With the second coming of Donald Trump, it may now be prudent to try to understand him. Neither episodic nor properly aberrant, the Trump phenomenon is striking in its clarity. Trump has a theory of American power. When he first put it forward, it was a relatively marginal theory. Now it is seemingly almost uncontested. As the differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden started to look more contextual than substantive, the former’s victory in November acquired the tinge of inevitability. Like it or not, Trump is what America means today.
Power, in Trump’s mind, must be exercised directly. This marks a drastic change: American power has distinguished itself for its ability to hide behind a complex structure of rules and institutions, a structure many thought only increased its reach. Trade rules, military alliances, political doctrines. The liberal international order, as it was often called, was a tool of power. That has changed. In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for Washington to bring about the outcomes it desires. China’s influence keeps growing. It threatens to dominate the green transition in the way America dominated the electricity revolution. The Taliban returned to Kabul, after the US announced its withdrawal. The Ukraine war appears frozen.
This is where Trump comes in with an obvious response: Americans have to forget about liberal pieties and embrace the open exercise of force, with little concern for legitimacy or normative trappings. Trump won because his adversaries conceded his point. How should we interpret the horror of the war in Gaza if not as the wilful embrace of a form of power that no longer cares much about legitimacy, having replaced it with a sense of civilisational superiority? Biden, after all, has called it outrageous that the International Criminal Court would apply existing international law to Israel. A number of Senators threatened European countries with economic destruction, presumably through sanctions, if they dared to uphold the system of international norms they solemnly committed themselves to.
In this and other examples, Washington opted for its version of might is right. In recent months the State Department has started arguing that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians, but – guess what? – Israel has the right to do that. In this sense, Trump and Gaza are deeply connected events. They signal a momentous change.
As HR McMaster and Gary D Cohn, two Trump advisers, put it in a notable Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2017, Trump embarked on his first term that year carrying a revolutionary new outlook that saw the world not as a “global community” governed by rules and institutions, “but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” They added: “Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.”
We are in the midst of a revolutionary moment. To understand this, let’s turn from Trump to a distinguished authority on revolutionary moments. Lenin thought a revolutionary situation is triggered by three distinct developments: the rulers become incapable of ruling; the ruled can no longer stand being ruled; and resistance to the rulers is being actively organised. The latter, as seen on the world stage, is what some authors call the new axis of autocracies. Organised efforts to overturn the world order take place when those most under pressure from the hegemonic power sense an opportunity. Two phenomena are at work simultaneously. First, the rulers seem weaker than before. That is certainly the case with American power. It is clear in the case of the Ukraine war, where Washington has refrained from trying to stop Russian energy exports to India or Indonesia, knowing that its own structural power over the world economy has been diminishing over the last two decades. Simultaneously, to the extent that whatever power America still has is now exercised in a direct fashion, expressed through threats and sanctions, that exercise will increasingly be seen as intolerable by their targets. These targets have started to group together in ways that would have looked impossible just some years ago. Russia and Iran have always been geopolitical rivals, and much still separates them, but they have been brought together by our revolutionary moment.
A decline in hegemonic power inevitably creates a sense of threat, to which a natural response is to call for greater ruthlessness in dealing with adversaries. In recent months this is practically all one hears in foreign policy circles in Washington and the main European capitals: we need to be tough, as tough as everyone else. Have we become soft? Do we no longer have any fight left in us? Remarkably, the very traits Westerners have projected upon the rest of the world – a cult of force and lack of concern with legitimate forms and processes – are quickly being re-appropriated by Western democracies themselves. Orientalism is coming home.
Trump is a master at these games. Already in some of his earliest rallies in 2015 he liked to evoke the example of Singapore to suggest the United States should solve its opioid crisis by introducing the death penalty for drug traffickers. The proposal was invariably met with loud cheers from his supporters. Today he is even more explicit about his theory: America should return to brute power, the instincts that made it great to begin with. Trump was never an isolationist. He wants to act in the world but with the weapons of the arena rather than the habits of that extinct geological epoch, the liberal world order.
Things never work quite the way Trump thinks. When a legitimate power is no longer widely regarded as such, and when it attempts to salvage its position by turning to naked power, its fate is settled. Brute force consumes too many resources and breeds new levels of animosity and hostility. It alienates friends and allies, who tend to feel even more humiliated by the abandonment of the norms and institutions recognising their status. The arena is not where the ruling power wants to be. But Trump has brought America down to the arena. Are you not entertained?
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