
It’s time for the world to consign expansionism, like war, to history
Summary
- US President-elect Donald Trump’s talk of an expansionist US may only be rhetoric aimed at his political base, but it still verges on the reckless. Globally, authoritarian leaders might get emboldened to pursue their own territorial ambitions.
A little over 85 years ago, on 1 September 1939, the Wehrmacht attacked Poland under orders from Adolf Hitler, sparking off World War II.
At the end of a conflict whose body count from military and civilian casualties is estimated at around 70-85 million, a global world order emerged in which the sanctity of territorial boundaries, democracy and liberal values were enshrined as non-negotiable.
Old institutions were repurposed and new ones set up to protect these values and embed them in social, political, cultural and economic practices. True, this edifice has faced threats from all kinds of actors in the years since, even though popular belief exuded confidence in its doctrines.
But the emerging political grammar in democracies across the globe today prompts an unavoidable question: Have we reached a tipping point?
This is moot in the light of US President-elect Donald Trump’s public utterances on annexing Canada and Greenland, apart from threatening to overturn an old US-Panama treaty and wrest back control of the Panama Canal, a key waterway linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
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Some of this might be plain bluster, as has been interpreted by many security and strategic analysts. However, the verity of Trump’s expansionist talk will only be known after his inauguration on 20 January.
Assuming the next US leader is serious about his well publicized intentions, multiple repercussions are likely to arise if his threats are carried through.
One is the severe stress that will probably be visited upon the fabric of global security agreements, with the flux in key bilateral or multilateral arrangements exposing weak nations and making them vulnerable.
Beyond that apocalyptic outcome, Trump’s desired geographic expansionism is bound to inspire other leaders across the world to dust off their own territorial plans: China’s for Taiwan and other areas on its western borders, Russia’s that cast covetous eyes beyond Ukraine (to perhaps Georgia) and possibly also Israel’s of marching into Lebanon and Jordan.
As other autocratic leaders decide to pursue such political agendas, the world will become a decidedly uncomfortable place to live.
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Even if we are to discount Donald Trump’s assertions as braggadocio, or empty threats that are designed to facilitate future transactional amenability, there are some valuable lessons inherent in them.
The statements are emblematic of autocratic tendencies, the predictable trajectory of strongmen who come to power riding on one kind of promise but then try to cement their position with promises of a different nature.
Hitler was elected on the plank of curing the Weimar Republic’s inflation-stricken economy, but went on to fashion a completely different kind of politics.
Likewise, autocrats elected on the pledge of reviving somnolent economies often have to make other rhetorical assurances to support feel-good sentiments.
Their initial promises often involve an economic model that cannot really deliver results within a single term in office; they occasionally include outlandish policy measures that pander to the electorate’s nativist instincts.
Trump’s revanchist claims as preferred state policy should perhaps be viewed through this lens.
Global leaders who still cherish democratic and liberal values must get their thinking caps back on to figure a way out of the economic stagnation and growing income inequality that afflicts such a large part of the world. That is the only way to return from the brink.
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