Lessons from the first year of Donald Trump’s second term
The West’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal razing of Gaza and the impunity with which an allegedly isolationist Trump abducted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, expropriated its oil, bombed Iran, and threatened to annex Greenland and Canada has, it’s fair to say, made international law a disreputable fiction
One way of understanding Donald Trump is to see his second term as a clarifying moment. Instead of exclaiming at the brutality and bigotry of his view of the world, we could recognise his policies towards Gaza, immigration, tariffs, aid, armed intervention, annexation, allies and China as the flailings of a superpower in relative decline. Instead of treating the crudeness of his government’s rhetoric as the maunderings of an unhinged president, we could accept that it represents the views of the electoral majority that endorsed him to make America great again.
This is not to be cynical or knowing about the United States of America. At least half its citizens dislike Trump and the prejudices that he embodies. The mid-terms or the next presidential election could change the tenor of US policy, but the fact that American citizens elected this man twice to the presidency must mean that his policies have widespread and enduring support. It’s also reasonable to note that there are continuities between Joe Biden’s administration and Trump’s on, say, Gaza and China, and that many voters, editorialists, policy mavens and citizens object to the optics of Trump’s take on American supremacy more than its substance.
If we were to itemise the lessons learnt from the first year of Trump’s second term, the list might read like this.
One, the West doesn’t exist as a fellowship of wealthy, first-world countries. It is, instead, a euphemism for a cluster of mainly White client nations under American patronage which have traded in sovereignty for protection. The sense of common purpose inspired by the Cold War wasn’t replaced by much after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the bid to expand NATO into a global alliance that would underwrite the West’s security collapsed when the US decided that it wouldn’t pay for it. Ukraine is a case in point. The inability of European countries to independently shore up Ukraine’s defences or negotiate a peace underlines Europe’s dependency.
The corollary of this dependency has been the spectacle of heads of European nations tip-toeing servilely around Trump in response to his tariffs, his humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky and his government’s scathing contempt for Europe’s political culture and its ‘civilisational’ decay. Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary-general, personified this cringing deference when he justified Trump’s rhetoric by saying “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.” Even Trump’s insistence on annexing Greenland, the territory of a NATO ally, didn’t elicit a blunt response from Europe’s major powers because they didn’t want to offend this raging father. Trump recently threatened to impose additional tariffs on countries whose leaders opposed his plans for Greenland; if he does move to annex the territory, it’ll be fascinating to see how Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz respond.
Two, Europe’s claim to be a moderating, regulatory superpower in the making has been tested by Trump’s belligerence and found wanting. The indifference of most European countries throughout Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, their unwillingness to ask for a ceasefire for fear of offending the US, the prosecution of pro-Palestine activists by centrist governments in the United Kingdom and Germany, show us that for all the pearl-clutching by European moderates at Trump’s provocations, there is very little daylight between Trump’s far-Right government and Europe’s centrist parties when it comes to countries and peoples outside the charmed circle of the West. The tacit support extended by European countries to Trump’s bombing of Iran and his assault on Venezuela suggests that geopolitically the EU is not an independent actor and its constituent nations are camp followers, not sovereign nations.
Three, the astounding rise of China and the dawning belief that it might be poised to achieve dominance not just in manufacturing but at the bleeding edge of key areas of science and technology has been framed and highlighted by Trump’s embarrassing failure to bring China to heel through punitive tariffs. China’s standing as the only peer competitor of the US was boosted by its use of its rare earths leverage and the very public way in which Trump blinked and backtracked. Paradoxically, Trump’s attempts to use the US’s military and financial sinews to assert its power left it looking diminished and alone, less the leader of the free world than a declining superpower gone rogue. In contrast, China seemed the rational superpower, anchoring the global economy, leading the world in renewable power and electrical vehicles, even as Trump doubled down on fossil fuels. America’s longstanding bet on fracking and Trump’s hostility to wind and solar seemed to surrender not just the present but the future to China.
Adam Tooze has made the point that if Europe’s first China shock was the impact of incorporating Chinese manufacturing into its supply chains, Europe’s second China shock will be the indignity of begging to be incorporated in China’s supply chains. Tooze also noted that the globe’s climate future depends mainly on China, which is at once the world’s largest emitter of carbon through its use of coal and oil but also its unchallenged leader in renewable energy, bidding to become the first electrostate powered by clean energy. The sorry way in which the US and Europe have resiled on their climate commitments reinforces the growing belief that China is, by a kind of default, the guardian of the world’s environment.
Four, while the US’s claim to being the leader of the ‘free world’ was never taken seriously by countries in the Global South, especially those that had been at the receiving end of its strategic attention, it did have a certain standing as the architect of the post-War order. International law may have been honoured in the breach by Western nations but even hypocritical lip service to a code of international behaviour was seen as better than nothing. The West’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal razing of Gaza and the impunity with which an allegedly isolationist Trump abducted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, expropriated its oil, bombed Iran, and threatened to annex Greenland and Canada has, it’s fair to say, made international law a disreputable fiction.
Trump’s internal policies have made America’s claims of moral leadership risible. A country which attacks its own universities, arrests legal residents for their opinions, gerrymanders its elections, vests its leader with complete legal immunity, lets masked paramilitaries accost legal residents, deport them, and even shoot them dead, that stokes White supremacy, that singles out White South Africans for asylum, can’t plausibly offer itself as a beacon of freedom or democracy.
Finally, Trump has helped clarify India’s position in the world. Narendra Modi’s vibes-based courtship of Trump, the assumption that the US president’s longstanding prejudice against Muslim countries was a kind of bond, the idea that there was a right-wing brotherhood that would oil the wheels of Indo-US diplomacy, turned out to be untrue. After Operation Sindoor, Trump tilted sharply towards Pakistan; worse, he punished India with the highest tariffs he has levied on any country.
For twenty years and more, since well before Modi’s tenure, India has walked back its traditional non-alignment for a ‘multi-aligned’ but effectively pro-US foreign policy posture. India’s membership of the Quad was seen as a strategic move to contain China. How membership of the Quad can be reconciled with India’s dire dependence on China for investment in manufacturing and the US’s barely-concealed hostility is a question for India’s pro-US foreign policy pundits to answer. Trump’s America has forced a reckoning; after him, we can’t die wondering.
+++++++++++++
Reflections on ideology, morality and conscience
Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery; War is Peace
Natalia Ginzburg: Our Monstrous Ideas
Biblical Archaeology and the Judeo-Christian legends / The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho
Gaza and the Death of Conscience
Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza
Israel’s War in Gaza Is Nothing but a War of Annihilation
Arab Failures: The Unspoken Complicity in Israel’s Genocide
After the truth-shower 