Millions of ordinary people, let down by their politicians over a lifetime, their livelihoods devastated by decades of neoliberal economics and their hopes and dreams trashed, lashed out by voting for populists with simplistic nostrums and snake oil remedies. The result is years of chaos, impacting many other countries; further, long-lasting economic damage; the spread of post-truth politics in which the things people say are no longer held to any standard of factual accuracy; increased polarisation of society; instability, danger and the threat of war; old friends around the world re-cast as enemies; long-standing international relationships, carefully built, demolished at a stroke; and despair spread among those who cling to rationality. Sound familiar? Yes, there is a lot in common between Brexit and Trumpism.
The one great change driving everything now, is that what was formerly the US-led West, can no longer trust the US. With his imposition of economic sanctions (dressed up as tariffs), Trump has gone from being less friendly towards America’s long-standing allies, to being actively hostile. We are now just a chip shot away from actual direct conflict with the US. If he invades Greenland, or makes an aggressive move on Canada, and they invoke Article 5, what could we do? The fact is, a direct conflict against the US is now a far more realistic prospect than a direct conflict against Russia.
If nobody in the Foreign Office or the MoD has ever done any thinking about what Britain could do in the face of a hostile US, then shame on them for being asleep at the wheel. Trump did not arrive out of the blue on 20th January. This has been building for years. Britain has spent the decades since 1945 making itself the willing vassal of the US, creating a wide range of dependencies, and ignoring the risk this brought, that the US could take a hostile turn. Now that it’s happened, we are totally unprepared.
For all my life, we have gone along with the US posture of standing for democracy, peace, freedom and capitalism, while undermining all four through provoked wars, regime changes, sponsored coups and extractive economic domination. Through a familiar (although to many of us, unacceptable) doublethink, we supported America in many outrages; the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of a vague “war on terror”; all the dirty wars against left wing governments or political movements under the guise of standing against communism; the knee-jerk support for the outlaw rogue state of Israel; bombing campaigns against people who had not harmed us; the list goes on and on. For the privilege that went with being the bully’s sidekick, we swallowed it all. Those of us who didn’t were derided for anti-Americanism or for being crypto-communists. But now, in just a short time, America has undergone a genuine moral pivot.
The American right (like our own right wing) regards itself as being on the moral high ground, but since the location of this nebulous patch of real estate is a matter of opinion, it’s quite possible for everyone to believe themselves its exclusive tenant. Trump’s culture-war morality is about staking his claim to this ground: his repudiation of racial equality; his fixation with old-school sexual morality (not the kind of morality that might apply to the pussy-grabbing rapist’s own behaviour, of course, but his anti-abortionism and his insistence on strictly binary sex and gender classification); and his full-on attack on immigrants, with threats of round-ups and camps. These are all appeals to his supporters who believe that America can become Great Again by rewinding to a golden age before (what they see as) the moral collapse of the 1960s. Rewinding to a time when American kids called their fathers “sir”, gay people stayed in the closet, women stayed in the home, and black people had yet to demand any rights. But, what’s actually happening now in the US is a moral collapse of a different kind. Authoritarian government by a President who works by signing Executive Orders; the criminalisation of dissent, with universities having funding withdrawn unless they suppress student protest; the intimidation of judges and journalists; the capture of the Supreme Court by packing it with political appointees; the threats made against Canada, Greenland and Panama; and the tearing up of the WTO rules by the application of tariffs. All these run counter to American constitutional values and the concept of the rule of law, domestic and international; together, they are amount to a national moral collapse. The sweeping aside of checks and balances carries the risk that an authoritarian President becomes a totalitarian one. Already Trump is speculating out loud about having a third term.
In my life, there has never been a bigger gap between the rulers and the people in Britain or America, than there is today. For example, the main parties in almost all the western “democracies” and the G7 countries, whether in government or opposition, actively support Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The majority of people are horrified by this holocaust-in-progress, but have no way to connect the popular will to their government. Protest is being suppressed in truly Orwellian style; the police raid on a Quaker meeting house last week is just one recent example. Six women who were discussing how to protest over Gaza were pre-emptively arrested, lest they … block roads? It seems that anyone who criticises Israel too strongly, is accused of supporting Hamas, which has been declared a “terrorist” organisation (a label better suited to the Israeli government), and thereby can be arrested under anti-terrorism laws and powers.
Some reactions to the second Trump administration have looked like little more than pearl-clutching over his vulgarity, the fact that he’s a convicted felon and sex offender, and his culture-war attitudes. But, those are American domestic considerations. Trump is far more dangerous than this. Look at some specifics. Firstly, since 1945, there has been a global economic order based on the dollar as the reserve currency. Until 1971, the dollar was convertible to gold, and when Nixon ended that, it was effectively replaced by the fact that the major oil exporters only accepted dollars in payment. Even America’s enemies – the communist countries, Iran, China and so on – used the dollar throughout that time to settle international trade. Secondly, over a similar period, the Western nations have based their security policy on the Atlantic alliance, of which the US was acknowledged to be the leader. We’ve fought some stupid, avoidable wars in that time, and lost many of them, but the essential fact of the geopolitical scene was America’s network of faithful military allies. Thirdly, slowly, over many years and through patient diplomacy, the world trading system has progressed toward reduced barriers to trade, lower tariffs, and common standards, with a widespread acknowledgement of the benefits of trade being more free.
None of these three great systems of the world order, were perfect. The reserve status of the dollar gave America an “exorbitant privilege”; the dollar was “our currency, but your problem”. It has allowed Americans (5% of the world population) consistently to consume 25% of the world’s resources, and pay for them with “small green pieces of paper” which cost them nothing to produce. It is bewildering that Trump can portray this situation as victimhood; Americans have constantly lived above their means as a result of it.
The security policy and the NATO alliance were based on America’s belligerent, imperial, aggressive approach, multiple wars of choice, and the constant threat of a suicidal nuclear war. The world trading system has allowed continued exploitation of poor countries, and was the well from which neoliberal economics flowed. So, in each case, there were losers; however, these systems were built over decades and were stable. But they relied on trust. Trust takes time to build, but can be lost in a heartbeat; the systems based on it were therefore vulnerable to a rogue President. Now we have one, and he has thrown away that trust.
The rule of law is the bedrock of the dollar system. It underpins the market for the world’s most important financial asset, the US Treasury Bond. America’s promise to honour its debt was fundamental to the whole world economic system. Similarly, the NATO alliance was based on the shared commitment that “an attack on any one of us, is an attack on us all”.
Trump’s America has not officially withdrawn from either of these commitments. However, he has undermined them sufficiently that they can no longer be relied on, which has much the same effect. His contempt for the law doesn’t stop with restrictions on his own personal behaviour; his announced intentions to take over Canada and Greenland, and his threats against all other countries, not just the usual antagonists, show that he recognises no restraints at all. Trump, and those around him, disparage the UN and even discuss leaving it. We hear ideas being floated to compel foreign holders of US bonds to exchange their current holdings for 100 year, non-interest-bearing bonds, in return for tariff reductions or military protection (sometimes called the “Mar-a-Lago accord”). Stephen Miran, chair of Trump’s council of economic advisers, has supported such a scheme. This, if it happened, would amount to a default on America’s debt obligations. So far, this is not a formal proposal, but we can see foreign bond-holders already reacting to the possibility, with many central banks disposing of US bonds and buying gold as a reserve asset. Similarly, Trump has said enough things to cast doubt on his commitment to mutual defence, that although the alliance still exists on paper, European nations are reacting in panic to the prospect of the US backing out. Finally, Trump has torn up the world trading order by imposing substantial tariffs on all imports; again, showing contempt for trading rules which America wrote, and which America benefited greatly from.
Now, fun as it is to give Trump a kicking, it’s not all about him. These developments have been a long time coming. There has always been a moral vacuum at the heart of the West’s world order; the aforementioned wars of choice, the invasions, the bombing campaigns, the engineered revolutions, the diplomatic arm-twisting and so on. This is brought most clearly into focus today by the West’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, the greatest evil of the century to date. All the bad things we accuse Russia of doing in Ukraine, we are actively helping Israel to do in Gaza and the West Bank. In economic terms, there have been millions of losers within the G7 countries from neoliberal economics and globalisation. The legal principle of property rights has been undermined by the confiscation of assets from Russia (and other transgressors). Ordinary voters have, over many years, been alienated by a system which offers them a choice of individuals in power, but not any real choice of policy. Hence the support for supposed alternatives like Brexit and Trump.
However, Trump is not offering an alternative, he’s just lashing out and pulling the rug from existing systems – imperfect, but stable – without offering a better structure. If he succeeds in undermining the dollar reserve system, if he does default on America’s obligations – whether through confiscation, a forced debt-swap, or simply continuing to devalue the dollar by over-issuance – what will replace it? If you don’t opt into his protection racket, where will you go?
Similarly, the undermining of NATO and the security order has already pushed the Eurozone into issuing a flood of new debt into the markets and raising military budgets at the expense of other public spending. Trump is now making threats towards Iran and there are signs of US military assets moving into positions within range of Iran. Bomber planes and their tankers are building up on Diego Garcia, for example. Warlike rhetoric has, for some time, been ramping up against Iran, which is the last country on the notorious list of seven neocon targets (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran) yet to be attacked. Trump’s cabinet is filled with neocons and supporters of Israel, whose top foreign policy wish list item is a war on Iran. If the President, elected on a platform of less war, starts one against Iran, two things could happen. One is that Iran wins; their military capabilities are very up to date and any attack (certainly any ground invasion) would face a highly effective defence; and Iranian missiles could devastate Israel. They also have the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, stopping the flow of 24m barrels of oil per day. Secondly, Iran has Russian support, and any such war could escalate to World War Three very quickly.
Even if the economic system survives, and we avoid a massive war, the tariff tantrum is pushing the world into recession. They will not work, by which I mean that they will not bring back millions of well-paid manufacturing jobs to the US. A nation doesn’t go through that stage twice. For the last 30 years, with full government backing, US companies have offshored their production. They cannot now bring it back, indeed they will not try on the basis of tariffs that are not legislated and could be lifted by the same casual diktat with which they were imposed.
Trump is not a joke; he is not just an immoral man imposing his reactionary views and unworkable solutions on his country. He is a danger to the world; a man with limited grasp of how the systems work that he is shattering; a spoilt child, claiming victimhood, playing with fire. He believes America was losing a game, and has thrown over the board. Whatever happens next, the pieces cannot land back where they were. While fearful of the risks which the world now faces as a result, we might hope that the outcome could yet be good – but that would require the next President to be a serious statesman and a leader with great vision and ability. So far, no such person is in sight.
Notes from Interesting Times 