Opinion Trump is building a new American empire

It is only now dawning on European politicians that the most serious threat the West faces as a geo-political actor is neither Russia’s army nor China’s economy. Even Muslims and migrants, long the favourite internal enemies of Europe’s populists, pale in insignificance before the external threat posed by US policy on Russia and Ukraine, Canada and Mexico, and on Europe’s military and economic status. While it is tempting to attribute this challenge solely to the Donald Trump administration, it has been in the making for much longer under Democrat-led administrations than Republican ones.

The end of the Cold War allowed the US to dispense with its old allies as well as its now-defunct enemies, since the former no longer held the same importance without the latter. This shift remained hidden for some time, as the Americans worked with Europe to globalise the world economy and usher in former Soviet republics into the EU. But in doing so, it also eviscerated the international order that had been put in place after World War II, one which had depended upon the inclusion of and engagement with enemies as part of the UN system.

Once liberated from such enemies, the international order represented by the UN could be sidelined for unilateral military action by US-led forces in places like Serbia and Iraq. These were often coupled with unilateral sanctions that sought to exclude recalcitrant state and non-state actors from a now globalised economy. With only very occasional expressions of dissent, Europe went along with these moves thinking it would gain from them. Its leaders did not realise that dismantling the international order gradually turned them into vassals, not allies.

Precipitated by the end of the Cold War, this shift also had significant domestic consequences for both Americans and Europeans. Their states no longer required the kind of popular support that was so crucial in facing the Soviet threat. This was demonstrated in the abandonment of Keynesianism and the welfare state for a globalisation of capital that moved manufacturing to Asia and so fragmented the old industrial working class and, with it, the entire social structure. But without traditional constituencies to cater to, domestic politics as much as economics was hollowed out.

Globalisation resulted in a condition where it became impossible to separate domestic from international concerns. Terrorism and migration came to represent this blurring of spheres in popular understanding, while politicians increasingly sacrificed domestic needs for international considerations in free trade deals as well as wars and military interventions around the world. Public opinion in the West, which has been solidly against interventions like those in Iraq and Gaza, is routinely shut out of political debates on such matters in favour of wage issues and culture wars against internal enemies.

Without representing sizable and long-standing electoral constituencies, political parties in America and Europe have been weakened and can now be taken over by adventurers. This is what happened to the Republicans when Trump evicted its old elite and took over the party in 2016. Elsewhere, we see the collapse of venerable parties and the creation of new ones almost overnight, with France being a good example of this process. In the meantime, the far right presents perverted visions of public opinion to an increasingly receptive electorate that feels shut out of regular party politics.

Trump represents the culmination of these developments, inveighing against a discredited “deep state” and “mainstream media” only to empower his friends, relatives, and the tech oligarchs who now shape public opinion through algorithms as a new form of censorship. He pursues long-needed political initiatives, such as implementing a ceasefire in Gaza or ending the war in Ukraine, in the worst possible way, with proposals to ethnically cleanse one place and gain mineral rights in the other. This apparent display of power, however, masks its own fragility as much as that of America’s political system.

While Trump has benefitted from the steady increase in presidential power countenanced by every administration since the War on Terror, his naked display of it against Congress also tells us how superior the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy is compared to the 18th century vision of elective monarchy that is the US presidency. And while commentators are fond of following Trump by taking William McKinley as his model for a new American empire, a more realistic assumption might be James Monroe and his vision of America’s power, built on a hemispheric dominance that excludes Europe together with Africa and Asia.

Trump’s efforts to subordinate Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Greenland to US power look like the making of a new Monroe Doctrine for a Western Hemisphere that, as in the original, abandons Europe to a world in which it no longer has any special claim to American assistance. While the Monroe Doctrine had signalled America’s rise, its reprise, however, is a manifestation of its decline. For a world in which India, Russia, and China might get more favourable treatment than Britain, France, or Germany is one in which US hegemony has collapsed and with it the idea of the West. If they cannot become its rivals, Europeans will now have to pay for the privilege of serving as America’s vassals.

The policies inaugurated by the Trump administration will have enormous consequences but are unlikely to succeed in their goals.
Globalisation has also led to the emergence of new economic and military powers in the world outside the West, and these cannot be dragooned into serving as America’s allies as Europe once had. The strength of the far right in both the US and Europe depends upon its recognition of the West’s decline. But it is also a symptom of that decline and can only accelerate it. Race, religion, and civilisation have come to define the West because it can no longer dominate the international order; it has chosen instead to destroy it.

The writer is professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford