It is the sort of discovery that never seems to occur in Lincolnshire. Recently, it was revealed that a toxic, shrinking lake in southern California has even more lithium dissolved deep beneath its surface than previously thought. Enough, in fact, to produce the equivalent of nearly 400 million electric vehicle batteries. For context, there are roughly 285 million registered cars and lorries in the United States.
If Australia is the lucky country, then America is surely the blessed superpower. Washington may still be mourning the end of the unipolar moment — the period sometime between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Global Financial Crisis, when the US was the world’s sole hegemon — but it still has the natural resources, military might and economic dynamism to act as what the economic historian Charles Kindleberger termed the global “stabiliser”. That is, if it wants to.
The irony is that, while the US remains the indispensable nation to everyone’s business, it is also the only country on earth that could feasibly be a self-sufficient autarky — closing the borders, hiking tariffs and setting forth on the path of self-reliance.
That is, in part, because America is less a country than a continent. And this is largely by design. Manifest destiny, the popular belief in the 19th century that it was the divine will of American settlers to expand west, came to fruition.
To be clear, I’m not recommending autarky as an economic system. Trade makes us all richer by allocating resources more efficiently and making countries more productive. Yet as someone who goes to sleep every night safely ensconced under the US nuclear umbrella, the thought is a little unsettling. And that’s when I still assumed Britain’s Trident submarines were capable of firing missiles.
With a population of roughly 340 million, the US certainly doesn’t have to worry about running out of labour. Nor do its citizens share the same problem as Icelanders, who must download an app to check whether or not their new potential romantic partner is a distant relative. So plentiful and fertile is much of America’s land, and advanced its agricultural technology, that it has often been described as the breadbasket of the world, able to feed itself and hundreds of millions around the globe.
Then there’s the stuff under the ground. The shale gas revolution has turned the US into a net energy exporter, and who’d bet against the vast subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act transforming the country into a low-carbon superpower?
Meanwhile, America’s geographical advantages are legendary. Its neighbours to the north and south are economically compliant and pose no military threat. As for its strategic rivals, they’re separated by a vast ocean. Going full-on North Korean-style appears unlikely, I accept. America First is not the same as self-reliance, nor is it the policy of a putative Trump administration, such as it has a platform beyond vengeance and controlling women’s bodies.
Donald Trump’s suggestion of 60 per cent tariffs on Chinese goods is unlikely to materialise, though I forget whether we’re supposed to take him literally or seriously. But even a little American retrenchment poses difficult questions for US allies, not least in Europe.
Trump gets Nato wrong. This is hardly surprising, given that he doesn’t understand people. The former Apprentice star believes that unless you are ripping someone else off, it is you who is getting cheated. And looking at the lawsuits relating to his business practices, he should know.
The fact is that the US gains from its web of allies and partners. Nato costs US taxpayers money, but it also buys a peaceful and compliant Europe. Keeping the shipping lanes open requires a large and agile navy, but it also powers the world’s most impressive economy.
Still, the uncomfortable truth is that US allies need America far more than it needs us. They’d be poorer under autarky, but we’d be completely screwed.
The Bank's boss is a throwback to public figures saying what they thought
I’m low-key obsessed with Andrew Bailey. While the markets parse the Bank of England governor’s words for signs of an interest rate cut, I can’t help but enjoy him as a throwback to an earlier time when public figures could say what they thought.
This week, Bailey appeared in front of the Commons Treasury committee, where he pointed out that, compared to recessions dating back to the Seventies, the 0.5 per cent cumulative reduction in GDP in the third and fourth quarters of last year was “the weakest by a long way”.
This had the merit of being technically true. At the height of the global financial crisis, the UK economy shrank by 2.6 per cent in a single quarter. But a “mild recession” is also only something an independent central banker could get away with saying.
