Cultural politics aside, MAGA is a coherent conservative-nationalist project through and through. It aims primarily to restore some interconnected variables that were set up following the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971.
MAGA seeks to maintain the centrality of the US executive in world politics via hub-and-spoke arrangements, along with the indisputable primacy of the dollar and the US Federal Reserve in global currency markets and the international monetary system, recycling global surpluses into the US proper via Treasury bills.
The project also aims to uphold the offshore power of Wall Street, guaranteeing unlimited cross-border financial operations and subordinating the productive sectors of vassal states to the United States. This integrated whole is what the late Peter Gowan, in his prizewinning 1999 book The Global Gamble, called the Dollar–Wall Street Regime (DWSR).
However, structural historical forces, coupled with the incompetence of liberal and neoconservative actors, caused the DWSR to disintegrate, especially since the 2007–08 global financial crisis. By looking at the reasons behind this disintegration in more detail, we can gain a better sense of how successful the MAGA project is likely to be.
The global financial crisis forced the Fed to introduce major bailout programs to save Wall Street investment banks and shadowy financial services from total collapse. At the same time, it drove interest rates down to zero, sapping the power of the dollar and making imports expensive. In a similar vein, the US Treasury later poured…
Auteur: Vassilis Fouskas
