As I think about how to frame the opening episode of the relaunched “A View from Afar” podcast next week, I find myself wondering about silver linings. The current international moment is very dark and the end of the liberal order is nearing, but surely there must be some good shining amid the gloom. I think I have found one such glimmer, perhaps not of hope but of honesty in how one country represents itself before the world–and perhaps by extension, how the West sees or should see itself.
Readers may remember that last year I wrote about Trump believing himself to be the “Great Disruptor” and agent of change in the world. His advisors and acolytes seized on this self-perception to whisper chaos theory-based sweet nothings into his ears about carving out spheres of influence (for the US, in a Western Hemisphere that extends to Greenland) that he is willing to divide up with Russia and the PRC. He believes in annexing the sovereign territory of other states (including Canada), renaming international geographic landmarks (like the Gulf of Mexico), authorising the murder of civilians on the high seas and kidnapping of the authoritarian president of a foreign state on trumped up drug charges while leaving even worse dictators unscathed because they are “friendly,” blockading an island State out of ideological spite, and interfering in the elections of foreign countries by using direct foreign aid as a weapon of reward or retaliation. It does not matter if the view is simplistic, wrong in its theoretical grounding and practical application, and ultimately more of a fever dream than a practicable reality when extended over time, but however deluded it is his belief system and he acts upon it with the complicity of the MAGA/GOP establishment currently in control of the US government. And because the US government wields extraordinary coercive powers, both economic and military, it is dangerous.
It is apparent that Trump’s mental abilities have diminished considerably in recent times, but his advisors continue to blow sunshine up his skirt and oil him with grandiose ideas that are designed to stroke his ego, promote his brand and enlarge his bank accounts while serving their overlapped agendas (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro are notable in this regard). From what I can discern, they encourage him to free range when it comes to speaking at domestic political rallies and campaign events, but then urge his caregivers to lace him up with the mother of all pharmaceutical cocktails when he has to give speeches to serious audiences such as foreign diplomats, business magnates and international statesmen in global fora. When compared with the stream of consciousness rants that he uses on domestic partisan audiences, with some exceptions his tone at these international meetings becomes more subdued, he speaks in a monotone, behaves semi-civilly and generally gives the appearance of situational detachment from the realities of the moment and consequences of what he is saying. If only we were to have access to his medication list and schedule!
Returning to the glimmer of light, it begins in darkness. It turns out that the US is indeed the core of the international system and Trump is the vortex that is drawing the old order into the black hole of systemic dissolution. One only needs to see the Trump ripple effects–he is the rock thrown into the centre of the global pond–to acknowledge his impact on domestic politics and international relations across the world. He is a malignant, evil force but he is also an irresistible object, a rip tide of ignorance, banality, self-interested corruption and narcissism using US power as the current against which all other global actors must now sink or swim. Fortunately, although undeniably strong, his hubristic ignorance weakens the US gravitational pull on the world scene.
There is good in this. For nearly a century the US has claimed to be the leader of the “free” world, the champion of democracy, upholder of human rights and defender of the innocent, weak and powerless. The reality is that it is a nation-state founded on racist beliefs standing on stolen lands by white property (and slave) owning men, using laws and institutions that promoted patriarchical heterosexist privilege over everything else. It took a civil war to abolish slavery and then another century to enact the Civil Rights Act that granted “equal” status to African Americans. It took over fifty years before females of age earned the right to vote, and long after that restrictions on the franchise remained in place (like poll taxes, residency and language requirements, forfeiture of voting rights due to criminal convictions even if for minor offences, etc. ). It systematically discriminated against waves of immigrants, be the Italian, Irish, Asian, Mexican and now those coming from the African and Latin American diaspora. It pushed indigenous tribes off their lands and onto reservations. Forced segregation was replaced by self-segregation, which is still a thing in many places. So is socioeconomic class stratification, gerrymandering, voter suppression (much more than fraud) and deliberate dumbing down of and distraction from obvious social contradictions on the part of the public majority. One percent of the population control eighty percent of the wealth. Christian nationalist-fascism, long thought to be on the wane, has a stranglehold on one side of the US ideological divide and skews public debates about cultural mores and social ethics. And yet the US public still believes, or at least until Trump entered office, to be living in the land of the free and home of the brave.
What is good is that Trump has ripped the veil off of that foundational myth. He has revealed the US for what it is even if he and others do not want to admit it: a venal, bloated, self-absorbed authoritarian husk of a democratic Great Power. It never was any of things that it claimed to be but for a while it at least tried to improve or pretended to be better than it was, harking to the idealism of some of its founders who held a belief in the perfectibility of humankind. It took time and struggle, but the myth tells us that the US was getting better as a society and as a political construct. But it never was and now certainly is not a truly liberal democracy. Yet it took Trump to debunk the myth.
The myth was, if not a lie, more of a pipe dream than an achievable reality. So it is good that Trump has exposed the true nature of US society and better yet, rendered transparent the contradictions and fractures that undermine its increasingly brittle institutional edifice. Or to paraphrase my father, “when the wanna-be dictator starts naming everything after himself and painting everything in gold leaf, he reveals his real intent.”
The same is true for US foreign relations. It is the core of the international system but that was the OLD liberal internationalist order that is currently being destroyed by the gravitational pull of the Trump dark hole. Again, the US used to claim that it was the “leader of the free world” etc., but today it is anything but. It is a neo-imperialist declining Great Power, once hegemonic after the Cold War but now more like an old athlete shouting “I used to be somebody” into the winds of time. The US has broken the global order but it is incapable of dominating what comes next. It is more akin to the death grasp of a drowning man, locked into a hopeless situation beyond its control and overcome by circumstance of its own and other’s making. So it thrashes about as it slips under, pulling anything it can get a hold of down with it. It now has the liberal internationalist order in its grasp.
Over the short term, as I have written at some length before, a declining Great Power is dangerous. It is more likely to start wars in order to preserve its position in the global status quo. But declining powers may be able to start wars but then are unable to finish them on their preferred terms. Instead, they are defeated by rising powers or, in what appears to be crystallising at the moment in response to Trump’s foreign policy adventurism, a polycentric constellation of established and emerging technopoles rooted in the Global South that use soft power as a counter-weight to US bullying. This is more than the BRICS and although critical minerals are the new gold of world technological economies, it is knowledge economies, knowledge production and commodified knowledge accumulation that will fuel the growth of the Global South and the ascendent Great Powers coming from it.
The US is too socially divided, too inward-looking, too partisanly governed, too corrupt and too incompetent as political managers to meet the challenges of the emerging polycentric technopolar world. It lives on grievance, internal culture wars, contrived outrage and clickbait self-absorption in a culture where “influencers” are given more respect than neuroscientists and astrophysicists, and where modern bread and circus acts have replaced the fine arts as the currency of popular culture. All of this is epitomised by the MAGA regime.
But thanks to Trump, all of that is now made transparent. There is no pretence of “public interest” or “commonweal,” just naked self-interest, bartering, bullying and opportunism posing as government for both domestic and foreign audiences. We finally see the US, or at least that part that is MAGA in orientation, for what it really is.
So it is that with Trump lifting the veil of hypocrisy from the self-proclaimed US position, we can now fully see that it is a two sided coin where the domestic side is marked by increased prejudice and avaricious authoritarianism and the foreign side is neo- imperialism. There are certainly many decent people fighting against this in the US, but the dye has been cast and neither the US or the international system will be the same once Trump has left the scene. That should give the rest of the world pause to reflect on what might constitute a post-liberal world order and perhaps for some in the post-imperial West to draw parallels between themselves and the giant in its decline.
“A View from Afar” podcast relaunch: Monday February 23, 12PM noon NZ time/Sunday February 22, 6PM US East Coast time.