Trump-v-world: the cage match
Our market-making role disavowed, US is now in pure market-playing mode
In my 2009 book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, I posited a series of “realignments” that would necessarily follow the great global tumult generated by America’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) and China’s rise. In diplomacy writ large, that entailed our acceptance that we were no longer in charge of the world order as we had long been but needed to dial down such world-shaping ambitions. Why?
With the GWOT, we chose to radically expand our security role around the world, not just preventing classic state-on-state war (a world order premised on state sovereignty and one that still burdens us with 800 or so military facilities around the planet) but taking up the issue of transnational and subnational threats as well — a rather supreme ambition but unsustainable.
In short, we needed to relearn how to play well with other great powers, not going overboard on the competition but being more realistic about the cooperation, which, yes, would oftentimes be defined in accommodating rising spheres of influence.
To me, this was the path of dialing down our market-making role (which, in retrospect, died a quick death with the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and our subsequent embrace of nation-building-at-home-presidencies in Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump 2.0) and re-embracing a more historically normal market-playing role (looking out for #1, or what becomes making America great again in our feverish imagination).
As I have noted many times here: America doesn’t achieve such course corrections smoothly. We have a tendency to reverse course with great gusto, suddenly positing the past strategies as a “betrayal,” “conspiracy,” “lie,” etc. With us, it can never be that one strategy made sense for a long period of time (say, our perceived “unipolarity” of 1990-2008) and then it stopped, forcing us to adjust. No, we can only course correct through complete reversals, disavowing the past completely.
Such is a characteristic of democracies (or, at least, ours), where freak-outs are par for the strategic course.
And no, re-embracing a more in-it-for-the-win market-playing ethos doesn’t mean we completely disregard world system needs or fixes. It’s just that we’re prioritizing our own re-generation as a power and readying ourselves for the next competitive landscapes to come — and there were so many such arising landscapes apparent to me even back then (scary power of global financial flows, China’s rise as energy super-consumer, food/water as the new oil, climate change, communicable diseases/pandemics, and growing concerns over seaborne global supply chains — not a bad list, looking back, in terms of the disruptions since experienced).
I guess I saw America of 2009 as sort of heading into a crucial “off-season” as a global superpower: the need to retool the roster and strategy for all these structural collisions to come, just as all these risen great powers began to tangle with one another (our current strategic landscape that has instinctively pushed us into a deep embrace of that more aggressive market-playing role).
Here’s what I wrote back in 2009 on this necessary shift:
And no, accepting this pathway does not constitute admission of a “post-American world,” in Fareed Zakaria’s analysis. It simply marks the accession of many “pre-American” powers into the American System-cum-globalization. No careful observer of America’s historical strength in innovative and efficient rule-making can casually dismiss our capacity to further evolve globalization through the biological revolutions [here I was rather crudely lumping the Singularity + climate change + demographics] currently just beginning to emerge in this century. Mastering our past accomplishments doesn’t make rising great powers our superiors but merely our fellow travelers. As always, owning the future is all about shaping the next set of rules in industries not yet discovered, something that requires a huge tolerance for economic — and therefore political — risk. In that competition, I vastly prefer America’s chances to those of any other great power on the planet.
As long as we remain the global economy’s eminent risk-takers, there will never be a post-American world. Just a post-Caucasian one.
If Trump 2.0 promises anything, it is risk-taking, and, frankly, that is what excites so many Americans about his return versus steady-as-she-goes Harris — that feeling that, finally, some heads will roll! With America currently navigating some revolutionary times, it’s not surprising we indulge in such blood-thirstiness as part of our self-motivation. Again, it’s all very American, if you examine our history — for which I offer, admittedly, too few apologies, as is my nature as an American-centric strategic thinker (the BBC guy was correct).
Looking back to that time (2009’s Great Powers), it seems clear to me that we as a nation have since continued to struggle with that sense of balance between still wanting to lead the world and instinctively feeling like we need to re-tool our system (my reach for “realignments” back then) for a radically changing world. To me, that’s what generates this we-better-get-ours-now-before-the-rest-of-them-claim-it-all vibe that sees us simultaneously seeking to shed global responsibilities while mirror-imaging some of the aggressive tendencies of our competitors (notably, Russia and China).
To me, that’s how an America First strategy morphs into an Americas First strategy, as many experts are now dubbing Trump’s resurrected agenda — hence the wild talk of Canada as the 51st state, annexing Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, etc. There is this sense of claiming our own before somebody else does (Russia in the Arctic, China across Latin America, Canada going with the EU or us?).
An Expert in Grand Strategy Thinks Trump Is on to Something
Do you want a future in which Canada defects to the EU, Russia rules the Arctic and China runs Latin America? That’s the default outcome of non-action.
In short, just about everybody (and every great power) today now sees a very fluid competitive landscape that exhibits an ongoing transformation from peak globalization (2008) to a re-regionalization imperative as the world’s great powers now recoil from the combined realizations of:
Supply chain vulnerabilities (near-shoring)
A race for AI supremacy that — by extension — compels aggressive competition in networking the Global South for all that resulting Big Data
The inevitabilities of South-to-North mass migrations compelled by (a) climate change and the (b) stunning demographic disparities emerging between the aging/depopulating Global North and the still very young and growing Global South
… to name only the three most prominent.
America First (Trump 1.0) was an over-reach — too much of a reaction and too much of an invitation for other great powers to step up their ambitions and actions, thus scaring us into an almost carbon-copy strategic reaction as our Cold War persona — a pointless pathway as I have always argued.
Trump 2.0’s Americas First vibe fits better because it feels suitably defensive and centers our actions far more on the South-to-North migration crisis that has long provided Trump with his signature crisis-at-the-border but now elicits those territorial ambitions and a renewed sense of Manifest Destiny — or the conquering of new frontiers (our nation’s strategic DNA [and a throughline of all my books] that long laid dormant across the Cold War when our market-making persona ruled our behavior — lest we succumb to WWIII).
Now, as much as the Trump world prefers to deny it, we face a genuinely inescapable WWIII-like disruptive threat with climate change, arriving just in time to collide with demographic collapse across the Global North and the rise of middle-class consumerism across most of the Global South (along with that one-time-only demographic dividend now centered in SE Asia but shifting already to South Asia and beyond that to SW Asia and Africa in years to come).
No, none of these constitute the same immediately existential threat of global nuclear war, but together they create enough systemic change so as to feel like an existential threat to the American-crafted — if no longer led — world order as we have now long (8 decades) known it
Making America great again reflects a lot of that fear: a sense that we either reclaim an aggressive market-playing role or we lose our very identity — not to mention our hemispheric dominance long taken for granted.
All of this is to say what?
It is to say that I’m not terribly surprised at this America-First-to-Americas-First leap that suddenly seems to be presenting itself with Trump 2.0.
After all, that was the coda to my book:
Was that realignment more likely with a GOP administration than a Democratic one?
Let me admit the following: I mostly vote Democratic but have largely worked for, and found far more acceptance with, Republicans when it comes to my strategic pathfinding efforts. [And no, that is no subtle attempt to ingratiate with the Trump crowd, who know me solely as a nefarious “globalist.”]
Is Trump a weird and imperfect choice for this moment?
The dude is already lining his pockets with his meme crypto offering that beggars one’s sense of ethics, so … yeah, not my first choice.
But also not all that surprising to witness his return to power within an electorate that still feels like we’re not well-positioned/structured/ armed/incentivized to meet the looming challenges either at home or abroad.
Biden was clearly more of the same, and Harris could not detach herself enough from that image, so, Trump the china-shop bull gets his second chance. Why? Because the GOP couldn’t find anybody better in the meantime (sad and depressing in its own way — yet another Boomer presidency to suffer through!).
So, Biden gets credit for the “breather” between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 but not all that much more, despite his legislative accomplishments.
Now, with Trump the Destroyer/Avenger in full mode for at least two-dozen months, our nation faces a true Zone of Turbulence that will either reposition us well or badly within the global version of that reality as I describe it in the book:
When history looks back upon this time, the collective judgment may well be that we were doomed for this political disruption (Trump 2.0) all along, meaning that’s just what democracies like ours have to endure to achieve serious course corrections.
As I have often opined, America gets the political leadership it deserves. That’s democracy, folks!
Will I cheer Trump on? Whenever he seems to be doing more good than harm, yes, with the opposite naturally holding true.
But I will not wish for America’s suffering merely to “prove” the relative demerits of Trump’s approach. The next four years are too precious a period and I am too much of an inveterate patriot.
