Originally a comment by Whimster Gap on Baffled and concerned.
There’s a lovely – probably apocryphal – story about James I & VI and his relationship with money that’s relevant here. James could be lavish in his spending and patronage, but also had a reputation for stinginess. If he was warned about his spending on something, it’d bounce off him; and so one day he was shown how much he’d spent on a project by having the equivalent value in coin tipped on the floor in front of him.
He was horrified. Seeing the money made it real and so got around an intellectual block. Very clever though he may have been (and he was), his brain simply didn’t do money or big numbers. That’s probably true for most of us: big numbers are difficult to imagine.
Trump is analogous here. He likes things he can see and that can be put in a ledger. Does spending on security cost? Yes. Does it yield an income in a way that a double-entry bookkeeper might be able to write it down? No. And so Trump doesn’t believe it’s real.
You could try explaining to him that American military hegemony allows the US to write the rules of international trade and diplomacy, and that what we used to call the West is happy to go along with that because those rules are the continuation of a system that’s much older than American hegemony and that makes us all very wealthy.* You could try explaining this, but you’d fail, because he doesn’t have that kind of higher-level thinking. In his world, if you spend money, you get a thing in return.
Spending money to secure peace to secure law to secure institutions to secure trade to secure wealth is just too long a chain.
* Well, OK: not to write the rules, but to maintain and develop them. That was the deal at Bretton Woods. We Brits couldn’t sustain the system any more, but everyone agreed that it was a good system, and so we just moved it from London to New York, a bit like the Romans shifting power to Byzantium.
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