Sensemaking in 2025: Trump Tariffs Edition

What is going on?

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a number of people coming to me to see if I could help them make sense of what was going on in the world. As a result, I decided to write some things down and share them - and thereby save time as well as perhaps help a few more people.

In particular, the events of the last few weeks (the “Trump Tariffs”) have been highly disorienting. Most interpretative frameworks (“frames”) can’t make good sense of them at all.

I can’t make good sense of the Trump Tariffs either. This is for two reasons:

1. There is, in fact, a whole lot going on and the Tariffs must be understood in this larger context.

2. Our legacy sensemaking institutions are basically defunct, regurgitating a small number of narrow and often idiotic frames that are barely functional.

What I can do, then, is discuss a variety of powerful but apparently not broadly known frames for understanding “what is going on”. None explain everything and in fact, all of them together don’t explain everything - but if you have them you’ll have a better view of the larger picture.

Note the first - I’m not going to be spending any time on frames that are already commonly available. These have been quite thoroughly squeezed and my perspective would add little.

Note the second - I’ll not be trying at all to mind read or model President Trump. I’ve seen many efforts in this direction (it seems to be a favorite pundit pastime) but when put to the test, none provide predictive value.

Note the third - I’m not writing this for you. This is some quick thinking intending to help out those who are interested. If what you see here confuses or angers you, I apologize and recommend that you wisely go elsewhere and find more fruitful places to spend your attention.

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Frame One: The End of Neoliberalism

Liberalism is intrinsically unstable. It is essentially incoherent and is fundamentally parasitic. While it definitely provides a variety of super-salient goods, it does so by means of an extractive process that undermines its own integrity. As a consequence, it must either terminate or continuously expand its domain of extraction - either by going deeper (“stripmining”) or by going broader (“colonizing”). By example, it takes “community” (human groups connected by real and intimate relationships) as a feedstock and releases certain kinds of value (largely material) by converting community into society (human groups coordinated by formal abstractions) - but it cannot produce community. Therefore when it runs out of community, it has to either dig deeper (into family for example) or wider (e.g., going global).

Neo-liberalism is the “final form” of liberalism and over the past several decades it has gone deep and broad to what appears to be a terminal limit. Consequently, like a car running out of gas (👀) it is starting to cough and sputter. It is coming to an end and is in the process of collapse, one way or another.

This fact is not lost on a critical mass of global elites (though it *is* lost on the more midwit portion of that class!) and a decent fraction of what is going on has to do with the strategic effort to use the leverage they have, which is declining over time, to shape the transition from the neoliberal global system to something that is maximally to their advantage.

This may or may not be to your advantage, of course, and I don't know enough about the intimate details of who is doing what or where to say anything precise about that. But the good news is, because the final, decrepit stage of neoliberalism has been largely to the disadvantage of most for a long time in the areas that are most meaningful (e.g., “meaning” itself!) the net result is likely to be a general improvement.

So we may very well see a really significant increase in the price of consumer goods (aka bullshit) at Walmart or perhaps the end of Walmart as an economic entity, we will also generally see trends towards things like an increase in “true wealth.”

Frame Two: The Fourth Industrial Revolution

It very much appears to be the case that “industrial revolutions” come and go in waves. Our understanding of these things is all a bit rough, but as a way of thinking, the 20th Century was dominated (and largely defined) by our increasingly intense application of things like oil, electricity and steel to produce a society of (centralized) mass production, mass distribution (cars, planes and really big boats), and mass communication (radio and television).

Starting in the 70’s the next big wave began to build and gave us things like computers, increasingly automated industry and global telecommunications (e.g., the Internet).

We are now entering into a new and potentially very big phase. Some see this as the “second phase” of the 3rd Industrial Revolution, others as the emergence of a 4th Industrial Revolution, a distinction about which I care little. The key insight is that things are changing and we are just about to enter into the acceleration phase of that change.

This phase includes things like the Internet of Things, very advanced biotechnology and synthetic biology, very advanced and increasingly agentic robotics, a variety of decentralized manufacturing processes, quantum computing, blockchain and (of course) AI (more on this in its own frame).

I’m not going to go into details here but, for example, where in the past 100 years "t-shirt” manufacturing became a function of gigantic mass production centers combining low cost human and automated labor with global distribution chains, as we move into this new phase, t-shirts might be “printed” (or grown using synthetic biology) in one off bespoke fashion at local centers and transported (by flying drones?) to your house. Consider how printing moved from centralized industrial presses to millions of desktop printers in homes and offices.

This kind of shift portends massive consequences for the current global order. For example, China’s rise over the past quarter century was largely founded on the techniques and premises of the waning last industrial form. Right now the shape and trajectory of the coming wave is wide open and (once again) a slice of global elites, some of whom are part of the above post-neoliberalism cohort and some of whom aren’t, have been looking at this transition closely and are making moves to shape this big transition to their advantage.

Note - given the implications of this shift, you can be sure that anyone who is sending you videos like this:

is either lying to you or outing themselves as a useful idiot.

Frame Three: The End of Post-WWII American Hegemony

From 1945 and then with a step function at the collapse of the U.S.S.R., the United States entered into a historically singular moment as the global hegemon. That period is also coming to an end. China has quite successfully emerged as a peer competitor and with the recent surge in BRICs it is clear that the future is multi-polar.

I should point out that this is even true militarily. While it is at least arguable that the United States still has the military power to win any particular fight it chooses, it is also arguable that this is no-longer true - and moreover the rate of change is going towards the latter. A big part of this has to do with the aforementioned fourth industrial revolution - while the US spends a lot more than anyone else, the metric of war is not how much you spend but how much effective lethality you produce. We might very well be spending 10X as much to get the same amount of punching power as our various adversaries as a result of late-stage corruption and the hollowing-out of our innovation base.

[Note - yes, I know it’s possible that we have a stable of sci-fi superweapons sitting in some DARPA warehouse that no-one knows about. Maybe.]

This is a big-old realignment and has a lot of consequences. One of which is that the US’s ability to shape the world according to its preferences is also coming to an end. Interestingly, because the United States was one of the first conquered by neoliberalism, a large part of the American Hegemony was put to the service of neoliberalism (facilitating the global spread and intensification of neoliberalism). This had the somewhat confounding consequence of using American power in a fashion that harmed Americans (e.g., the rust belt) to the benefit of (for example) China and (much more so) globalists.

Another major part of the American Hegemony was put to the service of the class of elites who were able to control and deploy it to their ends. While we can and should give Pax Americana credit for a pretty good overall historical showing in terms of global peace and prosperity, broadly speaking, the top .1% of political and economic elites (not at all necessarily American) have increasingly been using their ability to control the American hegemony to extract value from the world. An egregious example of this was the exploitation of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to line the pockets of a very small number of military and energy interests who were able to leverage the mechanisms of the American hegemony to benefit themselves.

The end of a major hegemony is always a dangerous transition. The last time this happened (the end of Pax Britannia) we had two world wars until the dust had settled. A non-trivial part of what is going on is a complex dance of diverse interests trying to move pieces on the current board in a fashion that threads the needle between shaping the coming multi-polar order to their advantage and avoiding a catastrophic military conflict.

Frame Four: The Civil War

Yes, I know that there aren’t folks running around in grey and blue uniforms shooting at each-other. As it turns out, that isn’t how war works. By sheer strategic necessity, the next war looks very little like the last war - and we are currently in a “5th Generation” Civil War.

Fifth generation warfare is a form of conflict that is largely non-kinetic, decentralized, and psychological—a war of narratives, perceptions, and influence rather than bullets, bombs, or battalions. It is insidious, obscure and we are immersed in it. By definition it is impossible to have certainty about who is on what team and what, exactly, they are doing, but for illustrative purposes, let’s carve out something of a game board to make some sense of things.

Right now in the US we have something of a coalition on the right that includes MAGA, MAHA and the DOGE cohorts. Notice that even within this coalition there are myriad fissures and wars within wars. Arrayed against them are:

• The legacy left (aka the Democrats)

• Big chunks of the legacy institution order (media, the academy, and most of establishment government - the IC in particular)

• Big chunks of the legacy right - (aka the Republicans)

• Globalists

• China

• etc.

Maneuvering in this environment is . . . complex. You have to “doge” and weave, disorienting your adversaries, taking and giving territory, terraforming the landscape in a fashion that serves your advantage and disadvantages your adversaries - but having to watch out for changes in the balance of power in your own fluid coalition.

A meaningful portion of “what is happening” is this dodge and weave.

Frame Five: The Rise of AI

You’ve probably noticed that AI has become a thing. What you *might* not know is that an increasing portion of the elites (particularly the technology elites) have concluded that it is the thing. There is a building consensus at the top of that hierarchy that we're close, meaningfully close, to crossing a tipping point where AI is good enough (particularly millions of AI running in parallel) to provide a categorically unique strategic advantage to whoever possesses it.

Moreover, within this frame whoever gets pole position on that point, particularly when you consider the feedback loop of intelligence on intelligence, starts to get something like escape velocity in power.

From their point of view, literally all of the above frames are relatively unimportant. Once you’ve seen the AI take-off, everything else starts to look trivial in the light of this new radical phase transition.

As a consequence, for these elites, every move in the above frames is a means to an end: establish dominion in AI.

Notably, there is really only a handful of players in that game. You've got OpenAI and the Stargate Bloc. You've got the House of Musk/Thiel complex that includes Palantir, Grok, Twitter, SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla. You've got the Googleplex, which was in the lead, but is now seems to be falling behind. And you’ve got China. Perhaps that big Saudi initiative or Anthropic is in the mix. Maybe a few others that are doubleplus secret. But that’s about it.

So those (increasingly powerful and influential) players are trying to figure out how to maneuver things to their advantage and if you use this lens to look at everything that's going on, you can begin to see the Tariffs as a way to (a) slow down China’s AI progress and (b) force next gen chip fabrication farther from Chinese control.

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I’m going to stop here. There are, of course, many frames that are also perfectly useful. This is by no means an attempt to provide a comprehensive nor even a sufficient model. Rather, as I said to begin, to hand out a few useful and not-broadly-enough understood frames.

Notice that these are not at all mutually exclusive. In fact most of them are highly entangled. That is how reality works - a lot is going on all at once and it’s all really happening.

The way I do this is I hold all of these frames at once and I peer at the world through this kaleidoscope curiously. Sometimes something pops out as pretty clearly true (e.g., COVID was a lab-leak). Sometimes all I get is a rough heuristic to help make choices (e.g., let’s wait on that whole COVID vaccine thing). Sometimes it’s all just very unclear.

Well, I hope that was helpful. If so, not a bad way for me to spend a few hours on a Friday!