Tag: Donald Trump

Half way into his four-year term as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump has unquestionably succeeded in redefining and reconstructing the art of politicking, the practice of governance, and the making and implementation of American foreign policy, and almost practically bent them out of shape and recognition. He is such a one-man riot squad with infinite nuisance value that even members of his party, the Republican Party (aka the GOP), stand in awe of him. Anyone who does not identify with him, his preferences and prejudices risks political sudden death. Recent casualties of Trump’s brand of toxic politics include the immediate past Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and a few senators, who either lost their seats in Congress or simply refuse to re-contest.

If anything, he has shown Americans and the rest of the world how quickly a single authoritarian-minded elected leader can twist democratic governance out of shape. At home, President Trump callously shut down portions of the US government, without any care about the pains this inflicted on nearly a million government employees who had to make do without their regular paychecks. Americans are now experiencing what it is to be held hostage by their own government, a callous thing that most of the rest of the world under authoritarian rule are already used to.

In a cynical way though, I find it refreshing that Americans are being taught, not by outsiders but by their own democratically elected leaders, the cruel lesson in how democracies become autocracies. I don’t know but I hope this may humble Americans and cause them to become more empathetic to the plight of the hapless billions around the globe who are pining away under corrupt and authoritarian lawlessness. Come to think of it, who would have thought that an intellectually lazy, narcissistic politician like Trump would be the one to teach American political scientists how to revise and refine their age-old theories and analyses of democratic governance!  Wonders, as they say, will never cease. And the leaders of both the democratic and the not-so-democratic countries must be paying close attention to how the evolving Trump-induced trends in America’s liberal democracy and governance may be helpful to them. Translation: America is deliberately encouraging the death of democracy around the globe!

Tempting as it is to want to keep commenting on the gripping developments in the scandal-ridden US domestic politics of Donald Trump, the focus of this write-up, however, is on how its foreign policy is shaping contemporary world affairs, its impact on global configuration of power, in particular the fast-receding American influence on the world stage. Though cerebral American thinkers like Joseph Nye, Fareed Zakaria and Amitav Acharya had foreseen and predicted the approaching post-American world order, they could not have remotely imagined that the fast-tracking of the decline of America’s influence would be the deliberate handiwork of an elected American president. What an irony. Now it is truer than ever, the era of American domination of global affairs which had begun at the end of the Cold War is fast coming to an end. And it is not only because of the rise of other rival powers seeking to carve a niche for themselves on the world stage alone, itself an indisputably significant development, but much more importantly due to Donald Trump’s deliberate policies and actions.

In less than two years under Trump, America has withdrawn from several multilateral engagements, amongst others, the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Nuclear Treaty, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the North American Free Trade Agreement; downgraded America’s participation in trans-Atlantic relationships, bullied its European allies and accused them of freeloading on American economy, undermined NATO, ignited a trade war with China, ridiculed the United Nations and unilaterally withdrew US participation from some of its organs, withheld funding for other UN agencies, demonstrating open administration for veritable autocrats like Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Turkey’s Recip Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Egypt’s Fatah el-Sisi, while shunning the company of democrats like Britain’s Theresa May, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron. Even the traditionally cordial relations with neighbouring Canada and Mexico have come under severe strain.

These developments are causing other great powers to have a rethink of their relationship with America and their future in a post-American world order. In Europe, Merkel and Macron are advocating greater intra-European cooperation and trying to chart a new course for themselves away from US; China is pursuing a gradual global power status, signposted by a fast expanding global economic influence in Asia and Africa to rival the US, the adoption of the Yuan as a global reserve currency alongside the dollar, a rising military profile and military bases outside Asia; Russia is on the rebound into international limelight from its self-imposed hibernation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, developing fresh economic and military muscles for global reach; Japan and India are not left out in the race for global outreach and influence, all of this inexorably creating what some analysts refer to as a polycentric world order. New multinational blocs are also in the process of challenging US and Western stranglehold on global economy, with the consequence that the architecture of world economy is undergoing drastic restructuring. By the time all these fully unfold, the world order would have changed in spectacular ways, and there would have been a thorough diffusion of political, economic, technological and military power.

I must hasten to point out that these developments do not necessarily imply a total diminution of America’s political, economic, technological and military power, although its adversaries wished it were so. But its hegemonic hold will weaken considerably in the multi-polar global order, and the American empire as we know it will go the way of all previous empires!

Though the US has never been an empire in the actual sense of acquiring, holding and physically dominating territories, but it is without question the greatest and most powerful country on earth, with an unprecedented global political, economic, financial and military reach since the 20th century. The breath and reach of its power is without historical precedent for a country that does not have colonial possessions but yet dominate the rest of world in ways that no nation has ever done in all of recorded history. Foremost African scholar, the late Professor Ali Mazrui, famously classified America as an ‘empire of control rather than an empire of domination’. It had perfected all the necessary technological, political, economic, institutional, diplomatic, and military mechanisms, including the means of propaganda, to control the rest of world without actually physically dominating others as previous empires did, hence what is known as Pax Americana. It became the only military superpower and global economic power left in the world after the dramatic disintegration of its arch-rival, the USSR in 1991. With the sudden exit of the USSR from the world scene, the stage was set for America to remake the global political and economic architecture after its own image, an enterprise in which it largely succeeded but not without serious challenges.

But that global hegemonic stranglehold is fast coming to an end, and a truly post-American world order is in the offing, although its exact outlines remain fluid. And it is America’s deliberate retrenchment from multilateralism and global commitments in the Trump era that is hastening it. The global architecture of power is now being refashioned also by the rise of new competitors such as China, a resurgent Russia, Japan, India, and economic blocs such as the European Union and BRICS. A truly polycentric world order is inexorably dawning on us. This is what Joseph Nye calls ‘power diffusion’. In the final analysis, all great empires have their terminal dates.

• Prof Fawole writes from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife.