The following interview was first published in Frankfurter Rundschau on 24 January.
During his first term as president, Trump vowed to focus primarily on the American people. Are we now, by contrast, witnessing a kind of US neo-imperialism?
Trump’s programme to Make America Great Again always had these two sides: repair America’s broken society or restore US world domination. Which of these was dominant remained open and is still so today. Sometimes we have isolationism, sometimes interventionism; currently both alternately or even simultaneously. Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is a particular version of this mixture: interventionism, but limited to Central and South America; nothing new in itself. Globally, this would amount to a division of the world into mutually respected regional ‘spheres of influence’ in which a major power more or less rules as it pleases. What does not fit into this picture is the unconditional support for Israel in its war of annihilation in Gaza and the West Bank, nor the threats to bomb Iran.
Why is there so little resistance to Trump’s policies in the world’s oldest democracy?
At first glance, this is surprising. But not at second glance. The American Constitution is almost two and a half centuries old and has never been adapted to the realities of a modern centralized state (until 1945, it did not even have a standing federal army). For a while, the old checks and balances held, but only as long as the country was doing reasonably well. In the deep social crisis in which the US has been mired for some time, the gaps and fractures in the constitutional structure are now becoming visible, and make it easy for an unscrupulous power-hungry figure like Trump – himself a product of the crisis – to brutally exploit them (with five judges appointed for life to the Supreme Court, virtually anything is possible), while deluding his voters that the ‘misery’ Carter spoke of in the 1970s is finally being overcome.
Does Trump represent a new kind of fascism?
To put it bluntly: there is hardly anything new about it, except that the fig leaf has been dropped. And not all violence is ‘fascist’; let’s not waste the concept. The US has always been astonishingly prone to violence, both domestically and internationally. For them, the post-war period began with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Korea, Vietnam (no one knows anymore why millions of people were wiped out with napalm there), and since 1990, there has not been a single day when the US hasn’t been waging war somewhere in the world. They currently maintain approximately 750 military bases spread across the globe. It is true that Trump has unleashed the violent potential of American society internally by inciting half of the population against the other. But his brand of civil war falls far short of the slavery and Indian wars of the 19th century, nor is he responsible for the extraordinarily vast and cruel prison system; that is the work of his predecessors.
Who, for example?
Well in foreign policy, primarily Bush and Cheney, who ran riot in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria – countries that had done nothing to the US and could never have done anything. I admit that the masses of deaths inflicted thanks to advanced technology, with almost no losses on their own side, has, phenomenologically speaking, something fascist about it. In 15 years of war, approximately three million Vietnamese died, compared to 50,000 American soldiers, which in the 1960s corresponded to the number of traffic fatalities in the US each year.
How should Europeans behave towards the US and Trump? Some speak of the relative strength of the EU as an economic area, while others stress disunity and weakness.
Both are correct. The Americans will continue to play hardball with the Europeans for quite some time; Musk and his fellow oligarchs will see to that. Why are they able to do so? Most important is that the Europeans cannot wage war, hot or cold, against Russia without exposing themselves to the impositions of the US. And as far as ‘unity’ is concerned, I believe that Germany will not forever be able to go along with the US sanctions policy against Russia, and especially China, for economic reasons. Nor can it commit itself to a Baltic or Polish policy that carries the risk of having to send German ground troops into battle against Russia without its own nuclear weapons.
Chancellor Merz is banking on his ‘good relationship’ with Trump, and is pursuing a ‘cosy’ approach. Is this the right strategy?
Nobody knows. But what is Merz supposed to do? Send the German navy to Chesapeake Bay and demand Trump’s extradition to the International Criminal Court? On the other hand, he is unable to cosy up like María Corina Machado, as he doesn’t have a Nobel Prize to donate. (Not that it did her any good.) Do you remember how Scholz publicly cozied up to Biden even as the latter told the press that the Americans knew very well how to shut down Nord Stream 2 if the Germans didn’t do it themselves? Trump wasn’t needed for that either.
Do you think that Greenland should be left to the Americans to prevent a major conflict?
You and I have no say in the matter and therefore don’t necessarily need to have an opinion. The Americans have long been deeply involved in Greenland – since World War II and then permanently since the Cold War. If you had flown over northern Greenland on a sunny day before 1990, as I was fortunate enough to do, you would have seen one US military base after another. If you want a prediction: given Denmark’s Russophobia, I presume that, supported by a relieved NATO, it will grant the Americans something like de facto sovereignty, with minor cosmetic adjustments to save face.
How dangerous will the conflict between the US and China become?
Very dangerous. The US has been discussing China for a long time, since Obama, from the perspective of the so-called ‘Thucydides trap’. In short, the Greek historian, himself a much-admired general, explained the defeat of the Athenians by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War by the fact they had waited for too long while Sparta grew larger and more powerful, instead of striking early – at a point when they could have made short work of them.
What does that mean?
As you know, the official US military strategy aims to prevent the emergence of any power anywhere in the world that could rival the US. The discussion among insiders currently revolves around the question of whether the right moment to strike has already been missed or not. A few days ago, Trump announced that the US defence budget is set to increase by 50 per cent to 1.5 trillion dollars by 2027. For what, one wonders?
No progress is apparent in the negotiations between the US and Russia. Doesn’t this indicate that Putin doesn’t want peace?
Could it be that the US, or the EU for that matter, doesn’t want peace either? Unlike Ursula von der Leyen and our other strategists, the Americans do not assume that Russia can be defeated. But for them that doesn’t matter; it’s enough for the Europeans to keep Russia busy with a proxy war of attrition ‘until the last Ukrainian’. A welcome side effect is that a protracted war makes any rapprochement between Germany and Russia impossible – which is the traditional nightmare especially of British policy towards continental Europe.
Well, the war in Ukraine was started by Russia, not the US, wasn’t it?
That’s a long story. You can’t just plan to deploy intermediate-range missiles 500 miles from the capital of a rival nuclear power without it reacting. But I agree with you insofar as Russia has managed to modernize its armaments and convert to a war economy during the four years of war despite apparently suffering heavy losses on the battlefield. Now it seems to be gaining ground every day against a European coalition that had sworn to the Ukrainians at the beginning of 2022 that the war would be over by Christmas, with a resounding defeat for Russia (von der Leyen even announced that ‘we’ would ‘dismantle layer by layer’ Russian industrial society through the miraculous sanctions she devised).
What follows from this?
Russia may now see an opportunity to go far beyond the Minsk and Istanbul negotiations, and effectively eliminate Ukraine as a viable nation state for the foreseeable future, while at the same time utterly humiliating the EU. I can imagine that Putin would find such a thing irresistible. The ‘Europeans’ would then have brought this on themselves.
Macron floated the idea of Putin attending the G7 summit. Pure desperation or a good idea?
One of Macron’s notorious inconsequential self-promotions. Aside from that, it is astonishing how simple common sense seems exotic these days. How can you end a war that you cannot win on the battlefield if you refuse to talk to the other side?
Are we witnessing the end of a world we know, with its rules-based order?
I don’t know how familiar this world was to you; for me, it has been uncanny since at least the bombing of Belgrade using the Northrop B-2 strategic bomber, if not before. And it wasn’t really ‘rules-based’ anyway, perhaps with the exception of the WTO trade regime, which, however, has increasingly existed only on paper since the 2008 financial crisis. Proclaimed after the so-called end of history in the early 1990s, the ‘rules-based order’ was administered by the US as the world’s policeman, world court and world executioner all at once, and by them alone, at their discretion. They never applied this order to themselves: see the invention of the ‘duty to protect’ in the 1990s, the permanent state of emergency under the ‘War on Terror’ that was continually expanded after 2001, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as a lawless experimental zone for non-nuclear depopulation, the armed crusade for ‘democracy’ against ‘authoritarianism’. Under the guise of ‘order’: a stockpile of justifications for ‘sanctions’ of all sorts to be imposed at will by the only punitive power that could not even be held accountable for its deadly invention of Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (an estimated 500,000 dead civilians).
And what is different under Trump?
Unlike his predecessors, Trump forgoes cultivated speeches delivered with a legalistic silver tongue; but the violent core of his idea of a Pax Americana is anything but new. Incidentally, compared to Bush II and Obama, Trump’s claim to the Nobel Peace Prize is not entirely absurd – at least not yet. Remember that Obama got it for free, one year into his first term. And even Kissinger got it in the end.
Read on: Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Engels’s Second Theory’, NLR 123.