Steve Bannon has
been a naval officer, an investment banker, a film producer and an
executive at Breitbart News. Now he’s Donald Trump’s chief
strategist and arguably the most influential man in the White House.
He was reportedly behind the chaotic move to restrict immigration
from certain majority Muslim countries and has called on the media to
‘keep its mouth shut’ about Trump.
First
on the White House agenda – the collapse of the global order. Next,
war?
Jonathan Freedland
Trump’s
allies yearn to wreck alliances that have kept the peace for decades.
Progressives must preserve them
Saturday 4 February
2017 07.00 GMT
Donald Trump doesn’t
read books. He leaves that to his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, the
man rapidly emerging as the true power behind the gaudy Trump throne.
Given Bannon’s influence – he is the innermost member of the
president’s inner circle and will have a permanent seat on the
National Security Council, a privilege Trump has denied the head of
the US military – it’s worth taking a good look at the books on
his bedside table.
Close to the top of
the pile, according to this week’s Time magazine, is a book called
The Fourth Turning, which argues that human history moves in 80- to
100-year cycles, each one climaxing in a violent cataclysm that
destroys the old order and replaces it with something new. For the
US, there have been three such upheavals: the founding revolutionary
war that ended in 1783, the civil war of the 1860s and the second
world war of the 1940s. According to the book, America is on the
brink of another.
You’ll notice what
all those previous transformations have in common: war on an epic
scale. For Bannon, previously impresario of the far-right Breitbart
website, that is not a prospect to fear but to relish. Time, which
has Bannon on the cover, quotes him all but yearning for large-scale
and bloody conflict. “We’re at war” is a favourite Bannon
slogan, whether it’s the struggle against jihadism, which Bannon
describes as “a global existential war” that may turn into “a
major shooting war in the Middle East”, or the looming clash with
China.
All this lust for
bloodshed may explain why Bannon was unperturbed by the chaos and
loathing unleashed by last weekend’s refugee ban, which he drove
through with next to no consultation with the rest of the US
government. For Bannon is an advocate of the “shock event”. He’s
described himself as a “Leninist”, telling one writer in 2013:
“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I
want to bring everything crashing down.” It seems war is his chosen
method.
People are beginning
to take notice – and get alarmed. Twice recently I’ve been told
of hyper-rational individuals, who made their fortunes reading the
runes correctly now converting their wealth into gold – better to
withstand the coming conflagration and collapse of the civilised
order. The current edition of the New Yorker includes a report on
escalating demands among the super-rich for apocalypse-proof
boltholes, with particular interest in airstrips and farms in New
Zealand as a “back-up”.
All this can seem
hyperbolic, if not hysterical. But if such thinking is taking root,
it’s because a delicate set of international arrangements,
painstakingly assembled in the years after 1945, and which have
prevented a world war for nearly 80 years, are now getting a kicking
from three different directions.
First and most
obvious, is Trump himself. Not content with declaring Nato
“obsolete”, he has begun hacking away at key pillars of the
western alliance. His phone call with Australia’s prime minister
has been written up in part as jaw-dropping comedy, but recall that
Australians and Americans fought side by side as allies for a
century. The two countries have long shared intelligence without
restriction. Australia’s loyalty is so great, it sent troops to
fight in America’s doomed Vietnam war (when Britain stayed away).
Yet Trump treated the country as if it were dirt on his shoe. It
shows the extent to which this US president is ready to implement
Bannon’s fevered dream – and “bring everything crashing down”.
But Trump is not the
sole villain here. This week’s Brexit vote in the House of Commons
was a reminder that Britain too is among those taking a mallet to our
fragile international system. By leaving the European Union, Britain
has made it a live question whether the EU can survive. Theresa May
insists she hopes it does, but the fact of Brexit will speak louder
than any words.
This was an argument
the remain camp failed to put with sufficient force in last year’s
referendum, but it is central. Europe has a history of bloody
conflict stretching back many centuries. The only period of
continental peace came when the nations of Europe combined in a
community and then a union. Even to risk the future of that union is
to risk the return of war in Europe.
Both these shifts
would be damaging enough, but the combination is a true menace. It’s
not just that Trump’s proposed EU envoy actively looks forward to
the unravelling of the EU, hoping it goes the way of the Soviet
Union. It’s that Trump sees multilateral cooperation as a
limp-wristed strategy for losers, preferring to make bilateral deals
that work for him. That triggers a Darwinian scramble, in which every
nation looks out only for itself – and damn the arrangements that
previously held the world together.
And of course all
this has an effect on those actors outside the west, as they respond
to these shifts. With a swooning admirer in the White House, Vladimir
Putin now feels free to flex his muscles: witness this week’s
offensive in eastern Ukraine. China is girding itself for a trade
war, or worse, with Trump’s America. Meanwhile global jihadism rubs
its hands as Trump, with his refugee ban, all but vindicates their
warped vision – signalling to the world’s Muslims that, yes,
Islamic State is right and there is no place for you in the west.
All this leaves
liberals and the left in an unfamiliar, unwanted position.
Progressives seek progress: their preferred stance is advocating for
change, for improving on the status quo. But the great shifts of 2016
have left them – us – in a new place. Suddenly we find ourselves
campaigning not for what could be, but for what was.
Take those rebel
Labour MPs who voted against the triggering of article 50. They were
singing hymns of praise for the status quo ante, for a union of
European nations that has brought peace, co-operation and stability.
Of course, in normal times they would prefer to be pointing out the
EU’s flaws, demanding it go further in, say, environmental or
worker protection. But the battle lines have shifted in these last 12
months. Now progressives are fighting desperately to hold on to what
we’ve got, trying to stop the unravelling going any further.
Democrats in the US
are facing a similarly queasy feeling. In the last few days alone,
they have seen Republicans repeal laws that prevented coal companies
from polluting freshwater streams and stopped US corporations
secretly paying foreign governments for mineral extraction rights.
Activists now find themselves campaigning not for new or better laws,
but for the survival of old ones that were doing some good.
Plenty on the left
will have disliked much about the postwar architecture that held up
since 1945: too US-dominated, too tilted in favour of the rich and
powerful. But now they see Trump and others take a wrecking ball to
the UN, the EU and much else, they may be having second thoughts.
Because Steve Bannon
is not destroying the old, clunky post-1945 order for the sake of a
fairer, more equal, more interdependent world. He seems instead to
dream of a bloody, fiery war that will kill millions – out of which
will be forged a new, cleansed and even more dominant America.
It’s a terrifying
vision. Next to that, any progressive should want to conserve what we
have. If that makes us the new conservatives – with Bannon, Trump
and the Brexiteers as the wrecking-ball radicals – then so be it.
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