It is not just that we have a US president who is a threat to whole civilisations. That claim could be made about several of Trump’s predecessors. Since the Second World War, the US has launched full-scale invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama, and Grenada and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq (twice). It has bombed many more countries and fought numerous wars by proxy.
The difference with Trump is that he is ghoulishly open about his ruthlessness. He tweets about it; he boasts about it.
Previous foreign interventions have been dressed up in fine words about freedom, democracy, human rights, even, in the case of Afghanistan, women’s liberation. Trump doesn’t do window dressing.
The phrase ‘might is right’ is normally used in a critical sense. For Trump, it is a principle to be proud of. His shameless pursuit of national self-interest is mixed with a contempt for alliances or international agreements and a penchant for deliberately unpredictable unilateral action. All this is tearing up the existing global order and making the world a very frightening place.
Two common explanations for the turn to gangster imperialism are that Trump is a psychopath or that he is Benjamin Netanyahu’s puppet. Sometimes both are assumed.
It would be a brave person who suggested there weren’t some unstable characters at the top of the Trump administration. Declassified documents show that during the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger deliberately gave the impression that Nixon was a little mad to convince the world he was prepared to take extreme measures.
Now some truly unhinged people have been allowed to take over the levers of power. It would also be foolish to deny that Israel’s prime minister has the ear of the president, as well as being a close friend of others in his administration.
But a historic shift in US imperial policy cannot be reduced to the mental health of its leaders, or the undue influence of a foreign power.
The new turn is a product of fundamental changes in the world system and the resulting predicament and policy of a whole ruling class. Trump’s frenzy is an expression of the torment and frustration of a great power in decline, or more precisely, of the fact that the US’s economic and political influence is waning in the face of the rise of China, while the US remains by far the biggest military power on Earth.
This is the only way to explain why up till now there has been so little opposition to Trump. Out and out isolationists are starting to find their voice now, but while many in the US establishment won’t like his style or his miscalculations, faced with rising China, they currently have no alternative to his unpredictable power projection.
Netanyahu clearly has leverage, partly because of the US’s weakened position in the world. But trying to explain Trump’s behaviour as entirely a product of Netanyahu’s influence also misses the big story. It writes the dynamics and the decline of the world’s biggest power out of the picture.
The US’s predicament has been playing out in Iran. Attacking Iran with Israel seemed to give the administration the opportunity to fundamentally reshape the Middle East at relatively low cost. That has turned out to be an illusion. Trump could deploy massive air power but couldn’t risk putting boots on the ground as the US did in Iraq.
He talked of hellfire, but despite the immense suffering caused by the bombardment, he couldn’t pull together an international or regional alliance capable of delivering a decisive blow. All the while the miscalculations, the lack of basic intelligence assessments underpinning the operation show how fantasy thinking is creeping into the foreign policy of a declining superpower.
The likely results are deeply alarming. Combined with Israel’s expansionism, Trump’s actions risk permanent war in the Middle East, even though economic disruption is already rolling out across the globe.
Even if negotiations succeed with Iran, Trump is likely to lash out elsewhere.
As a result, ‘shoot first talk later’ is in danger of becoming standard practice everywhere. An arms race has taken off around the world, strengthening nationalism as it goes. Europe’s governments are in the grip of war fever.
Everywhere, people are being told that warfare has to come before welfare and that the military must be prioritised. In Germany, a Volkswagen car factory is being turned over to missile production. Ten European countries are in the process of introducing conscription. Here we are being told that necessary rises in arms spending, and war-related inflation mean we have to ‘lower our expectations’.
Meanwhile, we are being treated to the very British idea of gap year military boot camps.
The hope in this difficult situation comes from the fact that even in the US, Trump’s gunslinging is unpopular. More than 60% want an end to the war in Iran and concern about economics and foreign policy easily outstrips concern about immigration.
In the UK, 55% now see the US as a negative force in the world, a jump of 19 percentage points since before US forces seized Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January. The majority oppose the war in Iran too.
Combined with the extraordinary energy and commitment of the Palestine movement, this gives us the basis for a hugely popular campaign against Trump’s wars, against the new militarism and in favour of a world where welfare comes before welfare. It is much needed.
Source: The National