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Across Europe and within the UK, there’s an understandable revulsion against Donald Trump, which his brutal treatment of Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelensky at their White House meeting of 28 February has served to accelerate, while his cutting off of military and intelligence aid is already causing deaths across Ukraine.
Trump is brash; he’s crude; he threatens and bullies; in fact he acts more like a mafia thug than an international statesman or, indeed, the most powerful politician in the world. But to underestimate the strategic rationale for what he’s doing would be a huge mistake. Neither should we agree with Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland when he suggests that he is really a poor deal-maker and a weak politician. Trump and his team have a set of clear, strategic goals, which in their brutish style they are seeking to impose on a startled world.
The US nationalist right knows that the triumphalist unilateralism of their post-1989 US neo-conservative predecessors failed. Their Project for the New American Century propagated under President George W Bush by senior leaders such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld sought to export democratic politics but also neoliberal economics by military means, with the aim of making the US the world’s sole super-power.
It faltered as the US found it had bitten off more than it could chew, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, while a clutch of emerging countries, above all China, but reflected more widely in the establishment of the G20, grew in economic strength. The US was forced to adjust to a multi-polar world.
‘Trump’s New World Order: America Will Enable Authoritarians to Win’
The spread of war in Europe is now a greater possibility than it has been since the height of the Cold War, writes AC Grayling
MAGA World
However, in today’s revised version of neo-conservatism, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement sees new opportunities to make the USA the dominant world power, if not the supreme one.
The USA’s lead in the IT revolution with the development of global leaders in different aspects of the digital economy – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, PayPal – has given renewed confidence to its capitalist model while an emergent group of ‘new capitalists’ notably Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have the ear of Trump and Vance and are rigorously arguing for an Ayn Rand-style unregulated capitalism.
These economically libertarian tech bros are at times in contention with the socially conservative MAGA working class base – and their advocates like Steve Bannon – on domestic issues like tariffs and skilled immigration.
However, in terms of world politics, they appear more united. The MAGA movement sees China as its main adversary. It recognises Russia is a serious military and nuclear power but believes, rightly, that it is not an economic rival to the US in the way China is.
It sees Europe as unable to translate its economic strength into geopolitical muscle and so is vulnerable to a US government willing to deploy ‘hard’ power. Some of the rising G20 powers, it believes, are amenable to transactional trade-offs. The role of the United Nations and its core principles established after the Second World War count for nothing.
In their world, belief in the values of international law, the acceptance that nation state boundaries cannot be changed by force, and the right to asylum for those fleeing war and persecution are all dead.
What the first month of the Trump Presidency has shown is that he and his team are trying to impose this MAGA vision by a diplomatic version of shock and awe. In their own backyard, Panama and Greenland are threatened, and if not cowed, then they’ll be coerced. Canada is a bigger fish to fry, but if they want to avoid punitive tariffs, Trump suggests they become the 51st state.
On the Middle East, Trump casually – yet repeatedly – proposes to evict over two million Palestinians forcibly from their homes in Gaza and for the US to redevelop the coastal area as a new Mediterranean resort. The policy’s astounding breaches of international law are not even considered worthy of comment by those within the US administration.
‘It’s Time to End the Trump Denialism and Admit the US Is No Longer Europe’s Ally’
Keir Starmer’s attempts to be an “honest broker” with Donald Trump are doomed to failure, argues Adam Bienkov