China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Trump’s America First approach ‘a return to the past’
Martin Jacques, the British author and academic, insists Donald Trump’s America First approach is not some aberration in the country’s history but a return to the past.
He argues this is why the decision to impose tariffs on a further $200 billion of China’s imports, thereby disrupting the world trade system, should be seen in context.
“It has only been since the end of World War II that the US has seen itself as shaping the world through a global hegemony of alliances,” said Jacques, author of When China Rules The World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order.
He said that throughout most of its history the United States has not sought a global role for itself and has been much more insular.
“It has been relatively isolationist, relatively speaking, dependent largely on its own power at home and also that derived from the international relations it had,” he said.
Jacques said the first break from this came under Woodrow Wilson, who was president at the time of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which led to the formation of the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations.
“America began thinking in terms of serious global alliances then, but this was shortlived and by the 1930s it had become essentially just a regional power again. It was after the next war that this all changed, and for 73 years the country has seen itself at the center of global affairs.”
Jacques believes that the US under Trump is shifting back to aspects of its past.
“The substantive question is whether America sees itself now as being a dominant nation state at the head of a number of global alliances, as it was in the last century, or just a nation state advancing its own national interest. It can either pursue alli- ances or adopt an isolationist position. There can be little doubt about the direction it is now moving.”
Jacques does not think it is a paradox that the US is challenging a global trade and financial order it largely created after the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and that China is defending it.
“China’s position is that it respects the global order as it is. It doesn’t mean that it regards it as the finished article. Bretton Woods was created at a time when most countries were colonies, and China had no part in building it, but the system has evolved to accommodate rising economies like China and India.”
However, Jacques does not expect the Bretton Woods system to survive and thinks it will eventually “wither on the vine”.
“I think if the US is lukewarm on this kind of thing and Europe hasn’t got any money, institutions like the IMF and the World Bank will become weaker. At the end of the day, it is about financial resources and firepower, and this all may come in the future from China.”
He said there has been frustration in China about the US dragging its feet on International Monetary Fund voting reform. Congress initially blocked a move agreed at the G20 meeting in 2010 to give emerging market countries more of a say before finally accepting change in 2015.
Jacques believes that China has been right to focus on its own initiatives such as the Belt and Road and setting up the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
“These initiatives are not meant to go against the existing system. They are in addition to it but they are the way the existing system will evolve,” he said.