My views here have long been in evidence to the intellectual cognoscenti:
I am, first, an economic nationalist, in a time, and in a country, for which that otherwise historically quite reasonable view is widely seen as a species of anathema, or is otherwise, more generally here, not fully understood.
My economic views are more sympathetic to those taken in the past by Japan, or more recently China, to develop their domestic economies as best they can by managed trade, in the global market they have been forced to confront.
Of course, the US would not have had to develop an export orientation, as they have been forced to do.
We pushed them into it, really, first Japan along with Europe after WW II, and then China and the rest of Southeast Asia, after the Nixon shock of 1972.
They have tended to promote such prosperity as they could for their own people, but especially for their elites who have colluded with ours, at times with mixed success.
They have not tried to promote utopian ideals of democracy or universalist laissez faire government on a global scale.
The United States was at one time in a rather unique position, in the 19th Century, and even into the 20th, to consolidate itself, politically and economically, and to flourish on the North American continent, without resort to substantial international trade. This can be shown, and has been argued, by some writers whom I have quoted here.
Yet from the beginning really, 1787, but reaching farther back to the Articles of Confederation and before, 'These United States' suffered from what some very knowledgeable thinkers called a politically fragmented, weak, disorganized, and contradictory, political structure, what Vernon called in Sovereignty at Bay fragmented federalist pluralism.
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