The return of Trump: from Pax Americana to a new imperium
India has to navigate the diplomatic minefield Trump would lay out, without binding itself to long-term commitments
President Trump has inaugurated a new imperium, in which a leader chosen by God commits to lead his nation to greatness, expanding territory, using military and economic power to quell opposition, privileging its own interests over the interests of other nationals and withdrawing from global engagement, whether global treaties on trade and the climate, the World Health Organisation, and on instituting a minimum tax of 15% on large companies with a threshold turnover of €750 million. Pax Americana is dead, American power will be used not to underpin any rule-based system of international engagement, but to advance American interests, so that America would be rich and great again.
Trump’s inauguration speech not only invoked an 18th-century American law, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, to wage war on criminal cartels, but also harked back to a pre-20th century vision of power, in which powerful nations conquered and colonized the weak, or, in the words of the inaugural speech, carried the flag of the conquering nation to new horizons.
Trump disguised the raw, aggressive edge of this declaration by citing Mars as an example of the new horizon where the star-spangled banner would be planted. However, in response to questions, he refused to rule out the use of force to acquire the Panama Canal or annex Greenland.
Trump’s declaration of war against immigrants, truncation of official commitment to affirmative action to compensate for centuries of discrimination against people of colour in the US, the ending of transgender rights, mass pardon to those serving jail terms for the insurrection of January 6, 2020, in which Trump supporters, including members of ultranationalist and white supremacist organisations, sought to prevent Congress from ratifying the election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States, ending the Green New Deal, including the electric vehicle mandate, reinstating those armed forces personnel who had flouted the vaccine mandate during the Covid mandate – these might seem to harm Americans primarily, and so could be dismissed as just desserts for Americans who elect such a champion of bigotry and obscurantism as their president.
However, given the power the US wields in shaping global cultural norms, these measures matter to the rest of the world as well. They send out the message that might is right, the notion that all men and women are born equal, endowed with inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is so much polite rhetoric that the strong can ignore and the poor should adapt to. It brings back the normative order of the medieval period or ancient India, in which justice is not something that had universal scope but varied according to social status, your status determining what justice meant for you.
Trump has inaugurated a vison of international relations as a zero-sum game, in which one nation’s gain has to be at the expense of other nations. Greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming are 17 tonnes per capita for North Americans, less than 1 tonne per capita for Africans and about 1.5 tonnes per capita for South Asians. Just norms would call for greater efforts on abatement on the part of rich countries. Trumpian norms would justify drill-baby-drill for Americans and climate suffering for those in poor countries battling sea erosion, extreme weather events, unseasonal rains that damage crops, drying up of pasture lands that cause herders to migrate, presenting themselves as invaders to be fought back, in the eyes of the inhabitants of the places to which they migrate.
Trump reiterated his commitment to tariffs to protect American manufacturing. High, arbitrary tariffs, at rates that vary depending on how pliant the American administration deems its trading partner to be, will undermine the global order of trade. India will have to work with non-US nations to revive the World Trade Organisation’s dispute settlement mechanism and step up global trade. The US share of global goods trade is 13%. Its removal from rules-based trade would be bad, but not fatal, if other countries collectively set up rules for trade amongst themselves, and boost trade amongst themselves.
For India, what matters more than goods trade with the US is services trade, H1B visas that are necessary for carrying out service exports, and access to technology. Right now, India is not among the countries deemed eligible for unrationed export of Artificial-Intelligence-capable chips and systems.
India’s primary concern is strategic autonomy. India cannot blindly toe the line set by the US or any other country. It must strengthen ties with other countries, grow more nimbler diplomatically, and grow domestic capability in quantity and quality so that other countries are compelled to reckon with India in all vital spheres of progress.
US unilateralism will strain trans-Atlantic ties, promote more, dispersed centres of global power and India must use these to advance its interests.
The entire Trumpian project is premised on falsehood. America is already great, it does not need to be made great again. Foreigners are not emptying their jails and lunatic asylums to dump their unwanted elements across the US-Mexico border. Crime is down in the US, not growing, as the MAGA crowd claims. Immigrants are adding talent and worker numbers to the growing US economy, the largest and the most robust economy in the world.
Inflation was caused by unprecedented expansion of the US fiscal deficit, to support Americans’ lives and business during Covid, and supply bottlenecks. Urging his staff to bring down prices by administrative measures signals a total lack of faith for the new leader of the supposedly pro-market Republican party, in the functioning of the free market.
China does not control or operate the Panama Canal. That is done by Panamanians themselves. Tariffs on imports would be borne by American consumers and American companies that import raw materials, not by exporting nations. If the US president or his cheering supporters are too dumb to appreciate this reality, it points to the danger of the public discourse being taken over by uninformed social media narratives.
Trump’s rhetoric is powerful, for those who fail to see how smarmy and hollow it is. His performance will be sub-optimal, and the era of Trumpian politics is unlikely to last more than Trump’s current term.
Trump will erode American greatness, and damage the rest of the world as well. India and other countries must fashion ad-hoc responses, not bind themselves to commitments that spell long-term disadvantage. And India must prioritise realizing the actual creative potential of its giant population, by making ‘learning to learn’ the goal of education, rather than learning stuff or transient skills, building infrastructure that would allow creativity to produce new jobs and incomes, and creating social harmony that would free up people to focus on living, instead of nurturing grievance or worrying about survival with dignity.
Nice article. we must focus on living and improving our daily life and not hold grudges and animosity over others.
A superb analysis of the disaster that awaits the world in the next few years. But Americans will realise sooner than later that bigotry based on power and majoritarianism will not take them very far. The US runs the risk of getting transformed into a great leader without many followers. It is a large market. But American manufacturing and consumption market will need large imports and Trump's economic policy may not have enough room for pick and chose in imports, even if he stomps over the WTO!