Planet of the Ape

Donald Trump's Incredible Shrinking Country

There are periods when history just seems to be idling in neutral, the engine ticking over and not much to distinguish one year from another. We aren’t living through those times. Nowadays, historical processes that should take decades can unfold in weeks, and epochal events unravel like scenes from a film in fast forward.

Take the madness that began on 5 April, when the Trump ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs came into effect. Within hours, the financial system created since the end of the Cold War trembled on the brink of recession, as trillions of dollars vanished from the global economy, supply chains broke down and the stock market tumbled. Four days later, with bond markets screaming, Trump emerged from the golf course to announce a ninety-day pause - except for China and the 10 percent tariff that the rest of the world was still subject to. Then, after imposing 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports, he abruptly excluded smartphones and computers in order to help his tech buddies- and donors - out.

Now there are mutterings in what passes for his ‘administration’ that even these exemptions may be only temporary. But whatever happens next, last week represents a watershed moment, in which the country that has dominated world history since World War II became everything that it was not supposed to be. Like a bull in a geopolitical China shop (apologies), one man trashed his country’s reputation, and stripped it of the last dregs of prestige, trust and reliability that his government had not already destroyed.

Of course Trump’s sycophantic minions, grifters and untruth-tellers have sought to conceal or sugarcoat their leader’s lunacy, just as King George III’s courtiers once tried to do when His Majesty went off the rails. At her press conferences, the White House liar-in-chief Maga Goebbels tried to turn Trump’s sow’s ear into a silk purse with a brazen indifference that raises troubling questions about human nature - I mean, how can people lie so easily and so readily, without even a smidgeon of embarrassment at their shameless dishonesty?

On Fox News, a succession of gushing commentators hailed Trump’s tariffs as the beginning of a new Golden Age, in which countries across the world would queue up to do the president’s bidding. At a cabinet meeting, Trump’s ministers grovelled before the Great Helmsman in a pantomime version of Stalin’s Great Terror. No need for the Gulag or the Lubyanka to make these craven miscreants crawl - just tickle their bellies with a feather and they do it anyway.

But the rest of the world can see what this rabble will never admit to: that Trump’s ‘America’ is a hollowed-out, diminished entity that is vanishing in front of their eyes.

It’s easy to see this startling transformation as a kind of political body horror film, in which the alien bursts out of an astronaut’s stomach, or the nice teenager down the road turns into a slithering monster, but America’s descent is entirely in keeping with the general pattern of 21st century national populism. Whether in Brexit Britain, Putin’s Russia, or the Trump clown show, movements that seek to make their countries ‘great again’ invariably make them smaller, as well as nastier.

In hearkening back to an idealised past, in which their former glories were taken away from them, usually due to the machinations of others: foreigners, immigrants, decadent liberals, feminists, and other enemies of the nation, these movements tend to ignore reality, or try to bypass it. Purveyors of political snake oil, their leaders offer magical instant solutions to both real and imagined problems. Need money for the NHS? Leave the European Union. Bring back American jobs to the rusty heartlands? Just crunch a few numbers through AI, slap tariffs on the whole world, including the bastard penguins, and - way to go! - they’ll be churning out smart phones, semiconductors, and Nike trainers in Detroit.

This, apparently, was the aim of Trump’s attempt to feed the entire global economic system into the wood chipper, as Elon Musk would put it, only to find that the machine jammed, overheated and very nearly exploded in his face.

That’s what happens when you try to replace the real world with a fantasy. In Britain, we know this very well, though knowing it hasn’t helped us much. Trump’s catastrophic and delusional pursuit of national greatness didn’t spring out of nowhere, however. This is not a futuristic ‘black swan’, but the product of assumptions and expectations that were already embedded in the American political psyche.

The Indispensable Nation?

It was Ronald Reagan who coined the phrase ‘Let’s make America great again’ during his 1980 campaign. In 1996, Madeleine Albright called America the ‘indispensable nation’ - a phrase first coined by the political journalist Sidney Blumenthal. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), picked up on the same theme, with a more belligerent tone, in its infamous 2000 ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ foreign policy proposals. As the PNAC authors - some of whom are now critics of Trump - put it then:

The United States is the world’s only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s largest economy. Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.

PNAC understood ‘preeminence’ primarily in military terms. It sought to extend America’s temporary technological advantage in the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ into the indefinite future, through a Reaganite program of massive rearmament that would make the US able to defeat any ‘challengers’ anywhere. Galvanized by the September 11 atrocities, the Bush administration launched America into a series of ruinous wars in an attempt to realise the Pentagon’s dreams of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’.

Throughout the war on terror, a stream of defence and foreign policy intellectuals, from Niall Ferguson to Thomas Barnett, called on America to act as the guardian of globalization, as the world policeman, the new Rome, against what Barnett called the ‘non-integrating Gap’, or the ‘arc of instability’ that other analysts located in the Asia-Pacific region.

Within the US government, old Reagan hands like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cheney were equally committed to maximising America’s unipolar moment. These were clever, cunning, calculating men - as dishonest and manipulative in their own way as their successors. Now - o tempora, or mores! - the clever schemers have gone, and even the veneer of geostrategic expertise has been obliterated by the felon-in-chief.

Trump’s America still retains its ‘preeminence’ and the financial and military power that goes with it. But today, it is no longer the only superpower, or the axis on which the West and the ‘free world’ turns. It is no longer the global policeman and the guardian of globalisation, or the guarantor of European security. The US may even lose its historic post-World War 2 role as the upholder of the global financial system.

Astonishingly, it may be China - the country that was once seen in Europe and America as little more than an offshore manufacturing centre and a bottomless source of cheap labour - that comes to play that role, even as the clown car posse in Washington continues to drop tariffs with all the finesse of hoodlums tossing molotov cocktails from a motorway bridge. China’s leaders, whatever you think of the Chinese political system, have a long-term strategic vision, coupled with an awareness of geopolitical reality, that has been mostly absent from the American ruling classes over the last few decades.

Already, it has been negotiating new economic relationships and partnerships with the countries unjustly punished by Trump’s tariffs, who have no reason to trust the country that imposed them. No wonder Chinese techies have been making AI videos mocking Trump’s lunacy. They know which way the wind is blowing.

The Vanishing

Much of the world knows this too, even if the MAGA cultists won’t acknowledge it. In a speech on 5 March, on ‘the historic events under way that are disrupting the world order’, Emmanuel Macron told the French people:

The United States of America, our ally, has changed its position on this war, lessening its support for Ukraine and raising doubts about what is to come. At the same time, the United States intends to impose tariffs on products from Europe.

On 27 March, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was even more explicit, declaring that Canada’s relationship with the United States, ‘based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over.’ Even Niall Ferguson, who once called on the US to embrace its role as a 21st century liberal empire, and who only recently dropped in at Mar-a-Lago to show his support for Trump, has said that Trump’s tariffs represent ‘the End of American Empire.’

If you’ve lost France, Ferguson and Canada, you’re probably doing something wrong, but don’t expect Trump and his minions to take responsibility for their mistakes or even recognize that they’ve made any. Like the Brexiters, being MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. But outside Trumplandia, the writing is on the wall, and it reads: ‘America has left the building.’

That America was always something of an illusion. Long before the Biden administration’s horrifying complicity in Israeli barbarism in Gaza, the moral democratic leadership that too many European leaders once took for granted had very different repercussions in the Global South. America might have supported democracy in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, but military coups, dictatorships, destabilisation, war and repression were the order of the day in the rest of the world, whenever the US encountered democratic governments and movements that it didn’t like.

Some countries have yet to recover from the Cold War that the ‘free world’ won, to some extent, at their expense. Even when the US acted in defence of Europe, it did so because its own interests as well as Europe’s. Now, as JD Vance pointed out, they don’t. To point this out, does not mean that America is the root of all geopolitical evil, or that the city on the hill the world once thought it knew was non-existent.

The dismantling of USAID is just one example of the more benevolent applications of US power. Trump’s overtly genocidal proposals for Gaza are a step closer to hell than the unforgiveable cowardice and collusion of his predecessor. His administration’s predatory, neo-colonial attitude towards Ukraine, Greenland, Panama and now, it seems, the Democratic Republic of Congo, represent a qualitative difference from his predecessors

In 1959, long before anyone dreamed that a reality tv star and corrupt real estate magnate could become president, Dwight Eisenhower told Congress:

We could be the wealthiest and the most mighty nation and still lose the battle of the world if we do not help our world neighbors protect their freedom and advance their social and economic progress.

Those aspirations could not be more distant from the America that the felon-in-chief and his monstrous movement are creating. Whether their project succeeds or fails, the damage they have caused to America’s global standing may well prove irreparable. But America’s moral collapse may have inadvertent positive consequences, even if they are not the consequences that Trump and his team imagine.

Too many countries have looked to American might for far too long, regardless of whether it advanced their social and economic progress. Too many countries have been throttled by the free market prescriptions of the Washington consensus. Too many have looked to America to provide security that they should have provided for themselves.

Perhaps now is the time to recognize that Trump’s incredible shrinking America is no longer their friend, and may even be their enemy. And perhaps this recognition can push the world to seek a new concept of international order, in which neither America nor any other country is the indispensable nation, in a fragile and interconnected multipolar world that requires collective solutions to collective problems.

The world is still a long way from that, and may not get there. As America slides into incoherent authoritarianism, other ‘great powers’ may seek to take its place and assert their power in the global competition for geopolitical dominance.

But for now, the country that the world thought it knew has gone, and whoever the 21st century belongs to, it will not be America’s.