If Donald Trump re-enters the White House after the 5 November elections, countries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea will be delighted
During the September 2024 debate between the two American presidential contenders, Donald Trump stated that if his opponent, Kamala Harris, were to enter the White House “We’re going to end up in a third world war. And it will be like no other because of nuclear weapons.”
Was this a prophecy or just a rant by someone known for outrageous statements? Who can tell?
But the more troubling question is: where would we land up if Trump re-entered the Oval Office?
The former president once said: “I don’t give a ‘shit’ about Nato” — America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. He also stated that pulling out of Europe would save his country millions of dollars annually, and that European conflicts were not worth American lives. In fact, he questioned the value of all United States foreign alliances.
In this respect Trump echoed the first president of the United States, George Washington, who in his valedictory address to the nation in 1796, called for as little political connection to the outside world as possible.
He declared: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world … Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
From there on American isolationism became cemented into place until 1941. The underlying conviction of its righteousness was that, in contrast to Europe with its endless armed conflicts, the US could advance the cause of freedom and democracy by means other than war.
Such was the attachment of the isolationist camp to the strategy that in 1940, fearful of the US being dragged into the raging World War II, they founded the America First Committee. It was to be short-lived.
The Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941 shattered the attachment to isolationism and marked the entry of the country on the world stage, replacing American isolationism with American internationalism backed by the force of arms.
The “America first” theme returned with a vengeance upon the entry into the White House of Trump in 2017. In his inaugural address he promised to focus attention on the home front and on freeing America from burdensome foreign entanglements.
Multiple millions of Americans cheered him on, especially those who felt short-changed by their country’s internationalism. Despite the chaotic administration that followed and the failure to deliver on many of the promises, the same aggrieved voters are more likely than not to once again come out en masse in support of Trump in next month’s presidential election.
Two questions are worth pondering in this context. First, what has been the nature of American internationalism since World War II and, second, what might the re-election of Trump mean for the international global order.
During the Cold War, the US’s leaders cast their country in the role of a noble defender of freedom and democracy in the world against the menace of communism, or so the American people were told.
On that basis a series of disastrous military conflicts followed. The 20-year Vietnam War was initiated in support of an anti-communist dictator. It ended in 1975 in utter disaster, with some three million Vietnamese and 58 000 Americans having lost their lives.
In addition to the war having polarised the nation, American reputation was damaged. And yet, foreign interventions under the same banner followed — to mention but a few — in Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Chile, not infrequently in support of autocratic regimes — as long as they were anti-communist.
With the ending of the Cold War, which was universally hailed as an ideological victory of democracy over communism and was considered to be “the end of history”, the US achieved domination of a unipolar world that undoubtedly helped shape a multilateral global order among like-minded democracies. But this proved to be a brief intermezzo.
The reversal of the positive trend can be traced back to 9/11 — code for the 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon — that unleashed the American “global war on terror”.
Subsequently, and on spurious grounds, the war in Iraq unfolded, despite reservations expressed by many of the US’s allies before and after the 2003 invasion.
Iraq was followed by the ill-fated involvement in Afghanistan. Tragically, with thousands of American soldiers dead or wounded and hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties, the bitter irony is that today the brutal Taliban regime is back in power.
In his thought-provoking book, American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us, David Bromwich concludes that today’s political landscape is the outcome of the preceding 50 years of American history and, more precisely, the consequence of the shortcomings and machinations of the political leaders.
He contends that since the Vietnam War and the cover-up that brought down Richard Nixon, every successive presidency centralised and further strengthened political power, especially in the wake of declaring the “war on terror”.
Trump’s promises to move away from the policy of internationalism and spend the shrinking resources on domestic issues are the catalyst prompting many sectors of the increasingly angry and distrustful electorate to rally around him.
Given his strongly populist leanings, should Trump return to the White House, it is not unreasonable to assume that democracy would be imperilled not only in his own country, but globally.
Despite its chequered history of international involvement, the US has been playing the role of the Big Brother to other democracies around the world.
Upon Trump’s possible re-election, the US’s foreign allies might find that their prime security guarantor could be relied upon far less, while autocrats everywhere would rub their hands in glee, especially the revisionist Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
An erosion of global rules would be likely to follow, with prospects of more military conflicts and with the most vulnerable bearing the brunt, as they always do.
Professor Ursula van Beek is the director of the Centre for Research on Democracy at Stellenbosch University.