So Donald Trump has been elected the new President of the United States of America after what has been termed the “most divisive” election in US history. Sadly, Trump’s victory prevented real history being made by America in electing its first woman President, in the form of Hillary Clinton.
If that historic opportunity was lost, the election also heralded some serious developments both in US politics as well as in global politics. It is this election that has made prominent what was already an emerging trend: the slow decline of the US from its position of pre-eminence in the world system.
I think that it was on the eve of the First Persian Gulf War, launched by the United States of America in 1990 to drive out Iraq from its forcible occupation of neighbouring Kuwait, that then President George Bush Sr. told a gathering of conservative Christian church leaders that the US was proceeding with this war to ensure the spread of ‘God’s Kingdom’ throughout the world. Of course, the gathered right-wing Christian leaders applauded the triumphalist endeavour.
Then, in 2003, US President George Bush Jr., at the head of a similarly formidable Western coalition, launched the Second Persian Gulf War aimed at ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime.
If the First Gulf War was motivated by Iraq’s wholly illegal and aggressive occupation of Kuwait, something that the whole world could see as real, the ostensible official objective of the Second Gulf War was to end Iraq’s apparent stockpiling of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD). Even at the time of the preparation for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was no firm evidence, whatsoever, to show that Iraq had any stockpile of WMD.
Even if much of the rest of the world outside western Europe and North America disbelieved this claim of ‘WMD’ by Washington – and echoed by London – the world, given the dispensation of power at the time (2003), could only watch in horror as a collection of the most powerful military forces combined to blast their way into Iraq even ignoring last minute pleas by the United Nations.
Why there was ‘horror’ at this invasion in 2003 is, today, easily understood when one counts the cost of that second invasion of Iraq by the Western powers. Within a couple of years the horror – including the dead bodies – was piling up. Today, the entire West Asian region is aflame, with perhaps Iran, ironically, now the sole major, stable country in that hapless region. Today, the war in the Gulf is infinitely more destructive than what happened there during World War 2.
This is the backdrop in which America has now elected a President who seems to be at the head of a new ‘movement’ (to use the President-elect’s own term) which apparently wants to dismantle much of the vast apparatus that currently conducts the continued destructive geo-politics in West Asia. It is this same apparatus that also conducts geo-politics – presently less destructive, but destructive, all the same – in other parts of the world. The destructiveness is notable in eastern Europe as Ukraine struggles under the pressures of giant neighbour Russia but whose leadership seems to be egged on to defy Moscow by the West.
When the Western powers chose to undertake the terrible war against Iraq in 2003, they did so quite blatantly using an unproven claim (of WMD) as the flimsy excuse. I remember writing in these columns at the time that this most destructive geo-political action completely undermined the claim by the Western powers for centuries to an ideological pre-eminence, a kind of ‘supremacy’ of ‘Western Civilisation’. I recall titling an Observations essay at the time as ‘The end of Western Civilisation’.
What I was pointing to was the blatant lie and the exposure of the West’s moral bankruptcy before the whole world. In 2003 it was just the Big Lie of ‘WMD’ that undermined the West’s moral ascendancy.
Today, that Lie has resulted in the greatest devastation on Earth since the Second World War. Today, the moral bankruptcy is fully exposed and the West no longer holds the same ‘brand value’ that it did in my childhood, influenced as we were by Hollywood, Fleet Street and Buckingham Palace. All that gloss has now been shattered.
Thus, the rhetoric and discourse that marked the presidential election campaign of Donald Trump, while astounding some of the US’s closest allies, is yet unsurprising if one has followed the trail of destruction these past decades. The very devastation in West Asia is evidence of the general weakness of an alliance that once was the world’s dominant one. The withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan and Iraq – and surreptitious return – is further evidence of this emasculation of Western dominance.
After all, the old colonial powers generally withdrew from their ‘dominions’ in an orderly manner not leaving too many power vacuums behind. Indeed, for their own continued economic interests, these colonial powers made sure that viable states were put in place with their retreat. Vietnam was one expensive failure of colonial withdrawal and Kashmir another less expensive one. But there are not too many, certainly not on the scale of what has happened with US-led Western geo-politics in recent decades.
Donald Trump’s election platform seems to be confirming this failure and decline. Most significantly, he has undermined the basic premise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – perhaps the greatest single military alliance in world history – and did so in a single speech! He has declared – and repeated this several times – that the US will not honour that basic premise unconditionally.
NATO’s basic premise is that if a member state is attacked, all fellow NATO members would treat that as an attack on the entire alliance and would respond collectively – the classic ‘one for all and all for one’ principle.
The US President-elect has not only publicly withdrawn that military alliance commitment but, so far, he has not retracted his statements. Even if Trump did retract it, no NATO member state will take the risk of not factoring in to its battle planning a possible US non-commitment to military action. To that degree NATO is now no longer the united, singular, world force that it once was.
Donald Trump has also taken similar positions on other critical military alliances – with South Korea, and Japan. He went so far as to speculate on the repercussions of a US failure to remain militarily committed: that those countries should resort to their own nuclear arming if they are no longer sheltered by the US’ nuclear umbrella.
Even if he is not serious about these pronouncements, the very fact that the new leader of the so-called ‘free world’ reduces such military alliances merely to the measure of financial costs, confirms the inability of the new US leadership to value these long-treasured alliances as what they are or were: mutually beneficial linkages vital for the very physical existence of states and societies in the face of existing security threats. Is this not a breakdown in global geo-strategic understanding by the United States, yet the world’s most powerful state? What will fill this vacuum? Can this vacuum be filled or, will numerous global edifices collapse or weaken due to this vacuum? There were also a string of ethno-centric and xenophobic pronouncements by Trump about his policy approach to Islam, to migration and visitation from Islamic countries and, the promise of a wall to protect the US boundary with Mexico. Again, these have not been substantially retracted and the world now awaits the possible implementation of these ‘promises’. Even if these are false promises only to win votes, since they have not been retracted, they remain as the hew hallmarks of American civilisation.
Both the ideological vacuum as well as the geo-political vacuum that is heralded by the arrival of Donald Trump is so profound, with implications to global security and wellbeing so severe, that all across the globe, people are yet trying to come to grips with this new reality that is dawning, paradoxically, from the West. True, Mr. Trump is not just a demagogue. Nor is he simply an adventurer – the whole election bid seemed such an adventure for him.
He is a serious businessman and will, no doubt, take stock of his victory, enjoy the kudos, and then turn to the experts for advice – this time not on tax-dodging, but on dealing with the most complex problems in world history. Already, indications are that various Republican Party stalwarts are lining up to support the new President in the formation of his cabinet and formulation of policy. How much the expertise is drawn from the pragmatic wing of the Republican Party and how much from the hardline and doctrinaire ideologues will decide the coherence and success of Washington’s new government and its impact on the world order.
The need for coherence is underlined by the worst public protest demonstrations ever to be held in the aftermath of a presidential election. Protesters demonstrated – some violently – in over 25 American cities, large and small. All of them were in protest against some of the very issues discussed above – against the xenophobia, racism, homophobia and sexism, among others. The divisions brought out from under the carpet by the Trump campaign cannot be easily swept under the carpet again. Indeed, what many people fear is that these divisions would be fanned further by new government policy and the behaviour of politicians. Brexit in the UK saw a resulting wave Islamophobic violence in that country.
Even if the world no longer looks at America in the idolizing way it once did, the world needs those countries that wielded power previously, to continue to give leadership in a creative manner that will ensure that the world, as a whole, remains intact both as human civilisation and, increasingly urgently, as a viable habitat. America is fast fading away from the ‘No. 1’ position, but its leadership is valued as a lovable human society that brought us not just flamboyantly entertaining billionaires but also some of the most brilliant minds, talented intellects and inspiring athletes.
‘Uncle Sam’ can still have a fatherly connotation – sans the braggadocio.