(This is the first sample of what I will write here from now on, beside digital issues. Please do read why, how and how to support me here)

I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a New York trip with stops in stores like “Dal Triestino” to buy every symbol of American coolness one could afford was the ideal holiday for many Italian teenagers, me included:

Back then, for me and most other Italians, Americans were the good guys. Yes, they did look clumsy and weird sometimes: here in Italy, we call “americanata” things or behaviors “eccentric, naively grandiose, exaggerated, tacky and kitch”. But “americanate” or not, Americans were likeable. They were the people with the most inviting places to visit, the coolest movies and music and the most effective army. Most of us also considered Americans the guys who, even if they were doing it primarily for their own advantage, mostly did the right things on the international scene.

I also worked almost two years in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s, when the Valley was still building software and hardware that did make sense, and I really enjoyed it.

In other words, throughout my whole life, I’ve almost always lived with lots of reasons to appreciate “the American way” and wish Italy was, for some things at least, a lot more like America. I still do.

Now, however, I am sad and pissed off because on one hand, there are plenty of wonderful places and people in the US I almost surely won’t see anymore in my life, and on the other hand I’m still forced to care about America. I am sad and pissed off because...

Crossing an ocean to be kicked back? Of course not.

First and foremost, I am not willingly going to land, not even for an intermediate stop, in airports where the stupidest thing outside my control may send me back home right away on my own pocket if I’m lucky, or block me there for weeks before doing that.

Travel-wise, China, Russia or even Iran seem safer to me these days. By this, I mean they look as places where, if a visitor knows and follows some clearly defined set of rules known in advance, everything will be all right. Not so in current America, where misfits who never learned or understood that Europe and Mexico aren’t neighboring places have more chances than everywhere else to work as Custom officers. Or, out of airports, deliberately badly trained ICE guys could shot or harass me just because I don’t look scandinavian, or speak with a local accent. You loathe me for no real reason? No problem whatsoever, as long as you stop me before I buy the plane ticket.

More in general, I’m sad because today’s US are a place that lost itself so much into infantilization, assorted extremisms, self-adsorbing identity issues and other kinds of virtue signalling of both colors to lose both any interest in their own people and, which is much more relevant, any perception of their weight in the world, and any responsibility for it.

The US of these times are a country doing a terrific job of making itself despised and ridiculized at the same time. Greenland? As arrogant and clownish as he was, had Berlusconi been in the Oval Office instead of Trump, with his same powers, he’d already have Greenland by now, just thanks to better manners and higher maturity. Ditto for, to name just the most recent events, kidnapping foreign Presidents abroad or, at home, (potential!) migrants not cute and blond as the foreign trophy wife of their Presidents. Tom Clancy novels like “Executive Orders” are fun to read, not to live in.

Feelings and perceptions like these may be exaggerated, or based on incomplete information. I am aware of that. Fact is, these are all feelings that, until very few years ago, got no news stories to spring from, and above all no US administration so happy to see them arise.

The same US which I’ve liked a lot for decades is doing all it can to make me wish for a world where I can finally - finally! - afford to ignore, if not their actual existence, at least everything they trouble themselves with at home. That’s what looms largest in my mind these days, more than debating, or proving, which system is better.

Looking the other way now

This America is doing all it can to make me accept, if not really like, a Heartland 2.0 world: a self-sufficient Eurasia, in which food and other physical goods don’t travel on sea lanes that US warships may block, but on electric trains powered by nuclear plants done right, and nothing is paid in dollars, or through US-controlled systems (for the latest EU steps in that direction, read here).

Can you imagine an Eurasia in which each part is free and content to live in its own way within its own borders because...

• China, India and their neighbors make cars, processors and other stuff

• Russia (without Putin) provides raw materials and energy to do it

• the Middle East is poorer but pacified at last, because its remaining fossil fuels and anything else there don’t matter enough anymore to stir trouble, and...

• the EU (possibly self-reduced to its current western part, with a cultural and military Intermarium buffer block) is...

• in the best case, the next “nation of free people, a country that would be a light unto the nations, and a shining city upon a hill”, just done right, maybe partnering with Canada in a NONATO (North Of (former) North Atlantic Treaty Organization)

• in the worst case, a new edition of “Graecia Capta Ferum Victorem Cepit”: that is, a vassal backwater, politically, but one with such a huge cultural soft power and legacy to shape its rulers for centuries, as Greeks did to the Romans

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I am well aware that the list above may be a mix of naivete and cluelessness from my part. By all means, do (politely!) tear it apart, if it deserves it, no problem. My goal here is to convey a feeling, not to promote any specific geopolitical doctrine.

It’s the feeling that matters, regardless of which place is “best”, if there even is one “best”: the US of the 2020s is strongly pushing me to consider as the lesser evil, if not as an intrinsically positive outcome, a world that doesn’t need to keep America happy and American dollars at the centers of every issue because - finally!- what happens inside American borders doesn’t matter anymore for the rest of the world.

As things stand today, I’m sure the number of Europeans who would accept such a world - if not actively ask for it - is already large and can only grow. And again, this is happening because America went off the rails first, not us. This is what the First in “America First” looks like from here.

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Had the US become a modern, limits-aware version of what its movies and leaders said it was in the 1980s (yes, I know that’s a contradiction in terms), I wouldn’t have any real issue to keep thinking as I did back then, and accept them as THE Big Guy.

But that’s over now, and things won’t change anytime soon. As far as I am concerned, I know a lot of Americans who are wonderful people, and want to stay in touch - and possibly work - with them all. But politically and culturally, it will take at least one generation, probably two, before trust and admiration for all that’s STILL great in the US return as they were just a few years ago.

By then though, it will be too late to rewind whatever version of “Heartland 2.0” will have actually happened.

And by then, of course, Africa will rise anyway. But that’s a topic for another post.

Bonus “it’s not just me!” quotes

You may say I’m a (naive) dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Here are a few quotes from some posts published in the last year, to prove that point:

• “America Is Crashing Like Sri Lanka Did, Hopefully Worse”:

  • “Historically, America does not care if countries collapse and in fact enjoys it. Chaos is a ladder, and as a reserve currency, they’re at the top.”

  • “I don’t think America can vote their way out of this, and I hope they don’t. In fact, I hope America crashes so completely that it just disappears as an entity, an identity, and as an enemy that holds deaths and debt over everyone.”

• The Brutish Are Coming, The Brutish Are Coming!

  • “There’s nothing overly imaginative about Trump’s and Musk’s unbridled attack strategy. They’re using the nation’s bigness and control of the jobs and money to intimidate - primarily friends.”

• It Was Us All Along

  • “The developed world made a deal with America 80 years ago. So long as we operated under the cover story of our stated values, other developed nations were willing to live under the American corporate and military umbrella. We’ve broken the deal. You can say it was Trump, but that doesn’t matter. We broke it.”

• What Happens Now That the World Can’t Trust America Anymore?

  • “there’s the world asking: can we still trust America? Remember, it hasn’t quite arrived at an answer yet. It’s sort of stunned. It can’t quite comprehend this weird... explosion-implosion”

  • “The point is that [right now, the world still] wants to [trust America]... But at some point, and it’s coming soon, America will finally lose all credibility.”

  • “[and then], nobody will bother even attempting to “deal” with [America]”

  • “go ahead and ask a European or Canadian if they’ll trust America again just because it elects someone nicer. They’ll tell you: so what? Now the problem is that you just might do it all over again, at any point, and how do we know you won’t?”

Also on topic:

• ‘It’s like our friend started a fist fight with us’: These Europeans are skipping US travel

• Is Trump the unwitting historical agent of Cosmolocal Accelerationism?