Even as hundreds died or suffered injury while yet asleep Tuesday morning, in a suspected gas attack in war-ravaged Khan Sheikhoun, a small Syrian town, spring shoppers on a quiet Friday afternoon in the heart of Sweden’s capital, Stockholm, were mowed down by a rampaging truck. In-between, even as fighting continued in Syria and Iraq (and several other parts of the world), on Thursday in his private holiday resort, the head of the world’s largest economy, US President Donald Trump and the head of the world’s second largest economy, China’s President Xi Jinpin had their first meeting.
And the night before Friday’s horrific Stockholm afternoon, even as the US President dined his Chinese counterpart in Florida, USA, US Navy destroyers launched 59 medium-range guided missiles to bombard one of Syria’s five major air bases. And at the beginning of the week, North Korea yet again test fired a medium range missile into the Sea of Japan – even as American and South Korean land, sea and air forces ended their 2-month-long annual joint military exercises.
I am sure not very many readers would have known of that military aspect of the heated environment in north east Asia: the annual, intensive exercises by the US and South Korea to fine tune their close military partnership, practising amphibious troop landings very close to both, North Korean and Russian coastal areas. President Trump had earlier trumpeted on the eve of his meeting with President Xi that the US would deal with North Korea on its own if China did not reign in Pyongyang.
Actually, Trump did show off US military prowess to his Chinese counterpart even as they dined in far-away Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. But that was in West Asia, a region of undermined, weak states with various insurgencies on-going. On that festive Thursday night in Spanish-style Mar-a-Lago, US destroyers off the Syrian coast launched 59 Tomahawk guided missile capable of a 1000 kg ordnance payload at a key Syrian airbase closest to rebel held territory in western Syria. The camaraderie between the two presidents that Washington projected was overshadowed by world shock reactions to the gas attack, the US cruise missile strike and, the Stockholm street attack.
Meanwhile, very close to home, the Maldivian opposition coalition continues to claim that it is close to unseating the current regime of President Mohammed Yameen.
Amid this overload of confrontation and conflict in a single week, a focus on the most dominant geo-politics and an appreciation of its implications could be a soothing distraction. The deliberate coincidence of the events in Mar-a-Largo and the US missile strike, along with the choice of the weapon and, the choice of the Tomahawks’ target, seem to indicate a new and sudden twist in the Trump presidency that implies more outward-looking and geo-tactical (if not strategic) US global posture. It was a shift in posture that came in the wake of a minor but significant internal upheaval in the White House hierarchy.
Analysts have noted the significance of the demotion of Trump’s official ‘chief strategist’ (the simplicity of the term indicates the limited conceptualisation), a controversial, American hard Right-wing media personality named Steve Bannon, in his official capacities. US analysts have noted that while Trump’s son-in-law, millionaire businessman Jared Kushner has risen in his role as Senior Adviser and special Presidential Representative, Bannon has been ‘re-assigned’ from his place as a rare civilian full member of the National Security Council. And, in recent meetings involving the President, Kushner has been seen constantly in the inner circle whereas Bannon, if ever present, is in the outer circle.
Bannon is a star of the extreme, mainly White supremacist, right-wing political movements in the USA, a sector of politics that has thrived with the socially insensitive public discourse led by Donald Trump in his election campaign. Trump’s overtly elitist, racially and sexually, insensitive public discourse was guided by Bannon as his chief strategist of the presidential election campaign.
White underclass culture
As in any in-coming administration the world over (don’t we, Sri Lankans know?), Trump brought along with him some of his favourite and most loyal associates. Bannon gave words and metaphor to Trump’s campaign mix of White underclass culture that embraces an old-fashioned White American nationalism. Bannon describes himself as an ‘economic nationalist’ but also advocated strongly isolationist American geo-politics rather than the traditional super-power role.
In fact Bannon is probably echoing the disapproval now being expressed by other American extremist right-wing personalities regarding the missile strike against the Syrian airbase. Already, Trump admirer Nigel Farage (of the United Kingdom Independence Party – UKIP) of Brexit fame has condemned the missile strike along with many British Right wingers.
Trump initially won the support of the American Right-wing (and some of its wealthy conservative backers) because he expressed a popular nationalism that appealed to the White underclass, much of which is Republican constituency. Trump’s early opposition to the US entry into the West Asian/Gulf quagmire and later the interventions in Libya and Syria won the hearts of these hard Right activists along with his ‘America First’ slogan and ranting against ‘big government’, an enemy to an underclass that has received little but economic marginalization from it.
This simplistic extreme Right and White supremacist politics is anathema to the conservative elite that is the mainstay of the Republican party, an elite no less snooty than its Democratic counterpart. The mainstream Republican leadership is already leaning rightwards as it came under the influence of a full blown, laissez faire political intelligentsia, a new urban class encouraged by massive corporate interests. But, the crudities and divisive nature of Trump’s discourse was, firstly, a social affront to the American super elite, but more importantly, undermined America’s expansive global posture regarded as even more necessary than before in the light of new global rivalries.
Thus, most analysts saw a Republican leadership strategy that has guardedly gone along with Trump as the new President, primarily in order to fulfil the Republican party’s long term strategy of gaining control of both, the executive and legislative arms of the state and, if possible, of the judiciary. Many analysts, watched how the White House appointments were balanced between Trump’s hard Right loyalists (Trump – like many South Asian politicians - trusts loyalty over expertise) and Republican leadership proxies. The general prognosis has been that, at some point, Big Washington will squeeze the extreme Right newcomer upstarts and attempt to influence Trump more in their traditionally expansive geo-politics and conservative.
This seems to be happening sooner than expected. Jared Kushner is an elite New Yorker of traditional Jewish religion, well educated and complements the intelligence and market savvy of his wife, Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Both now have official positions in the White House – controversial at present because there seems to be no careful disengagement from their big business interests during their governmental tenure.
They are accredited with deterring Trump from supporting deregulation of laws protecting people of alternate sexuality (male and female homosexual, trans-gender). A social conservative wing of the ruling Republican Party hopes that Trump will help roll back such social rights as well as abortion rights. Clearly, the modernist intellectual influence of his kin steered the President away from such old-fashioned and potentially unpopular policy.
It is likely that the distancing of isolationist Bannon from the White House inner circle along with the accumulation of intelligent ‘family’ influence opened up avenues for the Republican mainstream leadership to prevail.
Initial reactions
Initial reactions to the Tomahawk strike have been cautious or negative in many parts of the world even as much of the world continued to condemn the gas attack in Syria. The main western powers and Israel and Turkey, all declared enemies of the government of Syria welcomed the US missile strike.
But most of the world will be watching to see whether this marks a definite return of US foreign policy to the old, neo-expansionist, posture that Vietnam could not change and neither did Afghanistan or Iraq. Just as much as the world watches the re-emergence of China as a world power (China accounted for nearly a quarter of the world economy in the pre-European colonial era), the world is also watching to see whether that isolationist streak in Donald Trump’s espoused policy will be contained and Washington pivots back to super-power play.
As it is, already world markets have seen price rises in gold, silver and other precious metals as well as in oil and other mineral resources in reaction to the US missile attack on Syria. Given the boiling tensions in West Asia, a key source of mineral fuels as well as a geographically important trade and travel transit point, any heightened warfare in that region threatens global economic stability – leave aside social security and political stability. The Stockholm attack has added to the uncertainty.
The world has yet to see modern China in any militarily aggressive mode after the early border wars during the post-World War 2 building of the new Chinese state. Today, China epitomizes peaceful expansion through economic cooperation, investment and trade. Indeed, China has taken leadership – via the Shanghai cooperation process - in building some of the world’s first multilateral, geo-strategic economic and financial infrastructure since the setting up of the World Bank/IMF and UN system.
The world wondered whether the early Trump discourse signalled a dramatic shift from old American global policy. Last week showed a sudden breaking of the isolationist momentum inside the White House and a dramatic missile strike even as Washington hosted President Xi. It is likely that swift missile attack was executed all the more faster to coincide with the Xi visit.
In terms of geo-political realism, the US can do little more against any actor in vastly dangerous West Asia than an attack bearing the impact of a minor conventional heavy artillery barrage. A Tomahawk missile, unless carrying a small nuclear warhead, can unleash a blast of 200-foot radius which, apparently, is enough to fully destroy a single middle-class house. Other structures and living creatures in a 700-foot radius will suffer serious damage or injury/death. There were only seven so far reported deaths in the missile strike on the Syrian airbase. That is because an airbase is a ‘hard’ target (meaning with materially very hardened shelter for operations, equipment and personnel), especially, one that is on a counter-insurgency footing like in Syria.
Even though Washington has promised further similar responses to the uses of chemical weapons against civilians, one wonders how long the US can maintain such a posture in actual practice.
Hopefully, the new week will be quieter and a reduction of tension will enable everyone to take a breath and think.