We leave behind the first year of President Donald Trump’s attempts to restore US pride and place in global leadership, with a more explicit transactionalism somewhere near its core.
It’s not as if the US set up the post-world order and allowed things to rise and fall as they would; Washington has always had a handle on all things good and bad. What sets the Trump presidency apart is a more brazen transactionalism.
In totality, he is revitalising the Monroe Doctrine (Washington’s domination and control of the western hemisphere); causing mild panic among Nato members (across Europe); sharpening the focus on resource extraction in Africa; continuing selective (carefully curated) military support and collaboration in western Asia, and ramping up US military presence in east and Southeast Asia.
All of these are explicitly to curb Chinese reach and influence in the world and making the US “great again”. That’s all fine, in the sense that there is nothing new except that the old “Axis of Evil” (Iran, Russia, China and North Korea) has been rebranded as the “Axis of Aggression” by Atlantic Council hawks.
In a moment of clarity and intellectual honesty, Simon Kuper of the Financial Times remarked, in May 2023, that “our [the north Atlantic community] habit of casting our own problems as the world’s” remained a defining feature of the West’s approach to foreign relations".
Never mind. One fault line that runs through this refreshed world order is the domestic economy, conditions that may be precipitous for the US. The metrics are foreboding. Forget the “economics” people in the US, less so in Europe, are suffering from what public health workers have referred to as “diseases of despair” which includes depression, suicidality, addiction or anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders that may be explained through consideration of the impact of never-ending wars of the 21st century.
There is, however, nothing that covers up domestic problems better than foreign wars. One example that immediately springs to mind is the Malvinas (Falklands) war of 1982. In the conventional reading, the military dictatorship of Argentina was collapsing under the weight of its own corruption and economic mismanagement. The public took to the streets in protest. The governing junta ordered the invasion of the Malvinas islands, and with that whipped up patriotic fervour. The junta’s approval ratings rapidly soared, then fell. The war ended in defeat and the domestic problems remained.
Back to the US today. Washington is cashing in on chits big and small. Last month, Trump’s new envoy, Anjani Sinha, told Singapore that that island’s “miracle” had only been possible because of the US and that it was time to pay, so to speak.
This is, of course, true of several countries in east and Southeast Asia, which opened their doors for US military installations over several decades. The best example we studied was the role of the US military and intelligence community’s propping up of undemocratic, often dictatorial regimes, from the 1961 coup that overthrew the democratic regime in South Korea to support for Suharto’s genocidal Indonesian regime in the mid-1960s.
The growth and expansion, and the successes of, say, South Korea is always hailed by free marketers and liberal economists, but the governments of Seoul, Singapore and Taiwan were marked by various permutations of direct state control of corporations and “politically repressive states” backed by the US.
In South Korea the state offered generous access to money, framed favourable lending practices, provided bailouts, among other things, for corporations. In Singapore the state was allowed to become autocratic and politically repressive, as long as money could be made. A shopping mall was “better for the economy” than was a Sikh temple.
Today, fearing Chinese expansion around the world, and in east and southeast Asia, the US is going through its box of chits. And, some Asian countries (guided by an apparently Odysseusian Australia) are embracing “Washington’s transactionalism,” and the US has come to cash in on old favours.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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