Donald
Trump Is the End of Global Politics as We Know It
What
it means to live without a leader of the free world.
BY YASCHA
MOUNKNOVEMBER 11, 2016
The only thing that
makes nightmares tolerable is that you never do experience the
consequences. You might be falling from a great height, but you wake
up — or miraculously change scenery — before you can hit the
ground, or even wonder about survival.
For most of the
world, Donald Trump’s election feels like a nightmare that lacks
that one saving grace. For the last few days we have all been in free
fall, with the ground fast approaching, except that we also know we
are wide awake.
Difficult as it is,
however, it’s time to start thinking about what exactly awaits the
world after it slams into its new political reality. This is not an
easy task. While Trump is a man of strong words, he is not one of
consistent views. Over the course of the last 12 months, he has
flip-flopped on just about every issue, from the welfare state, to
civil rights, to nuclear proliferation and the use of American
military power.
As a result, it is
doubly difficult to understand the threat posed by Trump: It is
difficult to know whether his radical rhetoric will translate into
the most fundamental shake-up of American domestic and foreign policy
in the better part of a century, or whether the bluster of his ugly
campaign will give way to a more moderate persona once he is in
office. And even if his extreme persona should prove authentic, as it
well might, it is far from clear which variety of extremism will
characterize it.
So, we may not be
able to make a firm prediction about the rude awakening that awaits
us — but we need to start listing the possibilities.
Trump May Undermine
America’s Liberal Democracy
First and foremost,
we must not underestimate the possibility that Donald Trump may prove
a serious threat to liberal democracy in the United States.
In the campaign, he
has attacked every norm of democratic politics: He has threatened to
jail his opponent and to disregard the result of the election if he
loses. He has attacked the independence of the judiciary and promised
to muzzle the free press. This may be the verbal expulsions of a man
to whom the art of saying extreme things without thinking them
through comes very lightly, but it is just as likely to be a
reflection of the depth of his authoritarian impulses. And even if
his victory at the polls has not been nearly as resounding as the
immense power it has given him suggests, it did make one thing clear:
A shockingly large number of Americans were not put off by this
authoritarian rhetoric. They may be willing to go along if he decides
to walk the walk as well.
The hundreds of
political scientists (myself included) who signed a letter warning of
the danger Trump may pose to liberal democracy did not overcome their
professional reluctance to engage in partisan politics on a whim;
they were motivated by the similarities they saw between Trump and to
the many undertakers of democracy in other historical periods and
geographic areas. As James Loxton, of the University of Sydney, put
the question we now need to ask: “Is Trump the American Berlusconi
or the American Mussolini?” We must hope that he turns out to be
the former while preparing for the possibility that he may try to
turn himself into the latter.
He May Kill the
Dream of a Multiethnic Democracy
It is rarely noted
that democracy took hold in many European countries at the precise
moment when decades of war and ethnic cleansing had turned them
extremely homogeneous. This is probably no coincidence. In the modern
era, democracy has always gone hand-in-hand with nationalism. And the
popular perception of who truly belongs to these nations has, in
turn, been deeply restrictive. In most times and places, you did not
truly belong to the volk unless you descended from the same ethnic
stock as the majority of your co-citizens.
This is one way in
which the United States really was at one point, if not quite unique,
then certainly special. For despite its long and deep history of
radical racial injustice, it was tempting to think that America had
in some ways become a genuinely multiethnic democracy. Even as many
whites jealously guarded their privileges, for example, most had come
to accept that blacks or Latinos were fellow Americans.
Trump’s election
calls that optimism into doubt. It’s not only that Trump’s
willingness to bully and slander members of just about every minority
group was a core part of his electoral appeal. It’s also that his
extreme rhetoric against minorities gave the longstanding racial
divide in the American electorate a more bitter slant: While a clear
majority of white men and women supported a candidate endorsed by the
Ku Klux Klan, a thumping majority of Muslims, Latinos and
African-Americans sought salvation by supporting his opponent.
Politics in the
United States keeps getting more tribal. As Lee Drutman, my colleague
at the New America Foundation, has argued, the main political
cleavage dividing Democrats from Republicans was once economic; now
it is racial. The implications of this transformation are radical.
You can have deep economic disagreements while recognizing each other
as compatriots. But once politics turns this tribal, supporters of
competing parties may increasingly refuse to think of each other as
true fellow citizens.
After this election,
multiethnic democracy looks a lot less stable in the United States
than it once did. And that is a blow to its prospects in many other
parts of the world, as well.
The Illiberal
International Will Be on the March
During the election
campaign, global opinion polls showed an overwhelming preference for
Hillary Clinton in most parts of the world. But these polls missed a
crucial detail: among the illiberal populists who are now on the rise
in such diverse countries as France, Sweden, Hungary and Russia,
Trump has always enjoyed strong support.
Nigel Farage, who
helped bring about Brexit as the leader of the U.K. Independence
Party, campaigned with Trump. Other illiberal populists were among
the first — and the most enthusiastic — to celebrate his victory.
Marine Le Pen, of France’s National Front party, congratulated
Americans on “choosing their president of their own accord instead
of rubber-stamping the one chosen for them by the establishment.”
Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right leader who recently out-Trumped
Trump by calling for on an outright ban on the Quran, rejoiced in the
fact that “politics will never be the same…. What America can do,
we can do as well.
There is a reason
for their joy. While the far-right leaders who have enjoyed a
meteoric rise in recent years are virtually always deeply
nationalist, they now see themselves as part of a common enterprise:
to divorce liberalism from democracy. In a liberal democracy, the
rights of minorities are protected and independent institutions like
the judiciary rein in the power of the government. In the illiberal
democracies which the vanguard of the illiberal international has
established in countries like Turkey or Poland, by contrast,
minorities are scapegoated for political gain and independent power
centers are systematically undermined.
Viktor Orban, the
prime minister of Hungary and probably the most ideologically
sophisticated illiberal populist of them all, has put the aspirations
of his comrades most clearly: “We are living in the days where what
we call liberal non-democracy — in which we lived for the past 20
years — ends, and we can return to real democracy.” Orban is
right: The era in which the stability of liberal democracy can be
taken for granted definitively ended on Tuesday night.
Trump May Embolden
Dictators Around The World
During the election
campaign, much was made of Donald Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin.
Some journalists even speculated that Trump or some of his close
advisors might have a personal financial interest in an alliance with
Putin. But that misses a much scarier point: Trump praises Putin
because he genuinely likes the guy — and much of what he stands
for.
Like Trump, Putin
believes that nations should pursue their own self-interest
ruthlessly. Like Trump, Putin believes in a world in which great
powers have spheres of influence they can dominate at will. And like
Trump, Putin does not believe that there is such a thing as a loyal
opposition.
America has always
been willing to make alliances of convenience with ideologically
abhorrent regimes when that seemed geopolitically necessary. But it
has always preferred to forge its firmest alliances with liberal
democracies. One simply can’t be sure that Trump will follow that
tradition.
This is likely to
embolden the dictators of the world, not only in Russia but also
beyond. They now know that they won’t come under criticism if they
blatantly violate human rights, or quash the opposition, at home. And
they also have good reason to suspect that America will look on
leniently if they blackmail or invade their neighbors, so long as
they are willing to return the favor to America in its own
geopolitical neighborhood.
If Trump’s
election does result in a radical reorientation in American foreign
policy, two consequences are likely to ensue. First, authoritarian
powers like Russia are likely to expand the influence they wield in
the world dramatically. And second, their expansion will cause
radical instability, even in areas, like Central Europe, that had
finally seemed to enter a new era of stability.
America’s Allies
May Start Looking Elsewhere
Even in the best
case, American foreign policy will remain unpredictable for the
coming years. For countries whose security has always depended on the
reliability of their American allies, this is deeply scary. For now,
they will be extremely vulnerable to the caprices of President Trump.
That insecurity
cannot be a good feeling. And so, if decision-makers in capitals from
Berlin to Tokyo have any ounce of strategic vision, they must now be
hard at work in figuring out how to become less dependent on the
United States.
But their options
are sparse. They could invest much more heavily in their own defense,
and doubtless many of them will. But for countries like Germany or
Japan, it would be incredibly costly to modernize their armed forces
sufficiently to be able to do without the protecting hand of a
friendly hegemon. They could strengthen alliances with countries that
still do share their values. But those are few and far between, and
they are unlikely to be stronger than themselves militarily. Finally,
they could seek the reassurance of nuclear weapons. But this is
likely to engender significant domestic opposition and may prove
counterproductive if it scares their neighbors into an arms race.
And so, the most
realistic alternative among all the possibilities available to
America’s longtime allies may be to move away from a values-based
system of international alliances. In a world in which there is no
reliably liberal democratic hegemon left, smaller nations will be
very tempted to scurry for protection wherever it might be on offer.
And if that comes to pass, then the Western liberal order may
disintegrate more quickly than we might have imagined a few short
years ago.
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