The Trumpian threat to the global order
The unthinkable is starting to become plausible, writes
THERE is nothing surprising about Donald Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin. The would-be US president and the Russian leader share an authoritarian bent. They disdain multilateral engagement in favour of the raw politics of power.
Above all, they are transactional. Deals are to be shaped by narrow definitions of national interest, unconstrained by international rules or shared values. Putin wants to erase the humiliation of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trump promises to “make America great again”.
The reason for the Russian leader’s bad personal relationship with Barack Obama is the US president’s wounding refusal to indulge the fantasy of superpower parity.
Perhaps Trump has the better understanding of Russian psychology. He never ceases to praise Putin as a strong and decisive leader. The Republican THIN-SKINNED: Trump Party’s contender for the White House is not alone in cosying up to the Kremlin. Populists across Europe — from Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France to Golden Dawn in Greece — have tipped their hats to Moscow.
Putin also has sympathisers on the left. Britain’s Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is more comfortable denouncing US “imperialism” than challenging Russian revanchism. Until recently the foreign policy establishment was quietly preparing for a Hillary Clinton presidency. But the mood has changed.
As the polls have tightened, Republicans and Democrats have begun to imagine Trump as commander-in-chief. A dark quip among US generals — that they would remove the circuit boards before handing over the so-called nuclear football — no longer seems quite so amusing.
The fears are that “shy” Trump supporters may not be showing in the polls, that antipathy to Clinton could see centrists stay at home, and that the resolve of white working class voters to punish the elites could overwhelm Obama’s winning coalition of educated whites, Hispanics and African Americans. Faced with compelling evidence of Trump’s mendacity, misogyny and racism, too many people reply that “he doesn’t really mean all that stuff”.
The US is the only nation that matters just about everywhere. It is no longer the hyperpower of the ’90s, but the capacity of a thin-skinned, shoot-from-thehip president to wreak havoc is chilling. A lot of people in Washington are trying to persuade themselves that the checks and balances in the system would restrain him. They are not succeeding in the task. The obvious fear is that a temperamentally unstable President Trump would lash out in a crisis. Robert Gates, the Republican former US defence secretary, says simply he is “unfit to be commander-in-chief”.
Trump’s reaction to the latest bomb outrage in New York fitted the pattern. The US had to “knock the hell out of them . . . do something serious over there” — “them” indeterminate and “over there” the Middle East. The bigger danger lies in Trump’s promise to withdraw — to tear up trade deals, throw up trade barriers against China, repudiate the Paris climate change and the Iran nuclear deals, and abdicate responsibility for the security of East Asia and Europe. Trump’s policies are shot through with contradictions, but one constant is his belligerent isolationism.
America will go it alone. Hyper-realism, some call it. Dangerous is a better word. The global order — the liberal, rulesbased system established in 1945 — is under unprecedented strain. Globalisation is in retreat. At a conference in New York of the Ditchley Foundation a distinguished American elder statesman remarked that he has never known a period when the world had been simultaneously THICK-SKINNED: Putin buffeted by so many upheavals.
The list is a familiar one. Putin is trying to redraw borders in Europe, the Middle East is in flames, European unity is fracturing, jihadi terrorism is spreading, pluralism is challenged by authoritarianism, China is contesting the status quo in the South China Sea and its neighbours are rearming in response, populists are storming the citadels across advanced democracies.
To Trump, the answer is American retreat. He wants to build walls. He questions the US security umbrella in the Pacific — maybe Japan and South Korea should get their own nuclear weapons? He undercuts the credibility of Nato’s defence of Europe — the US might stand by if Russian troops marched into the Baltic states.
There is no sense in any of this that American national security is safeguarded by alliances and international order. If the polls are to be believed, Trump has wrested momentum from Clinton in the presidential race. This does not mean he will win on November 8. The structure of the electoral college gives him only a narrow path to the White House. And there are three debates ahead. But the unthinkable has become the plausible. We should be more than worried. — © The Financial Times