Why we all feel America's pain today

The world is watching Uncle Sam

For roughly 80 years, Pax Americana wasn’t just military or political — it was monetary, legal, cultural, logistical. The dollar, US Treasuries, insurance law, shipping finance, classification norms, sanctions regimes, tech standards, even how crises are interpreted: you don’t opt out of that by holding a different passport.

So when the US system looks erratic, it’s not “foreign news” in the way, say, Italian politics or Brazilian politics appear to non-Italians and non-Brazilians. It’s more like discovering the foundations of your house are shifting. You may live upstairs, but the basement is still American.

And that’s why it bleeds into everything:

• Markets: Treasuries wobble and the global risk-free rate is no longer risk-free. Consequently every asset reprices. The UK has overtaken China as the largest holder of US Treasuries, tying its fortunes to whatever may happen to the US and its currency.

  
  

• Shipping: sanctions, insurance, trade routes, freight finance are all US-adjacent whether we like it or not. The global shipping industry works on US dollars - but for how much longer? China is paying for commodities in RMB - how long until it insists on paying for freight in RMB?

  
  

• Politics: allies aren’t just reacting to US policy anymore, but to US predictability or, increasingly, US unpredictability. The trans-Atlantic alliance is dying in front of us. Mark Carney told the world not to be nostalgic. Canada and the EU have quickly finalised trade deals with India - the fastest growing economy and most populous nation on earth. The EU has done a deal with Mercosur. Trump is flinging threats of tariffs around like a gorilla flinging shit around his zoo enclosure. There is suddenly a huge increase in value in being a reliable trade partner.

  
  

• Psychology: the sense that “someone is in charge” has quietly been part of the background since 1945. I grew up in a world dominated by US culture, a world in which the US was, as Ronald Reagan put it, the shining city on the hill. The US was still the country built by immigrants from the Old World, and the Old World felt like it had a stake in the US. The chaos in and rebukes from Washington have burned to the ground both the feeling that the US is in charge, and that the Old World has any stake in it.

  
  

What feels new isn’t chaos per se. After all, the US endured America First in the 1930s, Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008. What’s new this time is the sense that the referee might be improvising the rules, mid-game, in public. Worse, we have come to realise that the referee is playing hard and breaking the rules while they do so.

So in that sense, we’re all Americans right now. Because we all have to deal with whatever comes next.