Trump Abroad

In 2018, Dylan Riley’s ‘What Is Trump?’ defined the 45th President as dysfunctional for the American ruling order.footnote¹ A hybrid product of the real-estate underworld and the entertainment industry, his rise was largely due to popular rage at the management of the financial bailouts and Great Recession by smooth-talking Democrats. It would be misleading, Riley argued, to assimilate Trump’s sui generis character as a political figure to any general category—authoritarianism, populism, fascism, ‘semi-fascism’; as a scholar of European fascism, Riley was adamant on that. Trump could better be understood as an ill-fitting amalgam of the three different ‘modes of rule’, as Weber had defined them, operating like a foreign body within the Federal bureaucracy. The combination of a would-be charismatic leader, ruling in a personalized, neo-patrimonial fashion over a legal-rational state, within an oligarchic representative democracy, involved multiple contradictions. The Administration’s incoherence was structural. Trump’s milieu of lumpen millionaires and far-right wannabes was too small and inexperienced to run the Federal machine, which boasted of blocking his agenda.footnote² Beyond China tariffs and belligerence against Iran—plus, on the home front, tax cuts, voter handouts and right-wing judges—Trump’s first administration achieved very little.

Few would call his second inefficacious. Abroad, the us has bombed the Iranian nuclear-enrichment programme, shelled Yemen, blown a dozen or more boats out of the water in the Caribbean, bombarded Caracas, kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan President and his wife, hijacked oil tankers, launched air and missile strikes on Syria, Somalia and Nigeria, blockaded Iran and Cuba, threatening both with regime change and, at the time of writing, is building up for a full-scale Iranian war. At home, it has expanded the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency into a combat force that has shot dead opponents of the President’s policies. Like Johnson in 1965, Trump has federalized the National Guard, but to opposite effect: instead of de-segregating the South, ice is re-segregating liberal cities through the ad hoc criminalization of Latino workers.

But how functional is all this for the imperatives of American rule? Roughly speaking, these might be defined as follows. Since 1945, the primary us goals have been, first, to stabilize and defend the international capitalist order; and second, to advance us economic, political and ideological interests within it.footnote³ Over the first half-century, even if the going was a little rough, America’s rulers could congratulate themselves on both counts, with the defeat of the Soviet Bloc, the globalization of investment and production, floated on an ocean of us-managed credit, and the incorporation of all major powers into a us-led world order, animated by ideas that an insider genially dubbed the Washington Consensus. True that the us had accumulated a few additional tasks along the way, including a commitment to Israel that entailed extra duties in the Middle East; but these were easily within the capacity of a military colossus with a well-oiled political-intellectual apparatus.

Yet in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis it was revealed that these prodigious successes had helped give birth to unwanted outcomes: the rise of China, as a huge and perhaps impermeable rival, and the hollowing of the us heartlands, the former industrial working-class regions of the Upper Midwest, battered by falling growth rates, stagnant wages, worsening morbidity issues, rising living costs and soaring inequality.footnote⁴ Post factum, the two were yoked in right-wing American discourse as ‘China stole our jobs’—handily leaving out the responsibility of corporate boards and shareholder interests for manufacturing’s relocation. This twin dilemma—signalling at best the limits of us power, at worst the advent of us decline—defined a further double imperative: the need to set a floor beneath domestic working-class discontent and to retain us primacy despite, or against, the rise of China.

Trump’s dysfunctional first term was both a symptom of this double dilemma and a flailing attempt at a far-right solution to it. The Biden Administration, however, continued and deepened the few signature policies he had set in place: wrecking-ball sanctions against Iran, embrace of Israeli atrocities in Gaza, embargo of advanced semi-conductor chips for China and a notional ‘foreign policy for the middle class’, code for the working class, picking up Trumpian tropes; to which Biden added his own signature in the triumphalist nato defence of Ukraine against Russia. Biden’s silent retention of Trump’s moves—albeit with a green sheen, whose value is still to be reckonedfootnote⁵—provided affirmation for them.footnote⁶ In that sense, at least, it could be said that the American ruling order had found a function for Trump, despite the dysfunctionality of his mode of rule. A normal administration, as Biden’s prided itself on being, could take steadier steps down the path that Trump had recce’d.

Now that Trump has returned, piling up deeds as well as words by which to be judged, it may be possible to press the question of his functionality for Washington’s world hegemony—that is, his role in advancing America’s double imperatives—a little further. Decisive verdicts as to whether Trump portends the end of the rules-based international order, the onset of a new predatory or illiberal type of hegemony, or even the long-delayed dawn of a multipolar age, have already been issued at Davos and elaborated in Washington’s heavyweight periodicals.footnote⁷ Recognizing that on key issues, not least China, a clear direction for Trump’s second term has yet to emerge, this piece attempts a more preliminary exercise. It sets out to examine the record on the ground across the four major theatres of us world power—Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, East Asia—for any provisional pointers, trusting that future contributors will intervene to criticize and correct any initial findings.

But first, a brief consideration of how Trump’s idiosyncratic mode of rule has altered in his fifth presidential year. Political commentators and journalistic gossip alike have homed in on the internal operations of Trump’s White House to discover the secret of his power. Inevitably, in an imperial-presidency system, personalist or characterological forms of analysis predominate: Trump Himselfism, based precisely on the neo-patrimonial aspects that Riley pointed out. Trump’s penchant for showmanship and throwing his weight around, his conviction that unpredictability is a strength, his impatience with procedure and preference for high-speed results—all these characteristics have real-world effects, from tariff policy to the war on Iran. Trump’s approach is often described as transactional; but that, surely, is the normal mode of politics. Rather, he favours economic coercion, overt displays of power that bring to mind Charles Tilly’s thoughts on the protection racket as model for the violence of the state.footnote⁸ But Trump Himselfism can be overstated. Much of the executive’s work goes on without him; aides are said to have encouraged the East Wing extravaganza in order to get him out of their hair so they can crack on with the agenda, since all he wants to do is talk. Besides, there is a risk in the personalist method of taking Trump’s pronouncements more seriously than he does himself.