Trump 2.0 Suffers From Selective Amnesia | Manoj Kumar Mishra

President Donald Trump’s administration (2.0) is in the process of forging a new America that treats friends and foes alike through transactional lenses. It is noncommittal to an ideological paradigm aligned with a democratic, interdependent and stable world order within which the US would seek to fulfill its long-term interests. It rather asks for quick redemption and repayments for any American losses suffered from and assistance rendered to its allies. However, the administration’s calculation of losses and assistance is ahistorical and skewed. It pretends to forget the glaring fact that the US has made enormous geopolitical and economic gains from its interactions with allies, neutral states and adversaries within the liberal international order tailored by it and that it has been leading for decades.

Trump 2.0 and Liberal International Order

The President sees a world around him as a burden which seeks to take a freeride on the American largesse. President Trump seems to be reflexively ignorant of the fact that It was the America and developed countries of the Western Europe whose brainchild - neoliberalism was imposed on Asian and African countries to financially benefit their own economies rather than the third world countries. It is a cliché to argue that the third world countries have long been the destinations of market, cheap labour and raw materials for the first world including the US. The US economy has benefited immensely from outsourcing jobs to low-cost economies. Dollar has gained the status of global currency largely because of the interdependent global economy - a byproduct of liberal international order which Trump would hardly be interested to sacrifice. The international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank still privilege the US and other developed economies to further their subtle exploitations through institutionalized mechanisms. The US has taken enough benefits from its permanent membership in the UN Security Council.

On the contrary, President Trump believes economic interdependence and the rules based world order of which the US was a harbinger is a threat to the US itself. Trump wants US’s traditional allies in the NATO to make more contribution to defense expenditure, offset the economic imbalances through weaponizing tariff and control illegal trafficking of people and drugs to US. At the same time, Trump 2.0 seeks to adopt a version of Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere which is clear from his annexation plans for Panama Canal and Greenland and bludgeoning approach towards Canada and Mexico.

As India, a strategic partner of the US has begun witnessing that the Trump 2.0 has begun deporting illegal immigrants using military and forcing them into flights with handcuffs as if they had committed crimes in the US mainland. While the US as a sovereign state has a right to identify and send back the illegal immigrants from its territory to their home countries, Trump 2.0 conveniently ignores all humanitarian principles and the history of interdependence and acts presumptuously in self-interest.

The Trump 2.0 pretends to project the US as a perennial victim of rules based liberal international order even as it has benefited immensely from that order. The extra burden that the US primed on itself is primarily for its own strategic gains. It would be naive to argue that the US did not benefit from the role that NATO and allies in the Indo-Pacific played to contain the influence of Russia and China in various parts of the globe.

The administration has again switched back to its position during the first dispensation by withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Paris Climate Change Agreement. While the phenomena of climate change and global pandemics are affecting human lives more than ever before, the administration’s myopic approach to these issues would place the US on a weak soft power pedestal. Using tariffs and sanctions as economic weapons privileging on current American economic predominance would most likely backfire as it would rupture the existing supply chains and push many neutral countries to the Chinese and Russian orbit of influence. The economic rise of the global south represented by groupings like BRICS is a fact that Trump 2.0 cannot ignore. This grouping’s cumulative contribution to the world economy has surpassed that of G-7. Trump 2.0 through its bludgeoning economic policy would further strengthen such groupings and the economic interactions as well as collaborations between such groupings with other regional groups in the Latin American, European and Indo-Pacific landscapes.

Trump 2.0 and Global Peace

Trump administration’s bullying strategies and uncertainties in foreign policy approach alongside his personal equations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nonetheless brought hopes for breakthroughs in the protracted wars between Russia and Ukraine on the one hand and between Israel and Hamas on the other while Joe Biden administration’s indecisive and soft approach botched up the conflicts on both theatres. Many viewed Trump’s success in attaining peace in the turbulent regions could win him Nobel Peace Prize in near future. However, the administration’s idea of enforcing peace unilaterally with threatening of withdrawal of support, economic sanctions and military actions may prove to be short-lived unless supported by shrewd and collective diplomatic efforts. Without the necessary American support, Ukraine will have no other options except succumbing to and accepting a deal that supports Moscow’s territorial absorption of the Ukrainian soil. Netanyahu might have agreed to the ceasefire with Hamas under the Trump administration’s pressure to immediately get an agreement signed in keeping with his election campaign.

As the President and his administration clearly lacks credible peace strategies which would reconcile the material and humanitarian interests and losses of the parties to war to their acceptance and also put forward the plans of post-war reconstruction. The enforced peace seems to be fragile and advantageous to the powerful side.

Trump 2.0 seeks to resort to a strategy of maximum pressure on Iran to roll back its nuclear power ambitions and broker ties between Israel and Saudi Arab to checkmate Iran and place Israel in the driver’s seat of emerging geopolitics in the new Middle East. Fall of Assad regime in Syria, massive weakening of Iran’s proxy Hezbollah by Israeli military strikes and partial destruction of Iran’s military capabilities by Israel’s precision strikes generate hopes that Iran may be further squeezed to abandon its nuclear weaponization programme. However, without creative diplomacy such incessant pressures would strengthen Iran’s integration with the axis between China-Russia-North Korea. The ceasefire agreement would eventually collapse once Iran gains strength and builds synergies with the remaining militants from the decimated organizations of Hezbollah and Hamas to regroup.

(Author: Dr. Manoj Kumar Mishra, Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science, SVM Autonomous College, Jagatsinghpur, Odisha, India )