AFTER nuclear brinksmanship with North Korea, support for Europe’s far-right insurgency, and now the decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Donald Trump has edged the European elite towards a conclusion they should have reached decades ago: American power is fundamentally dangerous, unsound and incapable of rational control.
Outside of Europe, this is old news. In 2013, during peak Obama-mania, WIN/Gallup polled 66,000 people to find out who the world sees as the biggest threat to peace. The result is easy to guess: by far the most common response was America, a distance ahead of anyone else. But the conclusions are even starker when you look at the data on a world map. It shows that while Europeans and Americans were obsessing over Iran and Syria, everywhere else – Latin America, Africa, Asia, even Australia – was losing sleep over the unimpeded Washington Consensus.
That survey, remember, happened when Donald Trump was merely a reality TV star and American liberalism was enjoying its eight glorious years in power. Inevitably, many dismissed it as evidence of crude anti-Americanism, inflamed by propaganda and state TV.
Yet the opposite conclusion is equally likely: relatively privileged Europeans, sheltered from the consequences of America’s actions, watching the world through “embedded reporters” on state TV networks, could dismiss the horror of Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Palestine as mere policy errors. By contrast, if you live in one of the world’s peripheral countries, you know you could be next on Washington’s hitlist.
In 2017, the global rich caught up with the global poor, and sentiments that would have been called “crude anti-American propaganda” a few years ago are common in liberal newspapers today. But if America isn’t going to keep us safe, who is? While the “Islamic terror threat” is mostly trumped up – no pun intended – nobody is denying that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are a problem. Today, though, there is no obvious hegemonic successor to the United States. It remains the country that dominates global markets and most of the global military. Many are wishing for a Trump defeat in 2020 – or even an impeachment before then – and a return to liberal norms.
But that is wrong on two levels. First, a president like Hillary Clinton would easily match Trump for warlike rhetoric and action. Secondly, repairing the damage of Trump’s diplomatic follies will require a level of moral courage that no liberal president has ever shown. Would a Democrat stand up to the Israeli lobby and move the embassy back to Tel Aviv? You’re more likely to see Trump and Putin wearing pink and waving from a float at 2018’s San Francisco Pride.
Indeed, perhaps the weirdest thing about Donald Trump’s first year is that it has been, by American standards, relatively war-free. Measured by boots on the ground and drones in the sky, compared to the heyday of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, Trump has been, objectively speaking, something of a foreign policy snowflake. But that’s not a good sign for global peace. It simply means things can get worse – we know that because we’ve seen it.
So far, the Trump era of foreign policy isn’t really distinguished by actions. What sets him apart is his complete disinterest in polite language and diplomatic norms. This can still be exceptionally dangerous, as we are seeing with North Korea.
But maybe it’s also an opportunity: Obama lulled the media to sleep while his administration drone-bombed villages with an obligatory tear for the victims; Trump’s brash, dick-out diplomacy has at least awakened polite opinion to some of the horror.
Indeed, the Israeli embassy fiasco, morally scandalous as it is, may have positive unintended consequences. Polite European opinion had somehow convinced itself that something called the “peace process” was happening, and nobody had paid much attention to Palestine for years.
With Obama in charge, Israel was flouting all its international obligations and conducting its everyday banal campaign of illegal mass arrests, collective punishments, occupation and settlement building. As usual, the UN turned up to show ceremonial disapproval, to the interest of nobody.
Trump’s decision to heap a bucket more humiliation on the world’s most humiliated people has at least re-politicised the question. Palestine solidarity and anti-war movements have new space to draw attention to the plight of the world’s biggest refugee community. Maybe there is new hope in this horror (it’s a big maybe).
It’s difficult to judge who can solve a problem like North Korea. America clearly can’t be trusted. The European Union has barely any influence inside of its boundaries, far less outside of them, and liberals won’t accept any Russian intervention.
Weirdly enough, you now hear respectable figures from the foreign policy establishment speaking about the Chinese Communist Party as the most likely force for global moderation. David Cameron has even signed on with the Chinese government to promote trade, a sign of where things are headed.
Ideally, a UN solution could be brokered. But that’s unlikely. Powerful countries such as America and Israel have spent generations ignoring the UN, making it all-but-irrelevant in a real crisis.
We are headed, then, for an interval, a period between two reigns, with no clear idea of how to have stable neoliberal capitalism without uncritical deference to America. The anti-war movement, and the public it represents, must be prepared to fight against joining any new crusades against new enemies, whether under Trump or under his successor. American intervention had little credibility under George W Bush, and even if Trump is overthrown, he won’t be forgotten.
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