Cory Doctorow says the Trump administration is accelerating a shift away from US-controlled systems in trade, finance, military coordination and the internet. His argument, published on Pluralistic, builds on a recent essay by economist John Quiggin, who wrote that countries once treated as indispensable can be worked around when the cost of relying on them gets too high.
The claim is not that American power has vanished. It is that President Donald Trump has made that power less useful to the countries expected to trust it. Doctorow, citing November Kelly, frames the postwar order as a game already tilted toward the United States, then says Trump rejected even the pretense of stable rules.
Doctorow points to Canada as the clearest example. He writes that Trump replaced NAFTA with the USMCA in 2018, then, after the 2024 election, moved to tariffs that he says have swung from 25% to 100% and, according to a White House fact sheet he links, to 50% this week. The result, in Doctorow’s telling, is a trade relationship where concessions do not buy predictability.
He also criticizes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, saying Carney has accommodated Washington by allowing Palantir into sensitive Canadian military systems, dropping a planned 3% tax on US technology companies, and replacing large numbers of civil servants with chatbots, many run by US companies on US infrastructure. Doctorow says Canadian retaliatory tariffs have raised costs for Canadians while failing to change Washington’s behavior.
The trusted third party problem
Doctorow’s technical point is that the United States has long functioned as a global trusted third party. In his analogy, complex transactions need an intermediary, like an escrow agent in a house sale. For decades, he writes, the US filled that role because key infrastructure ran through American-controlled channels.
He lists transoceanic fiber links landing in the US, dollar-denominated payments, SWIFT, aid programs, military bases in more than 100 countries, intelligence relationships, and IT systems used by governments and critical industries. His argument is that the US was never neutral, but previous abuses were often hidden or dressed in legal process. Trump, he says, has made the coercion explicit enough that counterparties have reason to stop trusting the system.
Quiggin, as summarized by Doctorow, argues that Europe and Ukraine are already reducing reliance on US military protection from Russia and have surpassed the US in some drone and artillery capabilities. Quiggin also says the EU is moving to cut dependence on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, especially as Trump uses financial infrastructure against bodies such as the International Criminal Court.
Doctorow disputes the AI focus
Doctorow agrees with Quiggin’s broad post-American thesis but says Quiggin overstates the importance of sovereign AI. He argues that losing access to chatbots would matter far less than losing access to Microsoft Office 365, tractors with remote kill switches, cloud systems, telecom software, government databases and e-commerce platforms.
Doctorow says the hard part is not writing replacement software or financing data centers. The hard part is extracting data, replacing firmware and connecting new services to old ones. He blames trade deals with the US that, in his view, made reverse-engineering American technology exports illegal in exchange for market access.
His conclusion is blunt: Trump has given other countries a practical reason to rebuild around US systems rather than inside them. That is less a theory of decline than a systems-administration problem with borders, tariffs and root access.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.
