Reagan was a neoconservative, heavily invested in deindustrializing the Midwest to break the domestic labor movement and capturing labor overseas for the benefit of investment capital. He succeeded too well, as his NAFTA and global trade policies birth to large foreign industrial powers that could meet the US as peers instead of supplicants.

Forty years later, Trump looked at the economic landscape and concluded he could undo the Reagan Era by throwing up high trade barriers, because he believed the finance capitalism at home (combined with our large international military) commanded leverage over physical capital abroad. Now we’re gambling on a war over Greenland and a promise that Europe needs Wall Street more than it needs Chinese manufacturing capacity.

But both Reagan and Trump were fixated on global US hegemony. They just went about it wrong, because they were dumb-dumbs surrounded by people more greedy than they were strategic. It’s a double-own goal, from opposite ends of the net.