Smallness
The 2025 national budget is an unmitigated calamity. But that is not the biggest tragedy for the nation.
This mangled, corrupted and craven budget document is a symptom of a deeper disease: a country ruled by an irresponsible political class whose boundless greed is matched only by smallness of vision for the country.
How can this nation navigate through a volatile and uncertain world when it is betrayed at every turn by a political elite that is always keen to plunder but constantly unready to sacrifice for the larger good?
The thought occurred to me as I watched a documentary shared by Gary Teves. It was about Beijing’s decision to cancel $164 billion worth of US agricultural exports to the country. The cancellation was announced without much fanfare. It pulls the rug from under Donald Trump’s bluster about imposing punitive tariffs on China’s exports to the US.
The cancellation will certainly bring chaos to America’s agricultural heartland, Trump’s political base. Over the years, American farms have been geared towards supplying China’s huge food market. The cancellation will gut the heartland, force hundreds of farms into bankruptcy.
Trump is famously long on words and short on strategy. In his first term as president, he initiated a trade war with China using tariffs as a weapon to extract concessions. But he did not prepare his own economy for a trade war.
By contrast, Beijing responded to the Trump tariffs by planning ahead. China revolutionized its own agriculture using artificial intelligence in farms, editing genes and evolving climate resilient crops.
Seeing dependence on American agriculture as a vulnerability, Beijing planned ahead. China supported with investments the development of huge farms in Argentina and Brazil to produce soybeans. With infrastructure support and corporate investments, Beijing encouraged the growth of agricultural estates in several African countries to supply the Chinese market.
Having diversified the sources of its food imports, China was ready for Trump 2.0. When the incoming president babbled about imposing more tariffs on Chinese goods, Beijing was ready. They had moved manufacturing to Mexico to continue selling to the
