Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Last week may well go down as the week of humiliation for us in the Asia Pacific. At the beginning of the week, Trump landed in Kuala Lumpur to attend the ASEAN Leaders’ Summit, where he got a special ceremony to mark his allegedly successful brokering of the peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia, the heavy lifting of which was actually done by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, who gracefully yielded center stage to the egomaniac. Trump did not even bother to wait for the summit to end but flew on to Japan, with Prime Minister Hun Manet’s sweet promise ringing his ears that Cambodia will nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Japan, Trump got a royal welcome from Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a disciple of the late Shinzo Abe, the reactionary ideologue who was also Trump’s golf buddy. Takaichi, Japan’s first female top leader, thought that a fitting gift for Trump was the club the assassinated Abe used to put the ball into the hole. Trump also notched another promise of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from her.

Takaichi was, however, upstaged by Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, who presented Trump with a replica of a golden crown from the Silla dynasty that was discovered in a royal tomb in Gyeongju. I don’t know if this was fake news, but I find entirely consistent with Trump’s personality the report that upon being presented with the crown, he said to Lee, “Thanks, but I prefer the original.”

And what did these leaders get for their brazen displays of vassalage to King Donald? None of the ASEAN governments got any reduction from the punitive tariffs of 19 percent imposed on their exports to the United States imposed by Trump. Nor did Korea and Japan get any relief from the 15 percent levied on their exports. Indeed, in addition to meekly accepting the tariffs, they also had to make commitments to make hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the United States.

What Trump is up to is the question that has kept the world at the edge of its seat since he began his second term ten months ago. Trump is the epitome of unpredictability, but if you impose the zigzag pattern of his moves on what statisticians call a scatterplot, you will see that there is a trend line that fits the hypothesis of the imposition of a new paradigm in the U.S. relationship to the world. There is a coherence to most of Trump’s ostensibly madcap moves.

Trump’s “Grand Strategy:” A Smoke and Mirrors Act

What are the main elements of Trump’s “grand strategy”?

Trump definitely represents a sharp break from the eight decades-long U.S. imperial strategy of liberal containment, where Washington met perceived challenges to U.S. hegemony wherever they appeared with a combination of military intervention, political alliances, and a multilateral regime that favored its interests. Trump represents that sector of the right that sees the United States as overextended economically, politically, and militarily, and believes that this is one of the key causes of its decline. This isolationism is the dominant one in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base.

He encourages a perspective of victimhood that sees both enemies and allies as abusing American generosity and regards previous U.S. administrations as being suckers for tolerating this abuse, the consequences of which fell on the American people. Trump sees China as the worst offender when it comes to taking advantage of the United States, but it is not the only one. Punitive tariffs on practically all countries in the world are his way of rectifying what he sees as a fundamental injustice.

He doesn’t care about multilateralism and the institutions that the US erected to legitimize its hegemony, notably the World Trade Organization, World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He wants to deal with each country on a bilateral basis, though this is only bilateral in name since the reality is unilateral imposition of Trump’s wishes on the weaker partner in military and economic negotiations. From Trump’s point of view, there are no definitive agreements, only tentative ones that are subject to change in their terms if the other party displeases Trump, a lesson Canada learned the hard way when the government of the province of Ontario aired an ad featuring Ronald Reagan saying tariffs hurt every American. Trump did not like this and said he was adding a 10 percent increase to the 35 percent tariffs he had already imposed on Ottawa!

As for addressing planetary problems like climate change, forget it. The United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and will boycott the climate summit in Belem, Brazil, this month, just as it pulled out of the fourth Financing for Development conference in Sevilla, Spain, in late June and early July this year.

Trump knows that globalization and neoliberalism promoted the deindustrialization and financialization of the US economy, and he is determined to make “America Great Again” via an ultra-protectionist strategy that radically limits imports to encourage U.S. reindustrialization and demands that US and foreign corporations dismantle their global supply chains, even at great cost, and relocate the most vital links in these chains in the United States. The corporations that led the migration from the United States in the 1990s and the 2000s in search of cheap labor in China and elsewhere have acknowledged that Trump is the boss, with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, meekly stating, “The president has said he wants more in the United States…so we want more in the United States.”

Whether Trump can reverse the process of American economic decline and reindustrialize the United States via ultra-protectionism remains to be seen, but the chances of stopping China from becoming number one are not, in my opinion, great. Indeed, in terms of the measure of purchasing power parity, China is now the biggest economy in the world, and it has developed a self-sustaining research and development capability that, in many areas, like Artificial Intelligence, now rivals that of the United States.

Trump’s simplistic approach to reindustrialization might well be called magic capitalism, where simply by issuing threats to raise tariffs against countries and demanding investment from corporate hostages, without any planning or industrial policy, voila, you have a gleaming newly industrially reinvigorated American economy!

Trump’s ultra-protectionist trade and investment policy is consistent with his immigration policy, which is to round up and throw out undocumented migrant workers and radically reduce the numbers of migrants coming in legally except from white countries like Norway, whose people have no intention of migrating to the United States.

Trump’s rhetoric is aggressive, but let’s not be taken in by appearance. He is actually moving from a posture of confronting threats to U.S. hegemony everywhere to a “spheres of influence” approach, where the United States sees the Western hemisphere, including Latin America, as its sphere of influence, while Russia is informally acknowledged as being dominant in Eastern Europe, Western Europe is left to fend for itself, and the Asia-Pacific is seen as China’s sphere of influence.

Behind Trump’s demand that Europe, Japan, and Korea must spend 5 percent of their GDP on their militaries is the reality that maintaining over 700 U.S. bases globally is a serious drain on American resources. The ruling elites in Japan and South Korea are, in fact, worried that Trump will significantly reduce the U.S. military presence in their countries and worry that Trump might come to a deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whom Trump regards as a personal friend, behind their backs. Their worries parallel those of the European elites, who suspect that Trump wants very badly to have a deal on Ukraine with Putin behind their backs. This suspicion was aired by no less than the president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, when he said a few weeks ago that Trump “objectively functions as an asset” of Russia.

There is a domestic reality behind Trump’s spheres of influence approach, and this is that the MAGA base is largely isolationist, as noted earlier. Vice President Vance, ideologues Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have been vocal about ending or radically reducing Washington’s global commitments to ensure there will be no more “forever wars.” They are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but because they feel overseas engagements are a distraction from America First. At the same time, the recent strikes against Venezuelan boats on the pretext they are smuggling drugs to the United States are really signs of an aggressive reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine that Latin America is an integral part of the U.S. imperial sphere of influence. More displays of this kind are likely in the future.

Another important feature of Trump’s military policy is that aside from its refocusing of the U.S. military interventionist capabilities on the Western hemisphere is his use of the military as an instrument of domestic coercion, along with the police. Using the pretext of dealing with crime, he has deployed or plans to deploy troops in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, Memphis, and Portland, all of which are cities controlled by the Democratic Party. Indeed, in an unprecedented assembly of U.S. military commanders from all over the world in September, Trump said deployments to U.S. cities were meant to deal with “a war from within,” in other words, to contain what he regards as the threat of civil war, and train them for combat abroad.

This refocusing of the U.S. military to the domestic front and the Western hemisphere does not mean, of course, that Trump will not engage in global shows of force, like the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities a couple of months ago. It is likely, however, that these will not be sustained interventions but occasional unilateral strikes to keep what Trump perceives as Washington’s enemies off balance. And, of course, whether under the Democrats or under Trump, the U.S. commitment to arming Israel’s genocidal machine is likely to continue indefinitely.

To sum up, Trump’s grand strategy might best be described as a smoke-and-mirrors act. It is the fighting retreat of an imperial power in decline. It is a defensive imperialism that has replaced the old expansive imperialism of the old liberal containment paradigm. But it is no less dangerous, because it has so many elements of unpredictability, indeed of irrationality, the main one of course being Donald Trump. This volatility was on display this last week, when even as he paraded himself as a man of peace in pursuit of the Nobel Prize during his trip through Asia, Trump also announced he was giving the order for the United States to resume nuclear testing.

How to Respond to Trump?

How should the Asia Pacific and the Global South respond to Trump’s recasting of America’s role in the world?

This is, of course, a subject that demands a separate essay. But let me just say, with respect to trade, that while the punitive tariffs may mean hardship for our peoples in the short term, since owing to World Bank and IMF policies, our economies have become so dependent on exports to the United States, they may also be a blessing in disguise in the medium and long term since we will be forced to pay attention to cultivating our domestic markets as the main engine of demand and this can only be possible through the adoption of redistributive strategies to foster greater equality.

Also, with the collapse of the old neoliberal multilateral order that favored U.S. economic interests as Trump adopts unilateralism, the rest of the world may find this an opportune time to build alternative regional and global arrangements built on cooperation, equality, and the provision of development space for countries in the Global South. The BRICS may offer an alternative, but they need not be the only one.

We live in an era of multiple crises, but this can also be one of multiple opportunities. Let me just end with my favorite quote from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, one that is so apt for our times: “The old world is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

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