The foreign policy of a country should be based on principles and, of course, their economic interests and not the whims and personal ideological preferences of the government leader of the time.
This is not the case now with the US government under President Donald Trump who has on numerous occasions imposed his personal predilections on his country’s foreign relations. This leads to global unpredictability, instability and uncertainty.
The latest example is Trump’s order to the US military at the weekend to prepare for action in Nigeria to combat Islamist militant groups. This if the country failed to crack down on the killing of Christians, which Trump claims are not being protected. There was no request for assistance or agreement by the Nigerian government.
Predictably the announcement was made on social media where Trump promised a “fast, vicious and sweet” military invasion.
According to a BBC report, claims of a genocide against Nigerian Christians have been making the rounds recently among right-wing groups in the US though groups monitoring violence in the country say there is no evidence to suggest that Christians are being killed more than Muslims in a country which is more or less evenly divided between the two groups.
What is particularly worrying is how amenable Trump is to lobbying by racist, Christian, right-wing US politicians who have been pronouncing on the alleged mass killing of Christians in Nigeria.
US senator Ted Cruz has made such claims about the “massacre” of Christians there and has introduced a bill to sanction Nigerian officials for their perceived lack of action to stop it.
That said, there is no doubt that Nigeria has a grave security problem which makes it vulnerable to this kind of distorted rhetoric. It would probably welcome foreign help in its battle against Islamist groups though on its own terms.
The distorted rhetoric has echoes of the scenario played out in SA where Trump offered Afrikaans farmers refugee status in the US because he believed they were being subjected to persecution and white genocide.
The narrative that whites are discriminated against was also repeated in the US administration’s opposition to BEE. In both cases, the response that SA’s history of apartheid, racial discrimination and white economic domination justified such measures fell on deaf ears.
Another example of ideological affinities overriding geopolitical strategic interests is Trump’s threat that the US would withdraw support for Argentina if its then president Javier Milei was not re-elected. Trump is a strong supporter of Milei’s strict austerity measures, his “chainsaw” approach to cutting state expenditure and his radical libertarian ideology.
“If he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” Trump declared earlier last month when Milei visited him in Washington to plead for economic help.
The threat — seen by opponents as political meddling in Argentina’s election — followed the $40bn bailout that the Trump administration had granted the South American country. It was seen by some political analysts as having influenced the outcome of the election amid popular disgruntlement with corruption scandals and a growing economic crisis.
Another shocking example of an attempt at foreign intervention and support for his pals was Trump’s attempt in July to force the Brazilian authorities to abandon the trial — he said it was a “witch hunt” — of former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro for having attempted to overturn the 2022 election and launch a coup.
Bolsonaro was found guilty and sentenced to 27 years imprisonment, a finding he is appealing against.
This had echoes for Trump of the moves to prosecute him for the invasion of the Capitol Hill in January 2021 after his electoral defeat. The US also applied sanctions against Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, accusing him of human rights abuses. Moraes led the investigation against Bolsonaro.
All this amounts not only to political interference in the domestic affairs of foreign countries but also to the bullying of the most blatant kind by Trump.
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