E o mundo riu-se na cara de Donald Trump
A gargalhada colectiva na imensa sala onde decorria a última
Assembleia Geral da Organização das Nações Unidas não foi só um momento
embaraçoso para Donald Trump. Foi um reacção generalizada do mundo aos
discursos pomposos do presidente dos EUA. E foi também um ataque a uma das
afirmações principais e fantasiosas de um presidente que, de acordo com o
Washington Post, fez mais de 5 mil afirmações falsas ou enganadoras desde que
chegou ao poder.
30 de Setembro de 2018, 6:40
Há já muito tempo que o presidente Trump argumenta que os
outros países se tem aproveitado dos Estados Unidos – “o alvo de chacota do
mundo inteiro”, publicou no Twitter em 2014 – e a sua ascensão política
baseou-se na premissa de que ele teria a força e a determinação para mudar
isso.
Mas na Assembleia Geral da Organização das Nações Unidas da
última terça-feira, Donald Trump foi castigado no maior palco do mundo. Com um
discurso que tinha como objectivo estabelecer a soberania dos EUA sob as
vontades e necessidades das outras nações, o momento triunfante do presidente
ficou marcado logo no primeiro minuto, quando a audiência se riu – à sua custa.
O momento embaraçoso aconteceu quando Donald Trump se
vangloriou de que a sua administração fez mais em dois anos do que “qualquer
outra administração” na história americana, o que despertou risadas na enorme
sala.
Na tarde de terça-feira, Donald Trump emanava um ar de
indiferença, dizendo aos repórteres que aquela parte do discurso tinha como
objectivo “suscitar o riso” REUTERS
O presidente dos EUA pareceu ter ficado surpreendido. “Não
estava à espera desta reacção”, disse, “mas tudo bem.” E a audiência que o
ouvia riu-se novamente – desta vez, talvez por simpatia.
Donald Trump continuou o seu discurso, que se prolongou por
mais 34 minutos, mas o momento marcou a reacção da comunidade internacional a
um presidente que tem adorado “picar” aliados dos EUA em assuntos como o
comércio, alianças de segurança e os bons costumes diplomáticos em geral.
“[Trump] Sempre teve uma obsessão com as pessoas a rirem-se
do presidente. Desde meados dos anos 1980 que ele diz: ‘O mundo ri-se de nós.
Pensam que somos idiotas’”, disse Thomas Wright, um analista europeu da
Brookings Institution. “Não é verdade, mas ele tem dito o mesmo sobre todos os
presidentes. Que saiba, é a primeira vez que alguém realmente se riu de um
presidente. Acho que isto o vai levar à loucura. Vai de encontro a todas as
suas inseguranças.”
Para Donald Trump, o momento não foi só embaraçoso. Foi
também um ataque a uma das afirmações principais e fantasiosas de um presidente
que, de acordo com factos apurados pelo Washington Post, fez mais de 5 mil
afirmações falsas ou enganadoras desde que chegou ao poder.
À medida que as eleições intercalares se aproximam, Trump
começou a vangloriar-se de uma longa lista de feitos da sua administração,
chegando a recitá-los num comício de campanha recente através de duas folhas de
papel que retirou do bolso do casaco.
Assim, o presidente dos Estados Unidos tem clamado um
sucesso esmagador e comparou-se a si mesmo, favoravelmente, aos maiores líderes
da nação. Num comício em Springfield, Missuri, na semana passada, Trump
discursava para os seus apoiantes e preparava-se para terminar com uma prosa
floreada no teleponto sobre a coragem dos fundadores da América quando se
desviou do guião para afirmar que a sua eleição em 2016 foi “o maior movimento
da história” dos EUA.
Nas Nações Unidas, a reivindicação de Trump de que fez mais
em menos de dois anos do que as 44 administrações anteriores desafiou todos os
limites da realidade – ou arrogância.
“Por um lado, pensas ‘Oh, meu Deus, coitado do presidente
americano, todos se riem dele no palco do mundo’”, disse Julie Smith, que trabalhou
para o vice-presidente Joe Biden como vice-conselheira de segurança nacional.
“Mas por outro lado, sentes-te contente que Donald Trump tenha finalmente saído
da bolha dos comícios políticos que continuamente lhe dão a impressão de que
todos concordam com as suas falsas afirmações”, disse Smith, que viu o discurso
de Trump a partir de Berlim, onde está a passar um ano como bolseira na
Academia Bosch. “Houve um momento em que pensei para mim mesma, ‘Ainda bem que
o presidente está ser exposto ao que o resto do mundo pensa dele.’”
Apesar de o riso dos líderes mundiais nas Nações Unidas ter
sido espontâneo, pode ter havido algum aproveitamento por parte de algumas das
delegações. As câmaras televisivas apanharam alguns dos diplomatas alemães a
rirem-se — talvez uma forma de aliviar a tensão depois das relações entre Trump
e a chanceler Angela Merkel terem começado com o pé errado e assim têm
continuado.
PÚBLICO -Foto
Para Thomas Wright, analista da Brookings Institution, este
momento “teve de doer” ao Presidente dos EUA. “Foi filmado e foi espontâneo.
Foi num dos maiores palcos do mundo.” CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS
No ano passado, os alemães presentes na conferência do
Conselho Económico da União Democrata Cristã, em Berlim, riram-se e aplaudiram
depois de ter sido cortada a palavra ao secretário do Comércio dos EUA, Wilbur
Ross, quando este ultrapassou o tempo destinado ao seu discurso. Merkel
respondeu depois aos comentários de Ross ao longo do seu discurso.
Nas redes sociais, os críticos de Trump não perderam tempo e
gozaram com ele. “Os presidentes americanos costumavam estabelecer a agenda
global na Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas. Agora riem-se de Trump”, publicou
no Twitter Ben Rhodes que, como assessor de segurança nacional para
Comunicações Estratégicas, ajudou o Presidente Barack Obama a escrever
discursos das Nações Unidas.
“O mundo acabou de se rir de @realDonaldTrump”, publicou,
por sua vez, a comediante Wanda Sykes no Twitter. Referindo-se ao famoso teatro
em Harlem onde a audiência vaia e interpela os maus actores, acrescentou,
“Mantenham-se sintonizados, pode ser que façam como no programa Showtime at the
Apollo.’“
Na tarde de terça-feira, Donald Trump emanava um ar de
indiferença, dizendo aos repórteres que aquela parte do discurso tinha como
objectivo “suscitar o riso”. Mas alguns dos espectadores não acreditaram, uma
vez que o presidente raramente ri de si mesmo e a sua expressão típica é um
olhar furioso que não poupa ninguém.
“Teve de doer”, disse Wright, o analista da Brookings
Institution. “Foi filmado e foi espontâneo. Foi num dos maiores palcos do
mundo.”
Exclusivo PÚBLICO/Washington Post
Tradução de Ana Silva
The world America made — and Trump wants to unmake
The US-led global order created peace and prosperity for
millions. So why are the president’s critics teaming up with him to tear it
apart?
By ROBERT
KAGAN 9/28/18, 12:57 PM CET
Updated 9/30/18, 5:01 AM CET
Image via iStock
The liberal world order is taking a beating these days, and
not just at the hands of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
In recent months a bevy of American political scientists
from the progressive left to the libertarian right has launched attacks on the
very idea of the liberal order, as well as on the conduct of American foreign
policy over the past seven decades.
These critics argue that the liberal order was a “myth,” a
cover for American hegemony and “imperialism.” To the degree there was an
order, it was characterized by “coercion, violence, and instability,” and also
by hypocrisy.
The United States did not always support democracy, but
often backed dictatorships, and in the name of shaping a “putatively liberal
order,” it often “upended, stretched, or broke liberal rules.”
The celebrated achievements of the liberal order, they
therefore claim, are either overblown — the “long peace” was due to the Cold
War balance of nuclear terror not the American-led order, Graham Allison
argues, for instance. Or the order’s benefits are outweighed by its many
failures — Vietnam, Iraq, McCarthyism — and by the costs of sustaining it.
Indeed, if the liberal order is failing today, they argue, it has been
“complicit in its own undoing.” In this, at least, the critics sound much like
the president — he, too, believes the liberal order has been a bad deal for
Americans.
Trump’s speech at the U.N. was an invitation to global
anarchy, a struggle of all against all.
Trump calls himself a “realist,” and the critics also insist
on a new “realism,” a Trumpian pulling back from decades-old alliances that
they believe have outlived their usefulness.
They might not strike quite the same “America First” themes
Trump struck during this week’s address to the U.N. General Assembly. But the
realism they have in mind is much the same. They would have us abandon what
they regard as the utopian ambitions of remaking the world in America’s image
and instead urge us to accept the world “as it is,” to use the Obama
administration’s favorite mantra.
But is this, in fact, realism? The founders of this liberal
world order during World War II and in the years that followed — people like
Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, George Marshall, and George Kennan — also
regarded themselves as realists, and perhaps with greater justification. For
they had seen firsthand what a world not shaped by American power, the world
“as it is,” really looks like. It was the world of two catastrophic global
wars, the Holocaust, man-made famines that killed tens of millions, the rise of
fascism and communism and near death of liberalism and democracy in Europe.
The liberal world order American leaders established in the
wake of World War II aimed at addressing the causes of those horrors and
preventing their return. It was not based on naïve optimism about human
existence, but on pessimism born of hard experience, earned on the battlefields
of Europe and the beaches of the Pacific islands. While there were many
Americans who did want to put their trust in the United Nations and
international law — the “rules-based order” we often hear about — these men had
a different view. The world was an international jungle, Acheson, Harry
Truman’s secretary of state, argued, with no “rules, no umpire, no prizes for
good boys.”
Yet for all the shortcomings and despite America’s often
high-handed and hypocritical behavior, none of the members of the liberal order
— not one — ever sought to leave it.
Nor would there be any escape from this brutal reality: no
self-sustaining international balance of power to preserve peace, no
self-regulating legal order, no end to international struggle and competition.
Such security as was possible, both physical security and the security of
liberal ideals, could be preserved only by meeting power with greater power.
And in the world as it was configured, the only guarantee of peace, Acheson
insisted, was “the continued moral, military and economic power of the United
States.”
As he would later put it, the United States had to become
“the locomotive at the head of mankind.” And the Truman administration put this
philosophy into action, deploying troops permanently in Europe, creating the
NATO alliance and putting in place the architecture of a relatively free
economic system for the world.
The triumph of the liberal world order was not the triumph
of ideas alone, therefore. Better ideas don’t win simply because they are
better. The order was the product of war and was sustained by the exercise of
power in all its forms. What gave the liberal principles a new life and the
opportunity to flourish as never before was not the sudden embrace of the
Enlightenment but a series of actions in the real world that reshaped the
international system and created what Acheson called an “environment of
freedom.”
The initial efforts to create this liberal world order
preceded the Cold War. And the key pillars on which the order was established
had little to do with the Soviet Union. The central element was the
transformation of the two great originators of conflict, the autocracies of
Germany and Japan, into peaceful, democratic nations. Through force and
coercion, but also with financial support and political encouragement, they
were led to abandon the geopolitical ambitions that had produced two world wars
and adopt instead ambitions for peace, greater prosperity and social welfare.
Their large and talented populations gave up the geopolitical competition and
entered the competition for economic success. They were in a sense liberated to
prosper in peace.
And their neighbors were liberated, too. By denying Germany
and Japan a geopolitical and military path, the new order provided an
unprecedented level of security in their vitally important regions. The nations
of Europe and East Asia, including China, were suddenly able to focus their
energies and resources on domestic and economic matters rather than on the
strategic concerns that had always consumed them—the fear of an aggressive,
powerful neighbor with designs on their territory.
The democratization, pacification and economic resuscitation
of Germany and Japan, along with the introduction of American power permanently
into the previously conflicted regions of Europe and East Asia, transformed the
dynamics of international relations. Within the confines of the new order,
normal geopolitical competition all but ceased. The nations of Western Europe
and East Asia did not engage in arms races with one another; they did not form
strategic alliances against one another; they did not claim strategic or
economic spheres of influence; there were no “security dilemmas” driven by
mutual apprehension and insecurity; no balance of power was required to
preserve the peace among them. Economic competition did not translate into
military or geopolitical competition, as it always had in the past.
Within the liberal order there were also no geopolitical and
strategic spheres of interest, which had so often been the source of
great-power conflicts in the past. This was a conscious American objective. As
one State Department memorandum put in July 1945, a return to spheres of
interest would be a return to “power politics pure and simple.” America’s
objective should be “to remove the causes which make nations feel that such
spheres are necessary to build their security.” The one exception, of course,
was the United States itself, which as guarantor of the order essentially
claimed the whole world as its sphere of interest, and especially once the Cold
War emerged.
The success of the order did depend on the United States
abiding by some basic rules. Chief among these was that it not exploit the
system it dominated to gain lasting economic advantages at the expense of the
other powers in the order. It could not treat the economic competition as a
zero-sum game that it insisted on always winning. It also meant taking part in
imperfect institutions, such as the United Nations, that other nations might
value more than American policymakers did. America’s willing involvement helped
knit the members of the liberal order into what they could regard as a common
international community. This proved to be a key advantage in the Cold War
confrontation. A major weakness of the Soviet empire was that important members
of the Warsaw Pact were not content with the Soviet order, and as soon as they
had a chance to defect, they took it.
This did not mean the United States always played by the
rules. When it came to the application of force, in particular, there was a
double standard. Whether they admitted it or not, even to themselves, American
officials believed the rules-based order occasionally required the exercise of
American power in violation of the rules, whether this meant conducting military
interventions without U.N. authorization, as in Vietnam and Kosovo, or engaging
in covert activities that had no international sanction.
Critics at home and abroad condemned American hypocrisy,
just as the critics do today. They questioned the legitimacy of an order that
claimed to be rules-based but was often shaped by the American hegemon’s
perception of its own interests. During the Vietnam War, millions of Europeans
went into the streets to condemn American policy; in the Reagan years millions
more protested the deployment of American intermediate range nuclear missiles
in Europe. In the 1960s, France under postwar leader Charles de Gaulle pulled
out of NATO and Germany’s chancellor Willy Brandt pursued an Ostpolitik of
rapprochement with East Germany and the Soviet Union that defied American
wishes.
Yet for all the shortcomings and despite America’s often
high-handed and hypocritical behavior, none of the members of the liberal order
— not one — ever sought to leave it. For America’s allies in Europe and Asia
and elsewhere, even a flawed American world order was preferable to the
alternative, and not just the Soviet alternative but the old European
alternative. The Europeans never feared American aggression against them,
despite America’s overwhelming military power. They trusted the United States
not to exploit its superior power at their expense. Although Americans were
selfish, like any people, the Europeans recognized that they were acting on a
more complex and expansive definition of self-interest, that the United States
was invested in preserving an order that, to work, had to enjoy some degree of
voluntary acceptance by its members. Flawed as this system might be — flawed as
the Americans were — in the real world this was as good as it was likely to
get. The order held together because the other members regarded American
hegemony, by any realistic standards, as relatively benign, and superior to the
alternatives.
The liberal world order produced extraordinary progress.
States and societies within it became more humane in the treatment of their
citizens, increasingly respectful of free speech, a free press, and the right
to protest and dissent. The poor were better cared for. Rights were continually
expanded to hitherto unprotected minorities. Racialism and tribalism were
dampened in favor of a growing cosmopolitanism. Extreme forms of nationalism
diminished. The liberal world was far from perfect — injustice persisted, along
with killing, bigotry and brutality, in the United States and elsewhere. It was
still the City of Man and not the City of God. But compared to what had come
before over the previous five thousand years, it was a revolutionary
transformation of human existence.
There was a self-reinforcing quality to the progress within
the order. As liberal norms evolved, all liberal nations came under pressure to
live up to them, including the United States. It was not accidental that the
greatest advances in American civil rights occurred in the decades after World
War II. African Americans had fought and died on European and Pacific
battlefields on behalf of ideals their country had yet to realize — and the
disjuncture became increasingly untenable.
In the end, and even if not always deliberately or
consciously, the United States did shape a world unusually conducive to the
spread of democracy.
It is true, as the critics say, that the United States was
not a consistent supporter of democracy. Although it actively promoted
democracy in Japan, Germany and Western Europe in the early postwar years, and
in Eastern Europe and other parts of Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, there were
large parts of the world where the United States was indifferent or even
hostile to democracy. Because Americans feared radicalism (communism during the
Cold War; Islamism today) more than they opposed authoritarianism, they often
supported ostensibly reliable dictators and on some occasions either acquiesced
in or participated in the overthrow of democratic regimes deemed unreliable —
in Chile, for instance, where the CIA either backed or acquiesced in a military
coup to oust Marxist leader Salvador Allende.
Yet in the end, and even if not always deliberately or
consciously, the United States did shape a world unusually conducive to the
spread of democracy. The transformation of the once predatory dictatorships of
Japan and Germany into anchors of liberal economic and political order may
alone have been the greatest stimulus to the explosion of democracy of the past
half century. It made Europe and East Asia, once the world’s cockpits of
nationalist confrontations, into zones of relative peace, prosperity and
stability, and that in turn reduced one of the greatest obstacles to democracy:
insecurity. Nations that are perpetually concerned with defending themselves
against attack generally produce strong central governments and often hand
extraordinary powers to their leaders. By creating conditions of general
security in the decades after World War II, the liberal order provided a
cushion for young democracies that might not have survived in a more dangerous
world. It mattered, too, that the strongest power in the world was itself a
democracy. Those wishing to live under the umbrella of the liberal order’s
protection generally sought to conform themselves to its values and mores.
So, yes, the liberal order has been flawed, with its share
of failure and hypocrisy. Liberal goals have sometimes been pursued by
illiberal means. Power, coercion and violence have played a big part. The order
has been the product of American hegemony and it has also served to reinforce
that hegemony. But to note these facts is hardly to condemn the order. No order
of any kind can exist without some element of hegemony. The Roman order was
based on the hegemony of Rome; the British order of the 18th and 19th century
was based on the hegemony of the Royal Navy; such order as existed briefly in
Europe after the defeat of Napoleon — the so-called Concert of Europe — rested
on the collective hegemony of the four victorious great powers. The idea of a
peaceful, stable multipolar world where no power or powers enjoy predominance
is a dream that exists only in the minds of one-world idealists and
international relations theorists.
The same is true of those who would condemn the liberal
world order because of the persistence of violence, coercion, hypocrisy,
selfishness, stupidity and all the other evils and foibles endemic to human
nature. Perhaps in the confines of academia it is possible to imagine a system
of international relations where our deeply flawed humanness is removed from
the equation. But in the real world, even the best and most moral of
international arrangements are going to have their dark, immoral aspects.
The question is, as always, compared to what? Patrick
Porter, the author of a widely discussed critique of the liberal world order,
acknowledges that “if there was to be a superpower emerging from the rubble of
world war in midcentury, we should be grateful it was the United States, given
the totalitarian alternatives on offer. Under America’s aegis, there were islands
of liberty where prosperous markets and democracies grew.” Indeed, that would
seem to be the key point. At any given time there are only so many
alternatives, and usually the choice is between the bad and the worse.
Are the alternatives on offer so much better now? Graham
Allison, dismissing any return to the “imagined past” when the United States
shaped an international liberal order, proposes that we instead make the world
“safe for diversity” and accommodate ourselves to “the reality that other countries
have contrary views about governance and seek to establish their own
international orders governed by their own rules.” Others, such as Peter
Beinart, similarly argue that we should accommodate Russian and Chinese demands
for their own spheres of interest, even if that entails the sacrifice of
sovereign peoples such as Ukrainians and Taiwanese. This wonderfully diverse
world would presumably be run partly by Xi Jinping, partly by Vladimir Putin,
and partly, too, by the Ayatollah Khamenei and by Kim Jong Un, who would also
like to establish orders governed by their own rules. We have not enjoyed such
diversity since the world was run partly by Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
The idea that this is the solution to our problems is
laughable. Porter points out American policy has led to “multiplying foreign
conflicts” and put the United States “on a collision course with rivals.”
Setting aside the fact that multiplying foreign conflicts and collisions
between rivals is the natural state of international relations in any era, it
is hard for any student of history to imagine that these problems would lessen
if only we returned to the competitive multipolar world of the 19th and early
20th centuries. To suggest that there could be a world with no collisions and
no foreign conflicts, if only the United States would pursue an intelligent
policy, is they very opposite of realism.
Strikingly absent from all these critiques of the liberal
world order, too, is any suggestion of an alternative approach. The critiques
end with lists of questions that need to be answered. Allison calls for a
“surge of strategic thinking.” Others call for “new thinking” about “difficult
trade-offs.” Some critics even complain that so long as people continue to talk
about a U.S.-dominated liberal order, it will be “impossible for us to
construct a reasonable alternative for the future.”
The most the critiques will offer are suggestions that sound
more like attitudes than policies. They throw around words like “realism,”
“restraint” and “retrenchment.” Allison proposes that the United States “limit
its efforts to ensuring sufficient order abroad.” Beinart comes closest to offering
an alternative, but he clearly has not yet thought it through fully. He wants
to grant other powers their spheres of interest, for instance, but he mentions
only Russia and China. Does this mean Russia should be granted full sway in,
say, Ukraine, the Balkans, the Baltics and the Caucuses? Should China be able
to impose its will on the Philippines and Vietnam?
And what of the other great powers? Does Japan get its own
sphere of interest? Does India? Do Germany, France, and Britain? They all had
their spheres a century ago, and of course it was the clashes over those
inevitably overlapping spheres that led to all the great wars. Is Beinart
suggesting we should return to that past?
Of course, we may be moving toward that world anyway. That
is the implication of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy philosophy, his
attacks on “globalism” and his recent suggestion that all nations look out
strictly for themselves. Trump’s speech at the U.N. was an invitation to global
anarchy, a struggle of all against all. His boasting about American power put
the world on notice that the United States was turning from supporter of a
liberal order to rogue superpower. This breakdown may be our future, but it
seems odd to choose that course as a deliberate strategy, as Allison and others
seem to do. Little wonder that they don’t wish to spell out the details of
their alternative but prefer to carp at the inevitable failures and
imperfections of the liberal world we have. As John Hay once remarked, “Our
good friends are wiser when they abuse us for what we do, than when they try to
say what ought to be done.”
No honest person would deny that the liberal world order has
been flawed and will continue to be flawed in the future. The League of Nations
was also flawed, as was Wilson’s vision of collective security. Yet the world
would have been better had the United States joined in upholding it, given the
genuine alternative. The enduring truth about the liberal world order is that,
like Churchill’s comment about democracy, it is the worst system — except for
all the others.
Robert Kagan is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
chair of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the United States
and author, most recently, of The World America Made.
