People ship million-dollar assets all the time. It would be a huge task to make 160,000 such trips, though.

Do you think Europeans are going to have a problem buying/selling US stonks any time soon?

Moving 1,400 tonnes might take years. The window to act is closing.

But we live in a world where it is considered poor form to expect history qualifications in elected office, so this kind of crash, followed by the long descent, is baked in.

Those assets are frozen, not seized.

Is this sarcasm? It’s hard to tell these days.

Does this demonstrate a lack of imagination or some kind of hermetically sealed alternative reality?

Agreed, but tempering their tendencies for isolationism doesn't mean trusting a country that threatens to invade so-called allies. There are many other places, starting in the EU (since Germany is already in the EU, of course).

1. Long-term backlash against unchecked globalization. Every western country has to come to grips with the long-term impacts of the deindustrialization that globalization has enabled - this impacts their domestic societal stability, their long-term economic growth, and their ability to act internationally and independently.

2. One particular western leader (who happened to come to power, at least partly riding the wave of the backlash above) has accelerated this trend by taking the possibility of trans-Atlantic (+plus a few Pacific trends) tradebloc to form "globalization lite" as a middle ground solution (honestly, I have no idea how viable this would have actually been), and took it behind the shed and shot it, and then burned the corpse.

Globalization was bearable in part because America did infact run the game, and tended to run the game reasonably well. US aligned nations could all see China growing in strength, but they all figured that as long as they played their role and played nice, that when the time came, they could join the US in whatever new game it wanted to play, or join the US in helping push back. What they perhaps did not count on was just has careless America could be, or that America would want to stop playing with them at all.

Towards your point on confidence and trust. As others have pointed out, Trump has also violated trust in all sorts of ways. Trump delights in norm and trust breaking, as a form of dominance display - both as meat for the base, but also to satisfy his own impulses. But perhaps worse, I think a lot of people are now also calculating that Trump could easily misuse or violate trust without really knowing it. Iran should have clarified to everyone that the Trump administration is willing the act on deeply flawed (or perhaps absent) second order (or even move-countermove) planning.

Then again as a Brit I am a bit biased

The trouble is that everyone chooses their own favorite bits from the past and ignores the rest, plus succumbs to unrealistically positive stereotypes about the past.

Or maybe 20ish years before that when we violently restructured the government or Iran at the behest of supposed allies?

Or how about when we sold our industry overseas because a steel mill who's pollution we can't control on the other side of the world is better than one in Ohio?

It boggles the mind that people cannot grasp that the sum total of bad and shortsighted decisions of the past are what created the present conditions.

The New York Fed’s gold is constantly being checked by bajillions of people.

> last time they did, a bunch of bars were made of tungsten

Source?

So maybe that happens, but it's a lot more complicated. And, of course, there are measures against that happening.