Kier Starmer, we are told, is no Winston Churchill – although, one may ask, why would he want to be one? Equally, Donald Trump is no Eisenhower.
With Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander, the planning of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, and of Overlord, the invasion of Europe, centred not just on getting men and material into the right place at the right time, but also on predicting and preparing to counter the enemy’s reaction.
On the consequences.
Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, so there is no one left to question his orders or challenge the consequences of his actions.
Leaving aside that the justification for the United States’ and Israel’s concerted attacks on Iran is at best thin, the fact Trump and his henchmen did not foresee or prepare for Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz amounts to military negligence. Not expecting Iran to lash out wildly at its neighbours shows geopolitical ignorance. And not realising that starting a war in a region, on which the world depends for a significant proportion of its oil and gas, would have a massive impact on the world economy was utter, mind-numbing stupidity.
But that is just the immediately visible consequence of Trump’s policy. Like an iceberg, there is much more beneath the surface.
Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ was just that – a slogan. It was not an ideology or a policy, it was simply a John Wayne, machoman stance. And in trying to live up to the image, Trump has overturned more than half-a-century of international political balance. It may at times have been delicate balance, but it was a balance.
And it is no use saying, as many people are: “Trump will be gone in three years.”
That may be so. It may be that a liberal Democratic President will follow. But that no longer matters. The weakness of the American constitution has been exposed. If the pendulum can swing to the right and then to the left, it can easily swing back to the right again. Trust has been broken. Only extremists like Farage and Truss will place any faith in the United States in the long term.
Take one small example. Having realised that the oil market was being affected by his war, Trump scaled back sanctions on Russian oil. This was intended as a practical move, to ease the supply of oil to the world market (although, in fact, it has had little impact). What it has done is infuriate the Ukrainians, confirm the European belief that Trump is untrustworthy, and destroy any chance of a Trump-sponsored negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Putin must now be crystal clear that Trump doesn’t really care about Ukraine.
And on the bigger picture, on the world stage, the situation is the same. By playing the machoman, by flexing America’s muscles in order to make it great again, he is actually making it weaker.
He is right that the European end of NATO has not been paying its fair share for a long while. Yet by attacking European values, by calling his allies ‘cowards’, by threatening to take over Greenland, by slapping tariffs on his European trading partners, he has alienated America’s friends. As a consequence, he has created a Europe which – despite its internal divisions – is more likely to stand up to American demands and bully-boy tactics than it was before.
The world is full of ghastly regimes: Iran, Russia, North Korea, Belarus. No one is suggesting that the United States has fallen that far yet but look at the direction of travel. Look at the things that Trump has been doing in the last year – unleashing ICE, attempting to muzzle media outlets (including the BBC) which criticise him, attacking the judiciary, using the law to persecute political opponents, tariffs, Greenland, Venezuela, and now bombing Iran without legal sanction. It’s a downward spiral, a rejection of democratic norms. If you put yourself in a position where you are no better than your enemy, then you lose any justification for engaging with him – and you lose your friends.
When Canada agreed a trade deal with China, Trump went ballistic. But why? The deal was a consequence – unintended – of his pressure on Canada to fall in with his political and economic demands. China is certainly not a liberal regime. But it does not pretend to be. Trump’s rhetoric and his tariffs created a Canada-China link which he did not foresee and does not want.
The lesson is simple. Trump wanted to make America great again. That meant exercising power. But exercising power indiscriminately has alienated allies and broken the world order that had endured since the end of the Second World War. It would be rash to predict what diplomatic agreements, trade deals, and alliances will emerge over the next two or three years, but there will undoubtedly be some strange and unexpected ones. And many of them will be exactly what Trump does not want.
The United States will end up weaker, not greater. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it will be the unintended consequence of trying to make America great again through swagger, bullying, blackmail, and violence.
