The Hyper-Imperialism of Donald J Trump
Vijay Prashad
IT did not take long. Within weeks, US President Donald J Trump authorised the firing of missiles at some caves in Somalia, where – he claimed – a military leader of ISIS (or the Islamic State) was hiding. No US president in the past quarter century has started his term without an attack on ‘terrorists’. Three days after he became president, on January 23, 2009, Barack Obama sent an aircraft to fire a missile at Ziraki village in North Waziristan (Pakistan). It ‘missed’ the Taliban target and instead killed at least nine civilians and injured many others (including 14 year-old Faheem Qureshi). There was never an acknowledgment for this ‘mistake’. Nor has there been any real account of the civilian destruction in the Momand Valley in Nangarhar province (Afghanistan), where Trump ordered the dropping of a 21,600lb or 9,800kg ‘mother of all bombs’ in 2017 onto a network of caves. We likely will not hear from Somalia’s civilians in a long time. This has become a habit of US presidents. They start their administration. They fire missiles at ordinary people in a belt that stretches from northern Africa to southern Asia. And then preen about being tough against ‘terror’.
In 2018, when Trump was previously the president, his administration declared the end of the ‘war on terror’. In fact, it was Obama in 2009 who had changed the name of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to the more bureaucratic Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), which Trump then closed nine years later. But, of course, old habits die hard. It is easy to send off a missile from one of the many US ships or aircraft that hover around the world and strike at a place that seems remote enough and unimportant to the chattering classes in the countries that otherwise ‘worry’ about human rights. There will be no real protest against Trump’s action because there will be no-one willing to stand up for the Somalis, not even likely in the African Union. Somalia’s unelected president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud expressed his support for the US strike on his country and his condolences for those who died in the collision of a military helicopter and a civilian plane in Washington. Unlikely that we will hear any public sympathy from him for any civilians who died in northern Somalia from the US missile strikes.
CHINA AND RUSSIA, THE ‘NEAR PEER RIVALS’
When Trump declared that the ‘war on terror’ had ended in 2018, he did so by pivoting the full weight of the US government to deal with other threats. The threats that his administration pointed to were not non-state actors, but two states: China and Russia. In the summary of their National Defence Strategy (2018), the Trump administration argued, ‘The central challenge to US prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers. It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions’. This was not the first time that the United States suggested that China and Russia were its rivals for power, but it was the first time that the US said that it was the priority of its entire state to prevent the ‘revision’ of the world order to permit the United States to be challenged by ‘near peer rivals’, such as China and Russia.
Nothing extraordinary had taken place in the years prior to 2018 for this major readjustment of US strategy. Neither China nor Russia had threatened the United States with any new doctrine, nor did the two of them begin to position military assets that could threaten the US mainland. A close reading of the public statements from the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Russian Foreign Ministry of the decade prior to 2018 shows that there was no change of tone or change of attitude from Beijing or Moscow regarding the United States. It is true that in June 2017, Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu signed a ‘2017-2020 China-Russia Military Cooperation Development Roadmap’, but this remains at a very low level compared to the military alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and tangibly nothing like the kind of aggressive language by NATO against Russia in the 2016 Warsaw Communiqué after its summit in Poland. What was it about China and Russia that so threatened the United States that it began to openly talk of the need to rollback Chinese and Russian power?
HYPER-IMPERIALISM
When the United States openly declared that China and Russia were its adversaries, both Beijing and Moscow protested. The Chinese government said that it merely wanted to develop China, to have peaceful commercial and diplomatic relations with other countries, and it did not wish to indulge in anything that resembled militarism. It was clear from Moscow as well that there was dismay at the characterisation by the Trump administration of Russia’s intentions. Russia had revived its economy after the catastrophic decline following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but its external trade was largely premised on the export of energy. Since at least 2007, Russia had complained about the militarisation of Eastern Europe by the eastward expansion of NATO, and it was upset by the unilateral departure of the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the threats by the Trump administration to depart from the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty. Neither China nor Russia had the military might to challenge the United States nor did they show any interest in a frontal contest with Washington.
So, why did Washington react in this belligerent manner toward China and Russia in 2018? The central fact was that after the 2007 financial crisis, countries such as China realised that it was futile to permanently expect the United States to be the market of last resort and so they needed to find or develop other markets for their exports. At the same time, there was an acute realisation that China and other developing countries in Asia had begun to innovate technologically and outflank Western high-tech firms in several areas of importance. Russia, meanwhile, had begun to export large amounts of energy to Europe because of the Western hybrid wars (against Iran) and wars (against Libya). Europe became dependent on Russian energy and increasingly on Chinese investments as well as Chinese technology (particularly in the telecommunications sector).
The drift of Europe away from its Atlantic umbilical cord into greater integration with Asia was a serious threat to the US model of the international order. The US began to argue that Chinese development and Russian energy sales were disrupting the ‘rules-based international order’. It was not any military threat from China or Russia that was the problem; the problem was that Chinese buoyancy, and Russian energy had interrupted the old Atlantic alliance that had underwritten US power since 1945. The United States had insufficient economic power to contest Chinese development, and it could not promise Europe that it could deliver energy at a lower cost than what had been coming from Russia. Thus, the only instrument left for the United States was militarism, a hyper-imperialist reaction to what was effectively a commercial problem that had begun to pose a geo-political challenge.
ROLLBACK BRICS
There are two errors often made in assessing the situation of US hyper-imperialism and the role of China.
First, that the liberalism of Barack Obama and Joe Biden is different from Donald Trump’s far right of a special type. In fact, when it comes to geo-political realities, there are only minor differences of emphasis. The overall policy for the subordination of Europe to the Atlantic alliance, for the prevention of any other centres of power from arising, and for the maintenance of US hegemony remain intact across administrations. All US presidencies, regardless of their own temperament and ideological background, are committed to the hyper-imperialism of war to solve any and all problems.
Second, what exasperates the United States is not merely the development of China, but the emergence of Asia as the new centre of gravity of the world economy. This emergence is related to the formation and consolidation of the BRICS+ bloc, which now includes such important Asian and politically divergent countries as India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the UAE. Shortly after his election, Trump made it very clear that he wanted to beat back any development that authorised the sovereignty of the Global South: ‘We are going to require a commitment from these seemingly hostile countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency, nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or, they face 100 per cent tariffs’. Trump’s fascination with tariffs (which he likes to capitalise) is not new, since the US has used unilateral coercive sanctions and tariffs routinely – and against its own pronouncements about liberalisation of trade – in earlier administrations to punish countries that seek sovereignty.
Trump’s foreign policy, the policy of US hyper-imperialism, will not be enormously different from what one saw under Biden. Certainly, he will make gestures to end some wars (Ukraine), but he will likely inflame other conflicts (the annexation of Palestinian lands, for instance) and he will use the entire range of weapons available to the US (such as sanctions and tariffs) to assault countries that try to develop out of US control. This is not an inter-imperialist conflict by any means. This is the United States unwilling to allow the Global South to assert its right to development and to do so peacefully. This is US hyper-imperialism.
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