On Tuesday, Donald Trump delivered a State of the Union speech that revealed his 2020 election strategy, designed to roil and mobilize his political base, and to declare to the Democrats that his political war with them will now escalate further. If anyone thinks the recent impeachment and Senate trial was the high point of the growing conflict between the two political parties, they haven’t seen anything yet.

Trump’s assassination of Iran’s general and senior diplomat, Qassim Suleimani, was a clear provocation by the United States, designed to produce an escalated military response by Iran. That did not happen. Iran did not take the bait. It responded minimally and appears to have done so in a way to avoid US deaths or even major US asset destruction. If Iran had escalated militarily, which it was capable of doing, it would have fallen into Trump’s trap.

History repeats itself, as they say. But in the age of American empire, not just twice, or even three times, but with disturbing regularity. The past half century shows two things about how America goes to war: First, it creates a provocation based on a lie. Second, it then makes its target adversary an ‘offer they can only refuse’, as the final justification for US military action once the adversary rejects the unacceptable offer.

The evolution of neoliberal policies since the 1980s is highly correlated with the decline of democracy in America. Democratic norms, practices, rights and civil liberties, and even institutions of government, have been in atrophy and decay over the period. Moreover, the decline has accelerated in recent decades as neoliberalism became more aggressive in implementing its policy objectives as opposition to it—both domestic and foreign—has intensified. The attack on democracy has risen to a qualitatively new stage in the era of Trump.

But Argentina is just the leading edge of a similar general process of global financial asset price deflation. In fact, Argentina is just an intense example of financial asset markets declining everywhere globally. And in that sense its current financial and economic collapse may be the harbinger of devastating things soon to come.

For the past decade or more, US policy has been to use both monetary policy and tax policy to subsidize capital incomes to the tune of trillions of dollars a year, every year. It used to be that monetary (Fed) and fiscal policy were used to ‘stabilize’ the economy in the event of recession or inflation. No longer. A decade and more of using these policies to subsidize capital incomes has led to the effective negation of the effectiveness of these policies for economic stabilization.

Trump’s trade wars and other policies should be understood as part of a broad reordering of US economic and political policies, and relations with other nation States allied and adversary alike, to ensure the continuation of US global economic and military hegemony for the coming decade. Nextgen technology development is at the core of that restructuring and restoration of US hegemony. Trump is just the appearance, the historic vehicle, behind the deeper global capitalist transformation in progress.

The failure of Democratic Party leaders’ 2018 strategy to deliver as promised in the November 6, 2018 midterm elections should also raise some serious questions about its strategy going forward for 2020. That strategy focused on running women and a few veterans in suburban districts and targeting the independent voter—a Suburbia Strategy—i.e. an approach apparently abandoning the 2008 successful Democratic strategy of targeting millennials, blacks and latinos, and union workers, who since 2012 have been steadily reducing their support for Democrats.

So what’s all the talk about a Trump ‘trade war’? Is it media hype? Typical Trump hyperbole? Is there really a trade war in the making? Indeed, was there ever? And how much of it is really about reducing the US global trade deficit—and how much about the resurrection of Trump’s ‘economic nationalism’ theme for the consumption of his domestic political base in an election year? One thing for certain, what’s underway is not a ‘trade war’.

One might think that US$440 billion in loans would have helped Greece recover from the global recession of 2008-09 and the Europe-wide chronic, stagnant economic growth ever since. But no, the US$440 billion in debt the Troika piled on Greece has actually impoverished Greece even further, condemning it to eight years of economic depression with no end in sight.