Trump has finally exposed the laughingstock of US superpower

Donald Trump's stunning ascension to the Republican presidential nomination - which now appears to be a mere formality after the knockout blows against Ted Cruz and John Kasich in Indiana last night - has finally exposed the laughingstock of US superpower status, namely our habit of brandishing bazookas on other people's front yards even as burglars empty out our own living room.

This whole comic charade has become such a well-established fact of international life over the course of the 21st century so far that its purveyors here in the Washington elite have grown totally blind to the scale of the absurdity.

On the bright side, China, the burglar-in-chief in this setup, has already moved on: it's already preparing for a Trump presidency. The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid linked to the communist party, pretty much lays out the choice between The Donald and Hillary that's all but a given now, notwithstanding yet another Bernie Sanders upset of Clinton in the Democrats' own Indiana primary last night (and yet another confirmation of how FUBAR Americans think the trade status quo is).

Meanwhile, the chickens are still running around with their heads cut off inside the Beltway here: none other than president Obama himself has penned an editorial, "Don't let China steal the lead on trade", in a rather blatant attempt to pry the national discourse on globalization away from the increasingly protectionist bent of the insurgent Trump and Sanders campaigns.

Given that China is Donald Trump's single biggest foreign policy obsession, it's worth noting that he has already begun to refocus the American discourse on the most critical bilateral relationship.

For starters, The Donald is unabashed in stating the obvious: since the start of the century, China has utterly devastated the American industrial worker. While the Washington policy elite is fixated on the comparatively minor distraction of a bunch of rocks and reefs in Beijing's front yard, the traditional backbone of prosperity in our very heartland has been gutted hollow in a long-term process by the unfettered wage and finance arbitrage of the past 15-plus years - of which China has been the linchpin.

This begs the question: How can we possibly lead the world when we've done such a great job dispossessing our own economic base?

Granted, there have been benefits from trade with China, but these have been glaringly clustered into two specific, symbiotically linked phenomena: cheaper goods and inflated asset values. As corporate bottom lines boomed thanks to the former, so did easy money and credit (including recycled Chinese and other foreign surpluses coming into the US) which have continuously fueled the latter.

That's created a massive imbalance: even as the economy has become seemingly permanently dependent on consumption and services as against industry and manufacturing, the typical American worker has become seemingly permanently dependent on debt beyond his or her wages to finance that very consumerist lifestyle.

No wonder the average American considered China to be the world's leading economic power as far back as 2010-11, when US GDP was still nearly three times as big as China's (in nominal dollar terms).

Today, even as China and the US are both (by their respective standards) sputtering, it remains clear that the long-term shift of economic power continues apace. Yet the Washington wonk and policy establishment remains in hapless reaction mode: it knows something's amiss with the status quo, but like Obama in the above New York Post editorial, it's at a loss to offer anything substantially new in our approach to the China trade challenge. The cold hard fact is, it hardly matters just how well the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is advertised or even actually written: American workers have heard the same exact arguments about "free trade" for a whole generation now and have little reason to expect this time the yawning gap between promises and delivery will turn out to be any less infuriating.

So along comes The Donald, quite a blast of fresh air in an otherwise putrid policy context and intellectual milieu. We won't be a laughingstock much longer, God willing: now that the joke's finally been turned on its perpetrators, we can at last move forward with some inkling of objectivity and rationality.