music] we all do, uh, you know all about the US uh, rattling the the cage of Iran. You know about the the snatching of Venezuelan President Maduro. You know about the whole Greenland story. And you probably know that China is doing so well financially that it's just buying alliances all over the world. Well, does this spell the end of the US empire? Are

[01:12] we in those final years or maybe final decades of the US empire? After all, we can't maintain this defense budget forever. One trillion dollars. Donald Trump wants to raise it to one half trillion dollars. Remember at today's budget that's bigger than the next eight largest countries in the world combined. I travel a lot. I see the the kinds of roads that other countries have, the the first class hospitals, the beautiful

[01:43] airports, the ports, high-speed bullet trains. Why don't we have those things? Well, because we spend our money on war and on the implements of war. We're going to talk about that and about what the future holds with a renowned expert in this area. Professor Alfred uh McCoy is an American historian and he's an educator. He is a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and he is extensively published on the issue of of

[02:14] American hegemony. He's also an expert in the history of the Philippines, the foreign policy of the United States, European colonization of Southeastern Europe, Southeast Asia, rather, the illegal international drug trade, and the CIA's history of covert operations. We could have a whole conversation just about that. Professor McCoy, thanks so much for joining us. It's great to have you, >> John. Pleasure being on. >> So, Professor, you've argued um you've been very consistent in your arguments over the course of decades. uh you've

[02:45] argued recently in in a new book uh in uh an interview with Democracy Now on Tom Dispatch uh and elsewhere that we really are in the final stages of of the end of the American Empire. Can you explain that to us? Can you walk us through it and and how we got to what appears to be the beginning of the end rather quickly compared to other empires? >> Sure. Uh [clears throat] let me begin at the beginning. I'm an historian of the Philippines. Actually,

[03:16] more particularly, I'm an historian of parts of two little islands. Not so little, but you know, from a global perspective, two little islands in the Philippines. All right. So, so how do I know about the whole big wide world or what right do I have to say about anything? Well, uh, about 21 years ago, I got together with 130 historians on three continents who were experts in various aspects of imperial history, and we mounted a project on empires in

[03:46] transition. We looked to the European past, the American present, and the global future. and we held conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, Sydney, Australia, Manila, Philippines, and Barcelona, Spain. We published two books which together are about 1,500 pages long. and and what we came up to at that time when we wrapped up the project in about 2011 2012 after 8 years a pretty hard work a lot of you know

[04:20] footnotes and cogitation what we came up to is that it looked like the United States Empire was following the course of all empires they rise they peak they decline it's just inevitable and it looked like the United States was clearly on a trajectory of decline what was missing by about 2012 when we were wrapping up our affairs was really a successor power >> and [clears throat] it was just at that point that China was coming online. And

[04:50] the United States admitted in one of the great errors in the history of empires, the United States thought that it could bring China with 20% of the world's population and the most powerful uh empire consistently throughout human history. we can bring this this little state China into the World Trade Organization into the international trading community and then we could somehow make them play the game by our rules, right? You know, because I don't

[05:22] know because we're so powerful and or or we're so nice or we're I don't know whatever it was. It was just a an an incredible exercise of imperial hubris by elites in Washington DC. And by the time China had spent a decade inside the World Trade Organization, they had accumulated $4 trillion dollar in foreign exchange surplus. And in 2013, President Xiinping launched China on the Belt and Road initiative, which is the

[05:53] largest foreign aid and development and loan program in the history of humankind. It's 10 times 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan which up to that point at during at the end of at the start of the Cold War 1947 to 48 to 1952 it was 13 billion. It was the biggest foreign aid program in human history. It was incredibly successful. Well, the Belt and Road Initiative was 10 times the foreign aid program and it launched China on a trajectory towards

[06:24] global power. And so suddenly beginning in 2012 2013 we were looking for a successor power some nation strong enough powerful enough to challenge America and that has been China. And you know I've been in my little way following China following this game of empires since then. So it's been basically 21 years that I've been working on this project. And I got some observations that I can share with you if you >> I' I'd love to hear them.

[06:55] >> Okay. Look, as I said earlier, all empires have a natural cycle. They rise, they peak, they decline. And and clearly by 2004, the United States was on the decline. I mean, you could see it. I mean, good heavens, the Imperial hubris, the, you know, the invasion of Iraq in 2000, uh, 2003, uh, based on on bogus fabricated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and the dismal outcome of that, the simultaneous intervention in Afghanistan, which is a 20-year path to

[07:26] disaster. Okay, both of them in a global scale, you know, medium-siz events, but indicative of an empire that was in decline. At the start of the Cold War, whenever we intervened with just the breath, the hint of US intervention, governments fell, uh, presidents fled into exile and our clients took power in in prime ministerships and presidential palaces around the world. Well, clearly that age was over. There all kinds of signs of decline. Okay. uh and so uh the

[07:58] the question then is you know in this natural trajectory to decline how is the US managing this decline how is it dealing with its descent from being you know the world's sole superpower a unipolar power into being primis interaris okay uh it can be done look at the United Kingdom okay United Kingdom during its century plus of global Dominion acquired enough cultural, intellectual, and financial assets so

[08:30] that it's declined from controlling a quarter of the globe directly and half of the planet both directly and indirectly to being a, you know, a modest island, you know, off the coast of Europe. um you know it's been softened by the accumulated assets cultural, financial, political that Britain acquired in at its peak of power. So we could have done the same. We could have had a a long slow trajectory where we lose elements of our

[09:03] hegemony, but the world system that we've created and that and that we would continue to defend would provide us with you kind of a buffer with assets that we could carry for into our retirement. if you will, from uh from global hegemony. Well, it's not worked out that way. Um uh the the Trump administration is is adopted very aggressive policies uh in several related arenas that are accelerating that decline. And if I

[09:34] could go through them very quickly, um the first is geopolitics. All right, this is the the underpinning of all global power. It's a word that's thrown around in the newspapers and magazines among the the commentary at you know very glibly but it's actually you know a serious subject and when you look at geopolitics from an academic perspective uh you reach a conclusion that for a thousand years more or less and

[10:04] certainly for the last 500 years the basis of global hegemony is a dominant position on the Eurasian landmass. From a geopolitical perspective, Eurasia is by far the biggest continent on the planet, it's home to 70% 70% of the world's population and productivity. Seven out of every 10 people on the planet live in Eurasia. All right? So to be a contending or hegemonic power, you

[10:35] have to have a presence in Eurasia. The United States uh learned this during World War II. After all, what was that war fought all about? Why why did those 77 million people die? Because the United States was fighting to evict the Axis powers from their perch at the antipodess, the axial ends of Eurasia, Japan in the east, Nazi Germany and Italy in the west. Okay? And when we done when we did that, we took those positions. We were the we were dominant in Western Europe and we occupied Japan

[11:06] and South Korea etc. Okay. And so at the start of the cold war, you know, that founding generation that launches the cold war, those guys were most of them ex-military guys like Dwight Eisenhower. They were men who during World War II for four years, they had drunk a daily diet of geopolitics between their morning coffee and their bourbon night caps. They knew exactly where global power lay and they created the US position at the start of the cold war at

[11:37] both ends the antipodess of the Eurasian landmass that made us exceptionally strong and we ring that continent with bands of steel in terms of mutual security alliances very importantly NATO uh MTO STO and then f those are middle eastern Southeast Asian packs okay mito from basically uh from Turkey all the way to Pakistan and Sito from Pakistan all the way to the Philippines and then

[12:08] five bilateral mutual defense packs up the Pacific literal from Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan. We ringed Eurasia. We were dominant. We confined the Soviet Union, the Sinos Soviet block behind the Iron Curtain. And whenever they ventured out, we often sent covert operatives to check their interventions. Sometimes we sent conventional forces as we did in South Korea, uh, South Vietnam. Um, uh, uh, okay. But we

[12:41] managed always to kind of push them back behind the iron curtain and keep them contained, giving us the free world, threequarters of the planet for our ambit during the cold war. And all we had, all Washington did during the cold war, our basic strategy is keep them contained and then wait for them to make a mistake. And of course in 1979, they ventured out. Okay? They invaded and occupied Afghanistan because the local their local communist clients were not doing well. They sent 100,000 troops. What did America do? He sent one guy,

[13:13] you know, CI operative, ven veteran CIA guy, Howard Hart, sent him to and he, you know, used CIA's millions. He built a a mujadin Afghani army of 250,000 men. And for 10 years, we the Mujadin bloodied and beat the Soviet army. And when they pulled out in February of 1989, they were demoralized. They were a hollow shell. And within months, you know, because remember February 1989,

[13:44] the last Soviet tanks come across the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan into the then Soviet Union. And you know, that's February. Eight, nine months later, Eastern Europe erupts in mass protests, anti-communist protests, challenging overthrowing Soviet client states in the captive nations of Eastern Europe, the critical buffer zone that Stalin created and grabbed at the end of World War II. And you know every time before that when the mobs in uh arose to

[14:17] protest the crowds arose to protest communism Eastern Europe the Warsaw pack sent the tanks 1956 Hungary they sent thousands of tanks to crush that uprising. Uh in 1968 in the Prague spring they sent tanks into Prague crush that uprising. This time they didn't send tanks. Well, actually they sent a few in Lithuania and that didn't go well and the protests kept erupting until there was actually a massive protest against that Lithuanian intervention in Moscow itself by a 100,000 Russians

[14:48] protesting Soviet intervention. I mean basically the satellite states broke free and the Soviet Union broke up and the cold war was over and America's geopolitical strategy had proven to be ruthlessly but brilliantly successful. Uh, I mean it was a great victory in basically the longest war in modern history. In fact, the longest war probably in history, longest major war in human history. Okay, we won hands down because we had a skillful geopolitical strategy and we maintain that position. Okay, in the decades

[15:21] since, well, what is President Donald Trump doing? Donald Trump has decided that he's going to pursue something different. Instead of the United States being a global hedgeimon contending for power in the Eurasian land mass in what scholars have called the new cold war between Moscow, Beijing, and Washington, he's declared a unilateral retreat and defeat in this new cold war. He's pulling us out. And instead of this United States contending with other two powers and maneuvering and maximizing

[15:52] its alliances and its diplomacy and its economic leverage uh to maintain some kind of stable balance like we did during the cold war and its aftermath, he's pulling out completely and he's got a kind of different very different vision, a kind of trontinental vision. >> Well, may I may I interrupt you on that point? Over the last several weeks, there have been a couple of pieces in places like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post to a lesser extent, but they they talked about using the Maduro uh snatching as

[16:26] as a hook. They said that Trump has reiterated uh the Monroe Doctrine that there will be no foreign interventions, no Chinese refineries in the Western Hemisphere, etc., etc. But at the same time, they argued he was conceding Taiwan to the Chinese and conceding Ukraine to the Russians and he was pulling us back into a multipolar world or into acceptance of a multipolar world. Do you think it's been that well thought out? Or perhaps

[16:57] Trump is seeing the the writing on the wall on the one hand that we are near the end of our empire. But even if that's true, how do we account for this crazy proposal to increase the Pentagon budget by 50%. >> Okay, couple things. First of all, you talked about um Ukraine, Venezuela, Taiwan. Okay, the the current chips on the on the the risk board of

[17:28] geopolitics. Okay, that all fits with with with Trump's strategy, which I call his trontinental strategy. Instead of the US being a global hedgeimon contending uh for its you know on the Eurasian land mass and competing with other powers, what he sees instead is basically the world the partition of the planet in three zones with Russia under Putin dominant in the former Soviet sphere places like Ukraine. Uh and then China dominant in East Asia. Uh so give

[17:59] them Taiwan, who cares? Uh and then the United States and and Trump states this very expressly, very explicitly in the national security strategy which he released last November that the United States will become dominant in the Western Hemisphere and this will become our zone and we will exercise our full military, commercial and diplomatic leverage to maintain our hegemonic control over this region. And you know I I think it's uh ill advised in a couple of ways. First of all, a unilateral

[18:32] retreat and a self-inflicted defeat in in the great game of nations pulling back from uh Eurasia and withdrawing from global contention uh is going to be very destabilizing for the world. It will certainly weaken the US position not only diplomatic and and militarily but also economically and we can come to that later on. Okay. But second of all, this retreat into the Americas and this

[19:02] attempt to create a US sphere in the Americas is not going to play well in Latin America. We did this from the 1890s through the early 1930s. It was called gunboat diplomacy. Uh we, you know, intervened in Colombia. We presided over the independence of Panama and then with unseammly haste we grabbed the Panama Canal zone in a treaty with the client government that we virtually created. We

[19:32] shunted forces in and out of countries like the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua. They stayed for years, sometimes decades for at a time, turned them into virtual client states and aroused such antipathy in Latin America that when President Roosevelt took office in 19 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR took office in 1933, one of the first things he did was to proclaim a good neighbor policy with Latin America, which was a basically

[20:02] kind of like a an indirect apology for what we've been up to and a promise that we would be intervening in Latin America again. And this paid huge benefits during World War II uh despite Nazi attempts to in Vagel and and uh with conservative governments in Latin America, it maintained a a loyal pro-American zone. We had a very strong ally in Brazil that was critical for our geopolitical position. World War II. After the war, uh we signed the Rio

[20:34] Pact. Most people don't even know the Rio pact anymore, but it's still there. It is a mutual defense treaty for most of the nations in the Western Hemisphere, you know, signed as peers, as equals. We're going to defend each other. All right. Um, and then in 1955, very importantly, we concluded the NORAD agreement with Canada, which is the closest military alliance on the planet, bar none. I mean, most Americans don't even know there is a NORAD. NORAD has been critical to our defense since 1955.

[21:05] It's how we defend our our northern frontier. The under NORAD, the commander is an American Air Force officer. The deputy commander is a Canadian. And so we have a foreigner, a non-American actually in command of American forces. I mean, this is extraordinary. There's no other alliance like it in the world today. Uh not even NATO comes close to the intimacy of that. So, so we were in a very strong position in this hemisphere and this exercise of this

[21:36] unilateral great power susanity over the Americas is is already backfiring. Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, a very intelligent and very skillful leader, off to Beijing recently, concluding a ending the the the kind of coolness in relations, signing a what looks to be like an important economic relationship with China. The Latin American region, which chafed mightily during the era of gunboat diplomacy, uh has its

[22:07] nationalism just beneath the surface, ready to erupt. This is a very strong region of nationalism Latin America. Uh and and [clears throat] you know uh let's let's put it bluntly. Okay, look armies, navies, air forces, military does not an empire make. Okay, it's an instrument. It's a tool. Trump has confused the the tools, the toys with the geopolitical reality. Okay. The real substance of empire is is

[22:39] diplomatic alliances and close commercial relations. China is already the dominant economic power in Latin America. Nothing Trump has done is going to change that and and and can change that. Okay. If anything, uh I mean look what happened. you know, his announcement that Canada is going to become the 51st state, you know, um, again, offending Canadian nationalism, which is a more subtle nationalism, you know, way deeper beneath the skin than

[23:11] Latin American nationalism. But even that just recoiled, rebelled, and, you know, Canada's off on its own middle power path. And that, you know, and that includes cozing up to China. Well, that that's already been going on in Latin America and that can intensify, you know, uh and and the consequences will be that at the ironically Trump attempts to claim, you know, the Americas as our sphere and the process of claiming it

[23:41] accelerates the loss. So, in other words, when you think about it geopolitically, we're withdrawing from Eurasia, uh weakening the NATO alliance by the grab for Greenland, uh uh maybe even not just crippling but ultimately killing the NATO alliance. Okay. Um weakening the alliance with our Asian allies to to retreat into the Americas and in the process alienating, you know, uh once close allies in the Americas, winding up with pretty much not much at all. uh so that that geopolitically

[24:14] that's one element of the mismanagement of the US geopolitical position and and that there there are other uh other complimenting and corresponding factors we can talk about >> before we go on I want to take a short break and tell you when I was a kid my grandfather handed me a silver coin seriously a 1921 silver dollar I still have it and he said to me this is real money I didn't really understand it then but I never forgot the weight of it in my hand. It felt different. It was

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[25:47] call 888 gold053. That's 888 gold053 and johnloves.com. help me understand the the thought process as the at the White House visav Iran. I think I think everything that you've laid out is exactly what we're seeing happening before our eyes. Uh we likely are at the end of the empire. We likely

[26:18] are trying to reiterate American uh primacy uh over the Western Hemisphere while conceding other areas to the world's other powers. But what about Iran? The Iranians aren't a threat to the United States. They they may be to Israel just as much as Israel is a threat to Iran. So why would we even play with the idea of of yet another war of choice? We're we're filming this on uh February the 4th and about two hours

[26:49] ago, President Trump issued a statement that Ayatollah Kamay better watch out. Well, what are we supposed to take from that? And and how how would it be in US interests to launch yet another war of choice, especially against a a country as big and as populous as Iran without international support? Um, it's not just Trump that harbors this illusion of the importance of the

[27:21] Middle East. It's the neocons, the neoconservatives of which he was initially kind of a dissident but has more or less kind of, if you will, stolen their thunder, appropriated their policy, and has in office has kind of fit in their groove. All right. Um uh essentially the neoconservatives took us into war in in in Iraq uh because it was deemed to be the way we would uh get ourselves a bastion sight ourselves in Iraq uh and uh disseminate democracy

[27:54] capitalism and take fuller control over the region's vast oil reserves. Okay. And Donald Trump is a man who's equates economics with minerals of various sorts. He's made that pretty clear. All right. uh you know Greenland is minerals, Ukraine is minerals, everything is minerals and the Middle East is oil and Venezuela is oil. Okay. Uh so [clears throat] uh and among the various minerals I suppose if you had to say Donald Trump's favorite min mineral is oil. He thinks oil is power. All right. And indeed it was but it no

[28:27] longer is. And so he's attaching us uh to it' be like in 1950 if we invaded England because we wanted to get their coal reserves. Okay? Just at the moment that coal was no longer the prime US source of of energy. Okay? And and and this brings us to the second uh mistake that the Trump administration is making. The second major policy

[28:57] decision that is accelerating US decline. Okay. Would you mind John if I played history professor for a second? Okay. Because that's what I do history. Okay. When you look over the last the history of empires over the last 500 years, right? And not every historian agrees with me and this is my own take on things, but I think it's a reasonable argument. Okay. The rise of every global hedgeimon over the last 500 years has been synonymous with and caused by their mastery of new forms of of energy. Okay.

[29:27] So with the Iberians, Spain and Portugal, what they discovered was that by the capturing of Africans and enslaving them and working them to beyond to the brink of death and beyond and working them in tropical clims. Northern Europe was agriculture 6 months a year. In the tropics, you can work 12 months a year. So you could work the human body to the point of death. And indeed on most plantations in the Caribbean was

[29:58] about a 15% death rate. Young healthy African males work to death you know in a matter of three four five years. Okay. So maximization of energy output from the human body builds these great empires. Okay. Then along come the next ascended power the Dutch. The Dutch a very poor region devoid of natural resources but you know very windy and they got windmills now. And they're not just cute little things. Okay. The Zhan district near Amsterdam was the world's first industrial zone. And there there

[30:30] were 150 windmills that could turn tree trunks into smooth uniform planks at the rate of 60 trunks a day per per windmill. Okay, this was a this allowed the the cheap production of the world's fastest ships that were the most efficient. And by riding the winds, the Dutch built an empire that stretched from uh the spice islands of Indonesia to Manhattan. Okay. And then along come the British who uh succeeded the Dutch

[31:00] and they in the late 18th century James Watt invents the the steam engine. The British then over the next 40 years make micro version of steam engines. They put it on trains to make the railroads in the 1820s. The Royal Navy puts them on ships in the 1840s. They come up with tools that will sculpt the earth's surface. The steam shovel, the steam roller, the steam dredge. Okay? And this propels Britain to global power in

[31:30] control of a colonial empire that rules over a quarter of humanity. Okay? And then uh in the United States uh by 1950, we're replacing coal with oil. And oil is synonymous with American civilization, American power. But it's over. Right now, we are in the midst of something that is akin to the industrial revolution, the age of steam and steel, the the creation of alternative energy

[32:01] that and and China is writing this green energy revolution to global power. And just as the United States is withdrawing from the Eurasian land mass and inflicting a geopolitical defeat on itself, so the Trump administration is using the very formidable powers of the American presidency to destroy to to to strangle America's infant energy revolution in its cradle. Okay? Denying construction permits for wind farms off the Atlantic coast.

[32:32] O opening up coal fields, opening up oil drilling, abolishing the uh $7,500 tax credit that was going to allow Detroit to make a a transition to to electric vehicles. All right? And and China is doing the exact opposite. China is lending its full economic resources and the considerable resources of the Chinese state to the construction of this green energy revolution. they already produce 70% plus of the world's world's solar panels and solar

[33:04] components. All right. >> [clears throat] >> uh they produce a similar amount 70% of the world's electrical vehicles and they are presiding and this has happened so fast within the last four to five years China's auto industry has gone from basically a joke okay they couldn't even sell their own cars in their own country right okay and now they're producing these absolutely state-of-the-art electrical vehicles China has electrical vehicles that solve all the problems uh

[33:34] uh Chinese latest batteries, they charge in 5 minutes. Uh the the the loss of battery power to cold, that's gone. Uh the distance uh Chinese has standard production batteries that have a 600 mile distance on a single charge. And you can buy a Chinese subcompact electrical vehicle self-driving for $9,000. I mean, last time I looked, I couldn't buy a 2010 Honda Civic with 150,000

[34:05] miles on the clock for 9,000 bucks. I mean, it's just amazing. And then they've got they've got these robotic factories that are enormous, biggest some of the biggest factories in the world that are cranking out these cars literally by the millions where they go to ports where they get loaded onto specially designed ships. I I have to tell you, I I went to China two years ago for the very first time and I saw these gorgeous cars that with and the logo said BYD. I said, "What in the

[34:35] world kind of car is this?" And my host said, "Oh, that's beyond your dreams." I said, "What the heck is that?" He said, "It's the Chinese electric vehicle." I said, "It's gorgeous. It It looks like an Audi, like a very sporty Audi. Are they expensive?" He said, "No, they're about $18,000." And I said, "Why have I never heard of this car?" And he said, "Because the United States is the only country where they're not available. The only one." I

[35:06] did some research and it turns out that we've we've banned them effectively. Not really. We've banned them by by putting something like a a 250% tariff on these Chinese electric vehicles. Now, with this new deal that the Chinese have negotiated with the the Canadians, they're freely available in Canada. And you're right about that battery. It doesn't lose power in the cold and it can go 600 miles. That's something that American electric car batteries can't do.

[35:36] >> But just pretending that the problem doesn't exist or that we can sanction it or tariff it away, I think, is is very shortsighted and just plain wrong. Well, the president of Ford Motor pointed out, I think, and I may have these stats slightly wrong. He said that, "Look, I've got 12,000 dealerships around the world." And I think he said something like 2,000 of them are in the United States. In other words, the big three, General Motors, Ford, Stalantis, they sell more cars out of the United States than they do in the United States,

[36:06] right? They've got to compete in the global market to survive. And if they can't produce a competitive electrical vehicle, within 5 years, they're all going to be bankrupt. They're going to be dead as doornails. Okay, it's just a fact because one thing, okay, think about it. The internal combustion engine, the gas guzzler, right? When was the last time there was a breakthrough in anything anything in gas guzzling technology? You know, >> it's been a very very long time >> about the la I don't know 1975 or something. I don't know. I mean, but

[36:37] and yet, you know, the one thing about the you know, all electrical vehicles are is a steel box with a battery. And so the technology they're engineers working around the world and they're making breakthroughs in this technology we have not realized the potential of the electric battery. All right. And the other aspect of electrical batteries too is as the the technology improves driven by the automobile industry then we're also getting new technologies for storage batteries. So that when you look at wind farms and solar power, the

[37:08] weakness they have is the, you know, and every fossil fuel advocate says, "Oh, yeah, sure, wind farms are cheap." Uh, you know, uh, solar panels are cheap, right? Right now, the the cost of generating electricity in a solar panel is 40% of the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel component. The problem is, of course, erratic nature. Sun only shines half the day. uh wind doesn't blow all the time etc. So you need storage batteries and what's happening is that as the

[37:39] batteries become cheaper and more efficient all right then the capacity for storage batteries. So what we're looking at is a is a multiaceted revolution in green energy with electrical generation via solar and wind backed up by electrical storage batteries low cost high efficient that even out the erratic nature of the of the of the electrical generation and then mobility through electrical vehicles of all sorts. Uh, I'd say we're

[38:11] no more than 10 years away from America's truck fleet being all electrical and all self-driving down every interstate in America. Okay. uh [clears throat] and and you know uh this is going to be the products of essentially foreign predominantly maybe even exclusively Chinese factories for both the the batteries the the solar the wind and the motor vehicles and >> that's right >> and if we lose if we lose Detroit okay

[38:44] uh that's 3% of GDP last time I looked there are 13 million American workers in the automobile deal industry. It's the biggest manufacturing industry in the United States, bar none. You know, we can't what that's going to do to the quality of life in this country is going to be really serious. And and and you know, and so [clears throat] that's a case where Trump's domestic policy, his hostility towards alternative energy has global ramifications. All right.

[39:14] Absolutely global ramifications. And another one is Trump's trade war. Okay. That's the third strand in America's decline. Um Trump uh uh has declared war on not only allies and competitors but indeed the entire international uh economic order. You know at the start of the cold war the end of World War II and the start of the cold war the United States presided over the creation of an international order. We created the

[39:46] United Nations. We virtually wrote the charter with other nations collaborating, but we did it in San Francisco. And um then our our one of our our third com our our next major component after the United Nations was something called the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs in 1947. That's today the World Trade Organization. And that basically I mean the the the the [clears throat] other component of the international economic order was done at the towards

[40:16] the end of World War II at Breton Woods in 1944 that created the international monetary fund. So the international monetary fund regulated currencies and currency exchange uh and the general agreement on trades and tariffs. Now the World Trade Organization set the rules for world trade and as a result [clears throat] uh the average tariff among major trading partners went down from about 22% in 1945 to about 2% when Trump took office and he's now raised uh

[40:48] the average US tariff up to about 15% overall. Okay. But he's also in his erratic way that he's rolled out his tariffs and kept changing them almost on a daily basis. He's hammering uh he's pounding he's he's shredding our trade relations with with both allies and competitors. And you know back in 1945 when we created this global system the United States was the last man standing.

[41:20] You know, there were four basic industrial centers in the world. You know, Europe was ravaged. Russia was was in ruins. Japan was a smoldering ruin. We were the last man standing. We produced about 50 to 60% of the world's industrial output. So back then when we said this is the international order, that was it. If you wanted to trade, you wanted to deal, you wanted to borrow money, you had to come to us. But now the United States is only 20% of the the

[41:51] world economy and that means there's another 88% out there and that's lots of room for people to trade with each other. And you know I'm sure John is following the news as you do. You've noticed the proliferation of trade agreements that are taking place around the world. Canada's trade deal with China. Britain is going to get its trade deal. The EU has signed a trade agreement with Moser. the the the southern cone of Latin America. India is trying concluding a a major trade deal

[42:21] with the European Union. There are all trade deals around the world in which the world is trading with each other and leaving us out because we are erratic. And by the time this is done, there are going to be two consequences. One, our access to international markets will be reduced. And two, as nations begin trading in non-doll denominated transactions, the dollar is going to decline as the global reserve currency. I believe it's already gone down from something like

[42:53] about 70% plus of international transaction to about the mid50s. Okay, that's a pretty rapid decline. Okay, and if it keeps declining, what's going to happen is the dollar will lose its preeminence as the global reserve currency. And that'll mean the cost of our debt, the cost of our borrowing, and indeed the costs of goods in American stores is going to go up. It's going to creep up constantly. And that's going to have a delotterious impact on the quality of life for American, you know,

[43:26] minimum wage workers, which are a large portion of our population. Because the grand American bargain is we pay you lousy wages, but you have access to cheap goods. You can go to Walmart and you can get your food and your clothes and your appliances cheap, right? Okay. [clears throat] And we can do that because you know we are the world's pre-minent power. The almighty dollar allows us to buy from the world market dirt cheap. All right. Well, that will be over. >> Yeah. >> And that'll mean that the lousy wages

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[45:00] and take advantage of the 47% off President's Day sale before Tuesday, February 17th. I wanted to ask you if I could one last question. You've actually touched on it a little bit, but I wanted to come back to it and and that is the that is the current state of NATO and and the continued efficacy of NATO. I don't understand what the strategy is at the White House to attack NATO to threaten essentially to invade another NATO country or to take it by force uh

[45:31] to to force you know economic u uh benefits out of it rare earth medals or whatever they happen to be. I don't understand if this is just Donald Trump being Donald Trump or if there is some grander policy at play here that that we just don't get. What do you think and and what do you think the lasting effect will be on NATO? >> Sure. Uh the Trump's antagonism towards NATO is is is well documented. It was

[46:05] very clear in his first term in which he uh he he strained the alliance. Uh to give Trump his credit, he was right about one thing that Europe taking basically a free ride on American defense and not maintaining its defense industries and its defense capacity given the fact that Russia Putin was on its borders and and Ukraine is only the first target. Let's let's think about Estonia, Latia, Lithuania, and [clears throat] there's always

[46:35] Poland and we can go on. Um, you know, so that seems in retrospect that was judicious on his part. Actually, that was one of the things Trump got right. Okay. Um and um uh so so now that that NATO is aware of the threat that it's facing and is now voting pretty much right across the board reason amount for their own defense. Um, NATO has been revitalized in part from Trump's pressures, in part

[47:06] from the reality of of Putin's ongoing invasion of of Ukraine and and the the horror show that that presents in European news on a on an absolute on a daily basis. Okay. So, so, so NATO has been revitalized um by by the Ukraine war. Moreover, um you know, uh Ukraine was the kind of thing that NATO was created for, right? It was designed to secure Europe against Soviet pressure. Well, now that's Russian pressure. So it

[47:38] circumstances and treaty came together perfectly and NATO responded quite effectively and it its bonds were strengthened. But but that but Trump's antagonism towards NATO is beyond the rational. It's I think first of all he doesn't like collaborative uh ventures of any sort or kind. He doesn't like the United Nations, right? He wants his board of peace in which he's the chairman. He gets to pick the

[48:08] successor. The billion dollar donations are going to go into his bank account some place under his control. And that's what he wants. He wants he has this this uni polar uniersonal vision of himself as a leader both domestically and particularly internationally because you know he's allowed to to play greater power exercise greater individual power internationally than he can domestically here he's constrained by elections courts congress civic

[48:41] protests all the rest internationally no so he can have his vision of grandeur and glory on an international stage. And he just doesn't like collaborative ventures of any sort. You know, he's taken us out of dozens of international organizations. He's weakened the US position and presence in the UN and again NATO as well. All right. So that's pretty consistent with his personality and consistent with his policy. Moreover, again, it fits with Donald

[49:12] Trump's trinental policy. If you look at the things he's done, claiming Canada is a 51st straight, claiming Greenland as US sovereign territory, demanding the return of the Panama Canal. In his first State of the nation address last year, I mean, he said it that we are going to reclaim the Panama Canal. All right. um you know that that he's moving to establish the US as the unchallenged hegeimon the unchallenged suzarin over

[49:43] the western hemisphere right and that's you know and then let Putin play around in Europe and let Xi Jinping play around in Asia and maybe we'll fight over the Pacific you know but that that's that's that's that appears to be if you look at the formal written strategy you look at the things he says the offhand comments the policy initiative makes it all comes together into a a pretty coherent vision. >> Professor Alfred McCoy, thank you very much for enlightening us. I I really

[50:14] learned a lot. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you.
