Daniel Tubb

Dismantling the Post-War Liberal World Order

Daniel Tubb

Trump’s second presidency is reshaping global trade and security. With tariffs rising and military aid shifting, the post-war liberal order faces an uncertain future. Read my analysis on the three theories driving this transformation.

Tubb, Daniel. “Dismantling the Post-War Liberal World Order.” NB Media Co-op, March 4, 2025. https://nbmediacoop.org/2025/03/04/dismantling-the-post-war-liberal-world-order/.

Tariffs are in, Ukraine is out. Which leaves a question: What to think about Trump’s foreign and economic policy?

Alain Deneault is right. Trump’s working-class supporters, disappointed by elites in Washington and New York for years, are in for a surprise. As tariffs bite, inflation will grip, recession loom, and Europe and Canada will forge new trade and defence alliances. At least, this is one way to think about the dismantling of the post-war liberal world order.

It is a struggle to make sense of today’s tariffs.

It’s a struggle to make sense of what happened in the Oval Office on February 29, when Donald Trump and J.D. Vance berated Volodymyr Zelensky as a pretext to withdraw militarily aid. More broadly, what can we make of the second Trump presidency and the reaction in Europe? One thing is clear, there is a disagreement on how the world has worked for the last 80 years.

Trump’s doctrine is to dismantle the postwar liberal consensus that tied European (and Canadian) security to the United States. A consensus that allowed post-war institutions of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and later, the World Trade Organization (WTO), to shape global security, trade, and economy.

Understanding the consequences of Trump’s endeavour to dismantle this is a theoretical and empirical question. It’s a theoretical question because there are various ways to think about global political economy. It’s an empirical one because Trump and his presidency are hell bent on putting their theory to the test.

In broad strokes, there are three ways to understand the post-war liberal consensus. The first is a mainstream theory. It argues that after the Second World War, American hegemony, the Washington consensus leading to free trade, globalization, and tight security integration have contributed to economic growth around the world. This rising tide has lifted all boats, and despite the externalities of capitalism and globalization, the World Order is the best we could have done. It has been a net benefit for everyone on the planet, so this theory’s proponents put it. In their view, the post-war consensus is worth defending because liberal democracies are the ones holding the line against autocracy and expansionist power in Russia and China. Without it, an unprecedented era of relative stability will end, making lives harder for everyone, including Americans.

The second is a critique from the left. Left critics argue that the United States imposed the post-war consensus after World War II and then expanded it in the 1980s and 1990s through globalization and free trade as part of an imperial project. It argues American empire has having been terrible for working people. It has hollowed out communities, increased inequality, fueled financial speculation, and crony capitalism to the detriment of everyone, especially working classes and the people in global south. It’s the critique that saw the Battle of Seattle against the WTO in 1999, and in the protests in Quebec against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in 2001. It’s the critique that led to protests in 2002 against the war in Iraq, and it is the critique that fuels ongoing protesters against climate change and ongoing wars. The basic thesis: the U.S. became a hegemonic power, globalization has benefited the U.S. and its allies through the exponential accumulation and growth of their assets across the globe, at the expense of the world. Not least because we have come to see clearly that decades of U.S. capitalism have fueled economic growth, with material consequences for a finite planet.

The third theory, which Trump and J. D. Vance have adopted, is a new critique from the right. (Prior to Trump, most mainstream Democrats and Republicans were united in believing the first theory described above.) The right critique goes something like this: post-war American foreign and economic policy was ‘bad’ for the United States, and especially for working people in the rust belt states, in rural areas, and in areas outside of the cities dominated by liberal elites. Their argument is that the post-war liberal economic and security order has been good for the world but bad for Americans. Globalization, free trade, NATO, and all the rest was financed by the U.S., to its own detriment. The world has played the United States for a sucker, they think. It is working Americans, U.S. corporations, and Washington that have given Europe, Canada, and Latin America an economic and security free ride. After all, when the United States opened its economy to free trade with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Europe, China and the world, it devastated manufacturing in its hinterland. Trump’s proposed solution is a muscular, masculine, hegemonic United States. An imperial power willing to throw its muscle around and get what it wants. One willing to use tariffs and re-engage in a Munro doctrine of outward territorial expansion, be that in Panama, Greenland, and, if Trump is to be believed, Canada.

The mainstream theory is that US-led globalization has been beneficial for the world and the United States. The left sees a system that has not worked for the world and working people, even as it has worked for the U.S. and U.S capital. The right sees a system that has been the terrible for the U.S, especially working-class Americans in rural areas.

What to make of all this? The answer is an empirical question—whose theory is right?

From a mainstream perspective, unwinding the role of the United States as the backstop of a global economic and security order will unravel the whole complex system, with devastating consequences. Like all complex systems, when parts start to break, things can go sideways quickly. It’s unclear what will bring down the house of cards. It might be today’s first salvo of a tariff war, or war, a Bird flu pandemic, an economic crisis, or the environmental crisis, but the mainstream sees a bleak future.

From a left perspective, undoing the post-war consensus will make things worse for American consumers, while creating opportunities for the world to get along without the United States. In this analysis, Trump’s tariffs might do some good by undoing US hegemony. If the skyrocketing price of imports match the skyrocketing price of eggs, perhaps what Karl Polanyi once called a double movement of organized social movements will begin to act as a self-limiting force to Trump’s agenda.

But what if the left and the mainstream are wrong? What if Trump is on to something? What if the right critique has merit? What if American protectionism and American expansionism lead to colonial endeavours that benefit the U.S.? What if things get worse for Canada, Europe, and the World, yet better for Americans, especially its billionaire class? We’re about to find out.

Let’s hope the right is wrong, and the left is right. That is, by imposing tariffs, undoing security relations with Canada and Europe, and turning U.S. policy away from globalization, things might be worse for U.S. voters, working people, consumers, and capital, but better for everyone else. It might create opportunities for fairer trade and security relations. If all that happens, Trump’s strangle hold on U.S. democracy itself might be short-lived, as inflation and recession could focus the minds of voters in the United Sates, even as it might be too late for its hegemonic project.

But what if the right is right? Trump has imposed tariffs, and if they work the way his advisors think they will— being that the tariffs won’t hurt U.S. consumers as other countries will see their currencies devalue to compensate—then people in New Brunswick, Canada, and the rest of the world are in for big trouble. The last thing anyone needs right now is an emboldened and expansionist U.S. in search of territory, resources, and a strengthened Empire.

Writer’s Diary 51: In Praise of Mellel

Daniel Tubb

Mellel 6.3 just came out. I bought my first copy of Mellel as a student in 2006 or so; although there have been long periods when I haven’t used it and worked in Word. Every long‑form thesis, dissertation, or book I’ve ever written has been finished in Mellel. Yet, most of my daily writing is done in Markdown in Tinderbox.

Markdown is a text‑to‑HTML conversion tool for web writers. It allows you to write using an easy‑to‑read, easy‑to‑write plain text format, which can then be converted to HTML. Since John Gruber of Daring Fireball designed the spec in 2004, it has taken over the Internet. Perhaps it should be required learning for students?

Tinderbox is a tool for notes—a place to put down ideas, move them around, edit them, and revise them. It’s a personal information toolbox, a piece of software that I find indispensable for my scattered writing process.

But at some point, the messy notes and ideas have to turn into drafts and manuscripts. By the time a draft goes to a reviewer or publisher, it has to be perfect.

For the last half decade, I’ve long been enamoured with the idea of writing in Markdown in Tinderbox and then using tools like Pandoc and CiteProc to take that output and convert Markdown into blog posts, websites, and Word manuscripts. Indeed, I’ve even written a few scripts and a contextual menu in Finder that convert a Markdown file with citations into a DOCX file, and vice versa.

But as an academic writer, there is, of course, a challenge with citations. I’ve long used Bookends as a citation manager. I’ve used Bookends since the early 2000s. It’s a powerful app for keeping track of thousands of articles. It’s fast, unlike Zotero. It plays well with Mellel, but also lets you sync with a BibTeX file, which can be used by CiteProc.

So, I can write in Markdown in Tinderbox using MultiMarkdown formatting for footnotes, and then send it to Pandoc to convert to Word or wherever with citations. It works well. I love it.

Yet, for every truly long form article or project, I find myself turning back to Mellel for the final step because one thing that an academic writer knows is that by the time it goes to peer review, it must be perfect. What you send to the press, the editor, or the peer review will first be reviewed, and if you get the subtle things wrong in the writing or the formatting, you can be prejudged as sloppy.

Writing a book or article is, in part, an exercise in getting it right. Perhaps it’s premature perception. Yet, as I work on finishing a manuscript, I again turn back to Mellel, and it shines as a beautiful word processor designed for print and for writing documents.

There’s a cognitive relief in not writing in an abstraction, even an elegant simple one like Markdown.

Mellel bills itself as:

is a word processor designed from the ground up to be the ultimate writing tool for academics, technical writers, scholars, and students. Mellel is powerful, stable, and reliable; it is the ideal companion for writing documents that are long and complex, short and simple, and anything in between.

It’s all of these things. Worth a look.

I turned back to it, because the recent 6.3 version has a new notes feature that allows you to put notes at the end of a section or page range (that is, at the end of a chapter). This means I can write the way that my corner of anthropology likes to write, with notes at the end of chapters.

This new notes are notes done right.

While a subtle addition would be to have chapter‑end notes arbitrarily situated in a notes chapter at the end of a manuscript, as publishers in the humanities do it.

For now, I want to say that the thing with Mellel that I love is that, as opposed to Markdown, is that there is a much reduced cognitive load in getting it right, and then moving on.

As I move into it once again and get my book set‑up, I feel a relief that once I get it right in Mellel, it stays right. There are no further processing steps where errors can be introduced. It’s done. Tinderbox makes it easy to make radical changes. But, at some point, one has to stop, and get it done.

Rather than write in a markdown, Mellel lets you just work on the final form.

It’s nice.

I write by picking at things, tinkering, changing, and cobbling. At times, an Markdown’s abstraction and portability is best. At the end, Mellel is best.

Scheduling a syllabus

Daniel Tubb

It’s time to design a syllabus again. As each semester comes to an end and a new one begins, I always find myself redesigning and rethinking my syllabi. Why? A course is an opportunity to brush up on material, to think through new ideas, and to return to interests.

However, there is always the challenge of working out what to assign, what works, and what to think about. I often assign too much reading, for example. So, before I dive deep into designing my first-year course on economics and anthropology for this semester, I wanted to put down some thoughts on what I know works.

First, go slower. I look back at my syllabi from my first few years teaching, and they are far too ambitious. I know students don’t always read, but part of the trick is working out the structure and the framing of a course. The reading schedule matters, but because it won’t change, but because its rhythms and speed shape the experience of the semester, for myself and the students. There need to be moments of working hard, but also moments of slowing down and relaxing.

At the end of the last semester, it seemed that five four-class (M, W, F, M) modules, with a couple of classes between (W F) offers a way to frame the semester. Things in between might be an in-class exam, an in-class reading reflection, a few films, or an ethnography.

For an upper-level course, we could just read five books. Reading five books is too much for lower-level students. But, we can read, think, talk, and discuss bits of books.

I’m going to try this module framework this coming semester.

iPad Mini + Tailscale + Screens + Better Display = Relibale screen sharing to MacBook

Daniel Tubb

Here’s the problem. I have my MacBook at the office on campus. I want it to be running through some long image processing tasks that are taking days. It requires an external hard drive. I don’t want to disconnect it. However, sometimes, I need to log in to do work, like post grades over the holiday.

What I want is to be able to log into the Mac remotely and use it to do other work if I’m at home. The problem: I don’t have another computer. I tried to get an old one, but I can’t.

I do have an iPad Mini, though.

However, the first time I tried to connect the iPad Mini to the Mac via screen sharing, I couldn’t get a reliable connection, the resolution of the display was off, I couldn’t get that keyboard mapping to work well, and it was just clunky.

I’ve solved it now.

What works?

First, to get a reliable connection between the two devices, I’ve found Tailscale works reliably. It lets me create a virtual network between the iPad and the MacBook, despite the fact one is on a university network and the other is at home. This allows me to connect between both devices as if they were on a local network, despite the fact they’re not.

To actually make the shared screen connection, I use Screens by Edovia. It works well and is a native iPad and Mac app.

For a while, I did have a hard time connecting from an external keyboard connected to the iPad mini because the iPad OS was grabbing the Command keys. If I tried to Command+Tab on the shared Mac, the iPad OS would Command+Tab to another iPad OS app. Perhaps this is logical, but as someone with a lot of muscle memory on the Mac, it was super annoying—almost a show stopper—to be working on the Mac, then suddenly in a different OS.

By inverting the Command and Control in the Keyboard settings on the iPad and then inverting it again in the settings of the Screens app on the iPad, it worked perfectly on the shared Mac display, which is my goal.

Next issue: the display resolution on the Mac did not match the resolution of the iPad Mini.

The solution: Better Display, a $20 Mac app that can create lots of custom resolutions and, crucially, has an option to create a virtual screen the size of the iPad mini. This means the full screen of the iPad mini is shared. This allows me to connect the iPad to a virtual display on the Mac that matches the iPad’s physical dimensions.

So, after an hour: the resolution matches the iPad Mini, the keyboard keys are perfectly mapped, the connection is reliable, and I can log in to the Mac from home with just an iPad.

Not bad. Now to post some grades.

Writing Diary #53: Cleanup Reepeated Text

Daniel Tubb

What makes a book different from an article? What makes a book different from an essay? One thing: it’s long. In my case, what I thought would be one book, seems to be becoming two or maybe three. However, over the years I’ve been working on it, it has grown to almost a million words. This creates just a writing challenge. How to organize, cut, edit, and work with the detritus of various versions, drafts, initial starts, notes on an idea, and it just piles up in a chaotic, Escher-like jumble, that is so overwhelming as it leave me lost. One problem is the order. One is duplication.

Order can be solved by coding. Putting things about the same topic together. This solves the issues that writing different iterations of these books for quite a long time. This means that the ideas have sometimes flourished in different drafts, different versions of the same text, living in different places. I’ve long since lost track of where things are.

Pragmatically, they’re in a big Tinderbox file. But, how to turn that into a book?

When it comes to the final steps of editing, tightening, and turning rough ideas into book form, one step that is both banal and annoying is the general cutting of duplicate text.

There are different ways of doing this.

For a long time I’ve done it by hand. It’s not very efficient when dealing with so much text.

More recently, I have been using a script I wrote called structur.py. With structur.py I code text and send paragraphs and pieces of text to the right place. I put ideas together that are about similar topics. However, once structur.py has worked its magic, there is still a problem: I still have a lot of duplicate text? One way to deal with this is to keep coding until all the similar text is in the same place, then delete it. This is what I did. But it takes a long time just to read 10,000 words. Let alone 30,000 or 100,000, which is my problem. The problem is that I want a copy of a piece of text, and then any good sentences that I might want to put together.

A few days ago, I put together a script called DejaText.py that flags files, paragraphs, sentences and even words that are duplicated. This is super useful for identifying where text is being reused in multiple places. The result was somewhat shocking. My drafts were full of duplicates.

This morning, as I was trying to code six files to deal with the most egregious case of duplicated paragraphs and sentences, I realised that I was coding the same text over and over again. Why not write a script that deletes the second and subsequent instance of repeated paragraphs and sentences? It’s dangerous. But, point it at a temporary folder, and it works. I call it [dejatext_cleanup.py]. It’s on GitHub.

This combination of deleting duplicate text, and then coding with structur.py, allowed me to cut 35,000 words down to 13,000 words. The scripts will speed= things up considerably. How to proceed? The way forward is to work at the level of what I’ve already organised. Take a section, say a section on pencils. Delete duplicate text. Code the remainder. Put the codes in order. Then, I’ll have a complete section on pencils. Revise it a couple times, and then I’ll have a draft.

These are power tools. They’re dangerous. But, it iwll speed up turning a folder of notes into a book.

dejatext.py

Daniel Tubb

DejaText is a Python script for identifying duplicate and similar text in a directory of text or markdown files. It scans a directory of .txt' or.md’ files, identifies duplicate and similar text segments, and produces organized reports for easy review. As part of my writing, I find it useful to go through a project and flag repeated words, phrases, or sentences. DejaText helps me with this.

Writer’s Diary #52: Repeated Words

Daniel Tubb

Today was revision. Cutting and tightening a few sections on pencils. A week ago it was 6,000 words. Now, it’s 4,000. The task today was words and phrases that are superfluous. Overused. Bugaboos. It’s not that all repeats are bad. But, the trick is to be deliberate. My drafts are full of words and phrases reused, without deliberation. They can often be cut. The idea for this came to me from John McPhee’s Draft No. 4.

It is toward the end of the second draft, if I’m lucky, when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working
and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, but it is hardly euphoria. It’s just a new lease on life, a sense that I’m going to survive until the middle of next month. After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose words and phrases in pencilled boxes for Draft No. 4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them. You could call this the copy-editing phase if real copy editors were not out there
in the future prepared to examine the piece. The basic thing I do with college students is pretend that I’m their editor and their copy editor. In preparation for conferences
with them, I draw boxes around words or phrases in the pieces they write. I suggest to them that they might do this for themselves.

This is an early step. Cut early, then revise with care.

I use tools: a script that lists repeated words, and Pro Writing Aid, which has a tool to list repeated words and phrases.

NaNoWriMo Update #4: Artisinal Writing

Daniel Tubb

What’s my update today? I was working on a section of cane toads and sapos, and then moved on to spies and anxiety of fieldwork.

I think I’m using it all to get at a discussion of the basic extractive nature of research, which I don’t contest. However, I’m not totally convinced by the normal solutions that people propose—participatory research, do people really want more workshops, solve the issue. But, in any case, I am still committed to the ethnographic endeavours. So, how does one square that circle? I don’t think you can. So, my answer is a. It comes down to the labour of ethnography—both in the field and afterwards.

The conditions of the research and the writing, as it were. It would seem silly to ask my friends from the field to participate in my half-decade-long writing process. But, to see that writing as labour, as embodied, as a practice, is to think of it, perhaps, like artisanal gold mining or subsistence production. Maybe? Is this a point worth pursuing? My writing process, at least as I imagine it to make myself feel better about being a cane toad, sapo, snitch, inquisitorial ethnographer, is artisanal, makeshift, craft work.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is the difference between an open-pit mega mine and a artisanal gold mine. Both are extractive, but the latter does little harm. I of course imagine myself on that latter side of things.

This is what I was trying to articulate today. Didn’t come together, but I’ll try tomorrow.

No finishing Friday today. But, maybe 5000 words are good.

Step by step; bird by bird.

NaNoWriMo Update #3: Zonked by Words

Daniel Tubb

It’s 2 p.m. I’m driving home from the office without my computer. I got to campus at 8:30, went to a coffee shop, and wrote intensely until about 11:00. Then I went to my office, did some more, had lunch, worked a little bit with a student on a grant, then did some more writing on the book. I’m done for the day, and it’s only 2:30, which is good because I’m zonked. I’ll go home for a hike. It feels like cheating, stopping early. But, it’s already been a six-hour day of editing, cutting, quoting, polishing, revising, and rewriting. More manual than intellectual, really. The book’s argument is that writing can be a form of more manual labor, after all. The section, I picked at for years. Maybe five years? It’s an about fieldwork and feelings of anxiety, of being a spy, an outsider, out of place, doing something where they don’t belong. It’s a common feeling, I suspect, for anthropologists. It’s also about cane toads, gossips, tattletales, snitches, and spies. Its now 800 words or so. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but because it’s tight, it’s dense.

At the end of the day, before checking out, I did some rough notes for tomorrow using voice dictation. It’s about thinking about ethnography as both an extractive and an artisanal endeavor. Tomorrow I’ll tighten up the rest of what I’ve already written and then do a first pass on the notes. Friday I’ll finish the whole chapter. It will be about 7,000 words.

I have no idea how that will count for NaNoWriMo records. I’ve been doing a lot in the last few weeks, but haven’t updated or tracked word counts. The election derailed me a lot. Then, I did a bit of programming. Today and Friday, were pretty good writing days.