Geopolitics in the age of Trump: Have we been here before?
With Donald Trump's inauguration and return to the White House, we can rightly ask the question: is 20th century geopolitics infecting the 21st century? Was post-Cold War neoliberalism misleading, rearming the world for wars rather than liberalising its economy? Four 1920s dynamics shaking the 2020s suggest so. They are the pandemic, populism, technological breakthroughs, and internationalising democracy. Each directly fed World War II. Will they bring us an all-out war now?
The 1918-19 Spanish Flu was not a product of Spain and the Covid pandemic was not "made in China" (as President Donald J Trump then claimed). But both followed global upheavals: Spanish Flu, World War I, Covid, the 2008-11 recession and the 2014-20 "six-year climate anomaly." All three examples show human-flows shaking the environment. World War I saw a human stew of soldiers from many countries crossing many boundaries, but also being locked up in war-trenches, where pandemics incubate; and both the Great Recession and climate changes moved people reluctantly. Viruses dormant in one setting often explode in another. They join such constantly threatening secular triggers as biotechnological advancements. When atmospheric conditions and advancing technologies combine, consciously or subconsciously, humans face a virus minefield. Tech-savvy people adapt. They globalise, push multiculturalism, and seek inclusiveness. Others resist. They become nationalistic, mono-cultural minded, and exclusive in preferences.
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Though it has many meanings and manifestations, populism is all about aggressive nationalism. It characterised empires a century ago, when the 1919-24 Paris Peace conferences freed many peoples. Some leaders turned extremist, and empowered White supremacy. On January 6, 2021, the world's most modern capital experienced what is generally dubbed a "third world coup." Rather than the military usurping the US Congress, Trump's fan-club ran riot. Trump lost an election, only to return stronger. He rolled out a red-carpet for his fan club, pardoning January 6 rioters, along with signing a handful of other executive orders and tossing pens from signing into the cheering crowd. Like leaders before World War II, Trump knows how to convert popular frustration into steam-rolling policymaking: pin a grievous national problem upon a domestic or foreign group. One consequence of this is to realign geopolitics. Trump detests foreigners and immigrants but geopolitics is dicier today. With Xi Jinping currently bailing Vladimir Putin, whom Trump admires, out, and Trump admiring Benjamin Netanyahu, whom nobody likes, when the International Criminal Court places both villains on the "wanted" list, no one speaks a word. Jinping, Modi, and Putin flaunt BRICS Plus and the "Global South" against US policies over Ukraine and Gaza, yet Trump, of all people, is most likely to end both wars.
Trump now placates Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and Panama, meaning the infamous US 19th century "westward ho" will now go in northern and southern directions. At the time, cowboys evicted native injuns (Indians). In the same vein, Trump's defensive Monroe Doctrine approach belies an explosive future with non-military skirmishes.
One victim of all the above dynamics is democracy. It stands more hopelessly today.
Among the champions of the "other group" alluded to (favouring newly independent countries) was Woodrow Wilson. His Fourteen Points and the League of Nations internationalised "democracy," appealing most to Main Street citizens in colonial Europe, India, and Ottoman Turkey. The League of Nations widened negotiations beyond Europe and the Atlantic, preaching global democracy. New countries relished it, but great powers shunned it. They still do.
Reconciling democracy and aristocracy was impossible a century ago. The 1943 Bengal famine exposed how British Prime Minister Winston Churchill deliberately diverted food to soldiers defending the British Raj against Japan than to the peasants and farmers in the very first Indian province taken by the East India Company (who also produced the original British wealth). Similarly, today countries crusading for democracy such as Canada, France, Great Britain, and the United States, also sell weapons to Israel to blast hospitals, kill mothers, and bludgeon children. Florence Nightingale's lamp in a mid-19th century Russian conflict paved the way for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and thereby the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1950, yet today the most "civilised" is also the most inhumane. With the genocide in Gaza, one may ask, do we define human civility with weapons, or democracy?
Democracy bells hitherto rang in the "West." Individualism, its key feature, does not jive in the collective-minded culturally different non-western societies. For other non-Western countries, the unequal past appears more golden than before because it carried peace. Substituting that with "democracy efforts" took away that peace.
Political parties were dubbed "left" or "right" of centre by the mid-20th century for pro-labour or pro-business preferences, respectively. Until the 1970s, elections were determined by those preferences. Today the left has moved to the centre, forcing the right to move farther right, as demonstrated by the popularity of Trump's MAGA ideology, promising restoration of greatness, to keep a safer distance against what they perceive as usurpers. Even in plights, "advanced democracies" still impose sine qua non policy preferences to new Africa, Asia, and South American countries to democratise, as with World Bank preconditions for aid. No wonder, even by charging more interest, China's Belt Road Initiative remains popular by not imposing preconditions. Noble as it was, the concept of democracy, the modern world's 20th century nirvana, has been driven to its twilight zone in the 21st.
One of its invisible killers is technological growth. Before the 1920s, the industrial revolutions revolved around human labour and tangible instruments. Factories and tractors kicked farmers out of village homes into metropolitan apartment homes and assembly-line work, with the Great Wall Street crash highlighting the problem in developed countries. Today we call those instruments "hardware," to distinguish our supposedly more "cultivated" intellectually groomed "software" skills. But today's "less developed countries" face double-dosage hardware and software kicks. In a world still not as educated as the new technologies require them to be, "democratising" has been overtaken by "monetising," as demonstrated by the presence of Elon Musk in US politics. Then there's the inescapable artificial intelligence (AI) dominance coming our way, which leaves us in a more uncertain world.
Restlessness is now our middle name. Survival of the fittest instincts dominate. They can be controlled by formidable rules. Yet instincts grow, as in the jungle, while rules of civil society vanish. Since every class has been mobilised by democracy without portraying bottom-up interests, no rules stand a chance against the Fourth Industrial Revolution's weapons: social media; artificial intelligence; and the likes. Without the promised fruits, the cancer can only grow. Since every solution must be "homegrown," international institutions flaunting vetoes and weights globally cannot help. Paradoxically, then, today's grass becomes greener if left under national control. Building a sustainable global order, in turn, requires a long enough hiatus.
Dr Imtiaz A Hussain is professor at the Department of Global Studies and Governance (GSG) of Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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