In 2003, Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian writer and liberal politician, made the telling point – and this at the time George W Bush was deciding to invade Iraq – that America was probably the first imperial power in history that had no consciousness of itself as an empire.
He might have also added that there was and remains another important strain in the American world view: a profound belief that when it decides to act – as it did over Iraq – it would do so without seeking permission or worrying too much what impact its actions might have on the world at large.
Bush, to use a phrase common at the time, just didn’t seem to ‘give a damn’. Nonetheless, this once errant member of a well-established American dynasty remained very much within the Republican mainstream when it came to thinking about America’s role in the world.
Thus, like his father, and Ronald Reagan before him, he believed in formal alliances, supported free trade and of necessity saw an active – possibly too active – global role for the United States. It was fashionable at the time to argue that following 9/11 Bush junior had carried out a ‘revolution’ in foreign policy. But on essentials, there was little radical about his world view.
Republican or Populist?
Clearly much has altered since those far off days when a confident America, still basking in the glow of victory over the Soviet Union and confident that globalization would always work to its advantage, felt it could reshape the world in its own image. As a result, not only has the country and the world changed beyond recognition – in 2001 it was possible to think that Russia and China could be made into ‘responsible stakeholders’ – but so too has the Republican Party.
Once a bastion of good old-fashioned patrician values, under Donald Trump it has been transformed into a populist movement hostile to an establishment whose policies he claims have destroyed working-class communities in pursuit of profit abroad while sending American kids overseas to fight and die in pointless, unwinnable wars.
Under Trump, the Republican Party has been transformed into a populist movement which claims to put ‘Americanism’ ahead of globalism. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images.
Nobody has articulated this change better than Trump’s running mate Senator JD Vance. As he put it recently: ‘From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnant wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.’
Furthermore, they failed because they bought into a theory of the world that forgot to put the interests of the US front and centre. No longer. As Trump famously declared back in 2016 when he first won the White House, ‘Americanism, not globalism, will now be our credo’.
Ukraine and NATO
Whether this credo will continue to appeal to a majority of Americans remains to be seen. America is preparing for a presidential election whose outcome is even more uncertain now that President Joe Biden has handed over the baton to Kamala Harris who, with her running mate Tim Walz, many think has a much better chance of winning – some polls are even now showing the Democrats moving ahead. Nevertheless, we still have to think through what a Trump victory might mean for the world at large.
The election may not be determined by events unfolding outside the United States. There is little doubt, however, that what happens in a country that still spends more on its military than the next eight countries combined, continues to account for something close to a quarter of the world’s GDP and sits at the centre of a global alliance system upon which so many other states depend, is bound to have a huge impact on the world. This is why what happens in November is crucial.
Ukraine might have most to be worried about. Trump after all has never shown much inclination to support Ukraine. Nor has the Maga – Make America Great Again – wing of the Republican Party which held up backing Ukraine for several critical months earlier this year. Nor can Vance’s words have gone down very well in Kyiv, especially after he told an audience of Republican enthusiasts in July that it was no longer in the American interest ‘to fund a never-ending war’ there.
The European members of NATO are likely to be just as concerned; and even if, as seems probable, Trump is persuaded that NATO is worth hanging on to – as he was during his first term – there is little doubt he will be putting even more pressure on getting Europeans to spend more on their own security. Nor can the European Union be reassured by the possible election of someone who is not only threatening to impose a 10 per cent tariff on all imports from across the Atlantic but once even referred to the EU as a foe.
Of course, one has to distinguish between Trump’s rhetoric and what he will be able to do if or when he takes over. But with a new Republican team in the White House less concerned to flatter politicians in Europe than deal with what it views as America’s much bigger challenge in the shape of China, there are likely to be difficult moments in the days and months following the US election.
And on to Beijing
How is Trump likely to play in a Beijing that has already come to the conclusion that whoever sits in the White House – Harris or Trump – the relationship is bound to be a deeply competitive one? Some in China will view Trump’s election with a degree of schadenfreude if, as many believe, it casts doubt over America’s relationship with allies such as South Korea, Japan and the Philippines whom President Joe Biden has gone out of his way to reassure.
Beijing may have also drawn comfort from what Trump recently said on Taiwan, when he proclaimed that ‘Taiwan doesn’t give us anything’ and wondered why the US was still acting like its ‘insurance company’.
Even so, there must be more than a few in Beijing who can hardly relish the prospect of a Trump-led team taking over in the White House. They might welcome the disarray a Republican Party victory would cause, both in America and among its allies. On the other hand, they are bound to be a little less happy with a Republican Party in power that has in the course of the campaign attacked the Democrats for being soft on Beijing while threatening to impose 60 per cent tariffs on most Chinese imports.
Many more business-oriented Republican supporters with an interest in China, such as Elon Musk, may push a new Trump team to dial back on its hard line. But, having let the populist genie out of the bottle, it might be hard for Trump to put it back in, especially in an America where playing tough on China, and even tougher than the Democrats, goes down well with an electorate 8 out of 10 of whom have an unfavourable view of China, and 42 per cent of whom even view it as an enemy.
Two wars
All this, however, begs a much larger question: how might a second Trump term impact our world that is already under enormous stress, the result in large part of ongoing wars on two fronts in Europe and the Middle East?
Take the war in Europe now into a third year with little end in sight. Trump talks of bringing it to an end within days of coming to power. But talk, as they say, is cheap. For even if his Maga base would prefer him to cut a deal with Russia, the overwhelming majority of Americans have by now become so hostile to Vladimir Putin – 88 per cent say they have no confidence in him – that any deal Trump tries to strike with the Russian leader that conceded too much could open him up to the politically damaging charge of appeasement.
Nor is Trump likely to risk a deal if, as seems probable, it will depend on the goodwill of China to bring Russia to the negotiating table. Were Trump to fail in persuading Russia to strike some sort of deal, he would then face the prospect of having to increase military support for Ukraine, either to ensure that Putin did not win on the battlefield, or, more likely, as a way of putting further pressure on the Russian leader to get around the table. Either way, no easy road lies ahead.
But if the situation in Ukraine is fraught, because of US support for Israel over the war in Gaza, America’s position has become dangerously exposed right across the Middle East. It has also handed Russia and China a diplomatic victory they could only have dreamed of a few months before.
So challenging has the situation become diplomatically, that a poll conducted in the spring of 2024 showed that Putin and Xi Jinping had become more popular and trusted across the Middle East than Biden. A possible Trump return to power is hardly likely to improve things. Trump’s close relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and their combined work together in scuppering the Iranian nuclear deal back in 2018, all point to an even more abrasive relationship with Iran than exists already.
As Jason Brodsky, the policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran, recently admitted: ‘I believe that the second term of the Trump administration would witness a return of the maximum pressure campaign and strong deterrent actions against the Iranian regime.’
Global South
To add to this long list of challenges one needs to look further afield at the wider Global South and ask whether a new Trump administration would be able to build bridges back to a part of the world where the US – and the West as a whole – has come under sustained attack in recent years for a whole set of purported misdemeanours.
These range from practising double standards – supporting Ukrainian statehood while denying it to the Palestinians – through to imposing tough economic rules on those least able to protect themselves. Nothing so far indicates that the situation would get any better under Trump and Vance, both of whom seem to be either indifferent or ill-informed about the many challenges facing poorer countries.
Were a new administration to impose tariffs on all imports as threatened, it would inevitably hit the less developed countries even harder than those in the OECD. If his new team then moved ahead with a ‘right-sized’ foreign aid package as it has been threatening to do, then the Global South would be confirmed in their view that America is just like any other great power looking after itself and caring not a jot for the rest of humanity.
All this, moreover, cannot but affect America’s wider competition with China and Russia, its two main rivals in the international arena who for the past decade or so have been making major inroads into the Global South. Some will reassure themselves that the West still holds most of the important economic cards and that at the end of the day Latin America, Asia and Africa have nowhere else to go but northwards.
But this would be short-sighted. With Russia having made recent political gains across Central Africa, China undertaking vast infrastructure projects from Indonesia to Pakistan, and the two together exploiting the many mis-steps taken by the West going all the way back to the colonial era and the Cold War, it would be foolish to think that the US and its western allies face anything but a difficult few years ahead, whoever happens to win the White House.