WITH the election of the eccentric and intemperate Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, observers of the world political order immediately began to fear that an urgent vacancy had opened for a new world leader. Their fears are not misplaced, for Mr Trump has nothing noble in him at all, nor anything presidential in his blood. The new president’s shortcomings are unfortunately situated within the context of radical and momentous shifts in international politics. Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, which dealt a death blow to a bipolar world dominated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, April 1949) and Warsaw Pact countries (May 1955), it was fairly indisputable that with the passing of years the world had grown increasingly and more effectively unipolar. That unipolarity of cultural, economic and military domination was for long virtually led by the United States which ran the biggest economy in the world and possessed the world’s most powerful military. That unipolarity, which historians date from 1989, has not changed too deeply in its economic and military essence. But something more significant and consequential has.
Boiled down to its elements, U.S. dominance, often erroneously viewed from only cultural, economic and military prisms, really consists of something much more nuanced — moral authority. What sets the U.S. apart from the Soviet Union, and after 1991, Russia, is the moral content of its domestic and foreign policies. Though the U.S. exhibited weaknesses and contradictions, it nonetheless pursued, almost dogmatically, the great moralising causes of free speech, vibrant and exuberant democracy, human rights, and freedom of religion, among other worthy principles. The pursuit of these causes, anchored as it were on a timeless and ennobling constitution, turned the U.S. into a world policeman, and invariably into the world’s leader and single most important moral authority. It is a credit to the framers of its constitution, its founding fathers, and a slew of great presidents over the centuries that the country’s weaknesses and contradictions have not irreparably damaged that moral authority.
As a result, and for many decades after World War II, the world enjoyed a delicate peace that flowed from the unstable balance of power between two counterbalancing militaries, especially from the 1950s, and between two contrasting and contradistinctive political systems, one virtually realpolitik, and the other generally liberal. World peace was sustained because when the U.S., with NATO in tow, became the sole superpower after 1989, the moral leitmotif of its domestic and international politics ensured that that power was often deployed responsibly. It was a time when the world, perhaps grudgingly, conceded leadership to the U.S.
Both President Trump and American voters who elected him into office were either unable to appreciate the undergirding principles of U.S. power or they were too conceited to bother about its indispensable moral content, preferring instead to emphasise the military content of that power. The effect is that Mr Trump’s politics and idiosyncrasies have violated every principle that made America great, every principle that transformed it over the decades into the world’s moral leader from whom the world took their compass and caution. Right from the day of his inauguration, the polarising effects of his politics and mannerisms began to turn the US into an insular and isolationist country inadvertently dedicated to constricting American power and shockingly disavowing the moral and constitutional principles that made the country incomparable.
In Trump’s America, it is becoming clear, the world has lost a restraining, moderating and moral voice. It is striking how just one election could trigger such destructive and seismic changes. The world no longer has a champion for press freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, the rule of law, gender rights, among other great liberal causes and values. In sum, deliberately and foolishly, and without any appreciation of the consequences of their policies and politics, Mr Trump and his supporters have led America into disavowing its own strengths and the moral backbone that had sustained its influence since World War II. In turn, these changes have opened a desperate vacancy for a new world leadership.
However, the search for a new leader to polish the world’s moral compass, mediate its conflicts and restrain it from indulging in centrifugal politics and policies may take a bruising and destabilising turn. Somebody or a group of countries or powers must simply guarantee the freedoms and liberties which the world has taken for granted, and help nurture the balance of power that has sustained a semblance of peace in a radically changing world. If America is disqualifying itself from that leadership by its insularity and isolationism, and by disembowelling itself of the moral content of its existence and power, it is hard to see how either China or Russia can step into the vacuum by simply turning on their economic and military charms. Nor is the European Union, despite its economic muscle, able to fill that vacuum given its military weakness and unresolved internal contradictions as exampled by the Brexit politics of the United Kingdom and the increasing embrace of nationalist politics by the rest of Europe.
It is not clear whether the search for a new world leader will be successful, considering how total and damaging the Trump effect is. The nationalist forces the U.S. under Mr Trump is submitting to have been triggered by economic, security, national identity and immigration challenges. The new U.S. president deliberately and systematically courted these forces, integrated them into his politics, and manipulated them into an electoral powerhouse that baffled and mesmerised his opponents. It was first thought that after the elections had been won and lost, Mr Trump would become a more measured and reflective leader. That has not been so, and will likely not ever be so. Mr Trump’s politics is indistinguishable from his persona. What Americans saw before the elections was not the contrived Mr Trump but the essential and archetypal Mr Trump.
Pope Francis, a very reflective, philosophical and modernising pontiff appears to understand Mr Trump and the forces that shaped and threw him up more. In a recent interview he granted El Pais, the influential Spanish newspaper, Pope Francis cautioned about the rising and potentially destructive forces of populism and nationalism. Said he: “In my opinion, the most obvious example of European populism is Germany in 1933. After [Paul von] Hindenburg, after the crisis of 1930, Germany is broken, it needs to get up, to find its identity, a leader, someone capable of restoring its character, and there is a young man named Adolf Hitler who says: ‘I can, I can’. And all Germans vote for Hitler. Hitler didn’t steal the power, his people voted for him, and then he destroyed his people. That is the risk. In times of crisis, we lack judgment, and that is a constant reference for me. Let’s look for a savior who gives us back our identity and lets defend ourselves with walls, barbed-wire, whatever, from other peoples that may rob us of our identity. And that is a very serious thing. That is why I always try to say: talk among yourselves, talk to one another. But the case of Germany in 1933 is typical, a people that was immersed in a crisis, that looked for its identity until this charismatic leader came and promised to give their identity back, and he gave them a distorted identity, and we all know what happened. Where there is no conversation… Can borders be controlled? Yes, each country has the right to control its borders, who comes and who goes, and those countries at risk from terrorism or such things have even more the right to control them more, but no country has the right to deprive its citizens of the possibility to talk with their neighbours.”
With his unrestrained and continuous attacks on the press, (though the media is an integral part of U.S. greatness and power), and his equally vexatious attacks on judges who deliver judgements against him or his policies, Mr Trump insouciantly opened himself up to an unprecedented broadside from Chinese officials. Said He Fan, a member of the Supreme People’s Court of China, on his public WeChat social media page last Sunday in reference to Mr Trump’s intemperate attack on a US judge: “A president criticising judges and bandits murdering judges are all enemies of the rule of law…In a country claiming to be the most democratic and most based on rule-of-law, for a president to lead the charge in scolding judges… makes him no different from a bully without dignity!”
In Europe, Asia and elsewhere, an unprecedented rollback of U.S. influence is taking place under the Trump presidency. That rollback comes with a lot of consequences, for it is not only American influence that is diminishing, the world’s freedoms may also be diminishing since there is no powerful and clear-minded person or voice left to protect them. If the nationalist fervour in Europe spreads beyond Britain to France and Germany, the rise of the political right, as has taken place in the US, will unleash cataclysmic forces whose trajectory or end no one can predict. Mr Trump will of course self-destruct, but no one can at the moment calculate the cost to the U.S. as a whole. For henceforth, even in Europe, the American leadership long taken for granted, is clearly imperilled or outdated. The continent may survive the nationalist and populist surge sweeping through parts of Europe, but it will likely emplace policies and politics that will guarantee their own independence and survival first in the face of an unpredictable U.S. or any other collective like NATO whose influence Mr Trump is insensitively subordinating to his personal fondness for the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.