One of the ways in which Donald Trump’s regime obscures and distracts is by drawing our eyes constantly to the US – its raw power to intimidate and bully other nations, and its vast financial heft in wielding soft power through organisations such as USAid.
But at the same time as Trump projects his agenda on to the world stage, he is withdrawing the US from the world and reducing its role to its bare bones – an imperial power that blatantly picks and chooses how to engage based on its alliances and interests. American taxpayer money is ever so precious on the one hand, but on the other can be profligately spent on proposals to take over an entire territory in Gaza and send billions in aid to Israel. This is not isolationism, it is unilateralism.
In doing so, the US, despite its domination of the headlines, is withdrawing from a world from which it has been receding for a long time as a moral, military and economic force into selective engagement. The arc of that recession is wide. It was “the end of history” in the early 90s, when the end of the cold war was predicted to herald a new world in which liberal capitalist values dominated under globalisation and free trade, and democracy flourished as the Soviet Union and its autocracies across eastern Europe collapsed. But in the three decades since, the US expanded then caved in on itself.
The country kicked off that period with several active military deployments and campaigns across the Middle East and south Asia under the guise of establishing security and democratic rights, as well as a robust system of broadly observed sanctions on deviant parties. It ended it with a hasty retreat from Afghanistan with zero of its objectives met, a drawdown of troops in Iraq and a host of empty ambassadorships across the world. On 7 October 2023, the US had no ambassadors in Israel, Egypt or Lebanon. A major cause of this was the Iraq war, as the quagmire the US found itself in “sucked the oxygen out of the administration’s foreign policy agenda”. A few months before Trump came to power for a second term, a foreign policy veteran in Washington told me that the state department was stuck in the past, unable to pivot and finesse its new role in the world, and compared its frozen nostalgia to “watching old cowboy movies on repeat”.
In the meantime, the world simply changed. America’s standing as a superpower is predicated on a sort of status quo that assumes that no other nations should accumulate enough economic and strategic weight to create their own unilateralism, or a version of multipolarity that undercuts the US. A brief survey of data: China is Africa’s largest trading partner and creditor; 20% of the continent’s exports go to China, and 16% of its imports come from China. China’s foreign direct investment weaves itself into the very development of the region, with a portion strategically going towards transportation, mining, energy and infrastructure. China has been a driver of a larger shift – south-south trade is increasing, as north-north trade is declining, particularly since the global financial crisis, creating a more integrated and mutually dependent world south of the equator and east of the Atlantic.
Middle Eastern powerhouses (to me, one of the most overlooked stories of how the global political economy is changing) are using their treasure chests to become global players that sit at the top of the capital investment structure. Trump is wooing Saudi Arabia, saying after his inauguration that he would make Riyadh his first foreign visit if the kingdom executed a promise to buy half a trillion dollars of US goods. Qatar is investing billions in the US. And the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund has earmarked the US as a top investment destination. These states are expanding regionally too, forging ties with Turkey in a quest, according to the Atlantic Council, “to gain strategic autonomy from the west and distribute risks by hedging against changes in US policy toward Turkey and the Gulf’s neighbourhood”, as “the global economy’s centre of gravity shifts toward the Indo-Pacific region”. That translates into real political power.
This shifting centre of gravity and the more assured dispersal of political and economic power have knock-on effects on the US’s residual foreign policy agenda. Russia’s evasion of sanctions has in part been enabled by trade through China, the UAE and Turkey, countries that are now too powerful and incorporated into the world economy to be slapped with effective secondary sanctions to deter them from undermining efforts to isolate Russia. The Biden administration’s recent declaration of genocide in Sudan, for example, and sanctions on its warring parties will probably have little effect in limiting the involvement of weapons suppliers, from Iran to the UAE, which either fall outside the US’s sphere of enforcement, or which are US allies simply too powerful to be disciplined.
The main culprit for that diminution of the US’s capability to force and persuade is that very same globalisation that would have appointed the US as the CEO of Globe Inc, spreading its economic and political ethos. Free movement of capital, lower barriers to trade, deregulated cheap labour and the diversification of national income streams have shaped a world that can no longer be divided into isolated outlaw “axes of evil” and pliant regimes. The international community is now divided into those with economic heft and global trading alliances, and those that don’t have either, but now have more options to become client states away from the US’s sphere of influence. And with Trump in power, divestment from his administration’s volatile and unreliable policies and turning towards more stable allies would be the wise choice for any government with that ability to “hedge”. He is moving too fast, breaking too many things, and unleashing such reactionary forces that the outlook in four years’ time looks less likely to be one where a resurgent Democratic party mounts a successful challenge and restoration, and more that Trumpism will continue by other means.
And so he takes the US with him, roiled and destabilised, into a world where its ability to advance whatever agenda it wishes at any time is increasingly undermined by its own moral and political collapse, and by the rise of other nations and arrangements that are rewriting the global order. It is the end of the end of history. A new chapter begins – nakedly transactional, more crowded, where political power is far more up for grabs. Trump could, by withdrawing in parts and aggressively asserting in others, create at once both a vacuum and a provocation that could catalyse that process. The irony is that as Trump casts a large, dark shade, more and more of the world is coming out of the US’s shadow.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
