It’s probably the case that children have already died as a result of Donald Trump’s war on U.S.A.I.D. If the freeze on foreign aid and mass furlough by fiat goes forward, many certainly will.
But the agency is not just a faucet of humanitarian money, distributing $40 billion in global aid, supporting soup kitchens and lead abatement and vaccination programs and saving millions of lives. It has also always been one face of American empire. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, the agency has funded health and development, but it has also supported business-friendly politics and what are often called democratic reforms to draw more of the world’s poor countries into the sphere of American influence.
And so the sprint to “delete” U.S.A.I.D. on grounds of waste and ideological bias also sent its own bigger message: that soft power, properly understood, is not really power at all, only a shackle restricting the exercise of the harder and more old-fashioned kind.
During his last time in office, Trump was pictured with a hurricane map marked up with black Sharpie ink so that the potential path of the storm matched his own ignorant projection. This time, he’s marking up some notional maps of American empire, which he says he would like to see stretching north through Canada and Greenland, south through the “Gulf of America” to the Panama Canal and across to the decimated rubble of the Gaza Strip, which he has taken to calling the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
It’s not clear, of course, that any of this will (or even could) happen — Francis Fukuyama described the Gaza plan as a “nonstarter” in an essay announcing both “the new American imperialism” and a return to the world of the 19th century. But each declaration of imperial desire is that mercurial kind of Trumpist speech act, in which a given utterance can be both meaningless and full of portent at the same time, self-disavowing even as it also demonstrates the president’s world-shaping power. Foreign leaders including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Rasmussen have warned that Trump’s acquisitiveness is deadly serious. And whatever comes of Trump’s retrograde dreams of manifest destiny, the implicit challenge to the legacy geopolitical order is just as striking: If we want these things and these places, who is going to stop us?
Among Trump’s Day 1 executive orders were withdrawals from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, which led some to describe the new president’s emergent foreign policy as a kind of strategic retreat, even an effort to “unwind” or “reorient” American power abroad, as Ryan Grim put it. But another first-day order designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, and as he assumed office, the new secretary of defense affirmed that when it came to military action in Mexico, “all options will be on the table.” The national security adviser has suggested the United States must recoup the money it has sent to Ukraine by plundering the country’s natural resources, and the president has threatened harsh tariffs on Denmark over Greenland, too. In addition to China, the first round of Trump tariffs targeted allies, with longstanding trade deals in place renegotiated not that long ago by Trump himself — and although the tariffs were withdrawn quickly in response to trivial concessions, you couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t safe to assume any existing arrangement would last for very long, with Trump likely to stress-test many aspects of the world order, country by country.
The new secretary of state began his stint as America’s top diplomat by effectively disavowing diplomacy, at least as we’ve known it for decades. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete,” Marco Rubio declared in his January Senate committee hearing. “It is now a weapon being used against us.” Last week, Rubio announced that the United States wouldn’t be attending the G20 in Johannesburg, explaining that “my job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.”
In Trump world, Rubio counts as an unusually clear spokesman, and these two statements together form a lucid if bracing declaration of intent: that a system built over decades largely by and for American power is now being discarded largely for inhibiting or even acting against American power. The country has long been a bully on the world stage, but one which at least pretended to play nice, even as its full command over the globe has seemed recently to shrink. “Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms,” the French observer Arnaud Bertrand wrote. “It is the post-American world order — brought to you by America itself.”
What comes next? New paradigms rarely arise fully formed. But if we spent the last four years watching Joe Biden’s ineffectual attempt to revive some rickety version of the moralistic postwar order, it is supremely clear what Donald Trump would like to replace that pretense with: the principle that global chaos opens up opportunity for great powers long hemmed in by convention and deference. You’ve probably heard of the madman approach to diplomacy; this is the mad world approach.
Over the last decade, as China dropped its show of geopolitical obeisance and began to perform similar games of dominance — telling the 10 nations of the ASEAN regional alliance, for instance, China is a big country, and you are small countries, and that is a fact — it inspired a new foreign-policy term: wolf-warrior diplomacy. This scandalized the foreign policy institutionalists of the West, including Biden, who in juggling not just China but Russia and Israel dedicated much of the second half of his presidency to a nostalgic diplomatic restoration project. The MAGA riposte is, Let’s not be naïve and let’s not be suckers: We are all wolves on the world stage, and the game begins when we show our teeth.
When Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire just before Inauguration Day, it seemed to many like a credit to Trump, whose emissaries had, on one exceptional Sabbath, apparently bullied Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting a deal that had been available for many months — and perhaps a sign that those who voted for the once and future president imagining he was the candidate of peace were not entirely deluded. But just a few weeks later, it seems clear that he regards demolition and mass displacement of millions as a straightforward matter of eminent domain. The ultimate acquisition of Gaza would be a simple “real estate transaction,” he said last week, and it wouldn’t even be Israel but the United States presiding over the closing. “We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it,” he said on Tuesday — “Mar-a-Gaza,” some have called it.
None of this was exactly unforeseen. The American-led international order has long been criticized as a cover story for the exercise of U.S. power, especially on the left, with critics on the right more likely to see it as an anti-nationalist plot to bring about global government. And though the United States remains a central global power, we are now well past what was once called the unipolar moment and perhaps nearly as far from the time when Madeleine Albright or Barack Obama could refer to the country as the world’s “indispensable nation.” (“Hegemonic decline is a done deal,” the historian Adam Tooze remarked recently. “It’s over.”)
And yet Trump’s second term “marks a symbolic end to global neoliberalism,” the economist Branko Milanovic wrote last month, a sharper break than his first term — in part, Milanovic later added, because in the meantime so many impulses that once seemed outlandish (on China, on trade, on industrial policy) had quietly hardened into elite conventional wisdom.
The difference is also marked abroad, with far fewer global leaders falling into alignment against Trump — even if a few seem to enjoy mixing it up with him personally — and acknowledging that the basic terms of engagement have changed. The office of the Russian foreign minister has publicly applauded the assault on U.S.A.I.D., as has Viktor Orban of Hungary’s political director. China seems happy to watch America detonate large parts of its infrastructure of global power. In Europe, the European Commission’s Josep Borrell got into trouble a few years ago when he described the continent as an orderly and peaceful “garden,” surrounded by the “jungle” of the rest of the world. Now the president of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is striking a very similar tone — calling it a “hotheaded world” and an “era of hypercompetitive and hypertransactional geopolitics.”
In other words: It’s a jungle out there.
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