Opinion
Shake-up alert: Panama isn’t the only US ally that Trump has rattled
Summary
- America’s president-elect seems bent on an expansive approach to its ‘manifest destiny’ but any overreach in its exercise of power could unsettle Pax Americana. Neutral India, thankfully, needn’t worry much.
President-elect Donald Trump appears keen to expand on the long-standing American belief in the United States’ “manifest destiny" to dominate its part of the world. His utterances on buying up Greenland, enrolling Canada as a state and forcibly taking over the Panama Canal all suggest that the US guiding principle under Trump would be ‘Might is Right.’
This might work in the face of a few small nation-states in no position to resist, but would rile bigger powers and also weaken the alliances that have held Pax Americana in place under Washington’s watch. It is not just economic and military might that underpins US leadership, but also its moral suasion, as articulated by its diplomacy and cultural advocacy.
To abandon that, as Trump seems disposed to do once he takes office on 20 January, would be to unravel the power structures that uphold the world order and open up at least a brief phase of instability. India’s stance of being non- or multi-aligned should help it be one of the countries least rattled by any Trumpian overreach.
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The 19th century US gloried in the notion that destiny had given it the duty to spread the republican form of government and American way of life across the Americas.
Its key role in World War II, the rebuilding of Europe and setting of global rules, coupled with its economic success, domination of the world’s financial system and the rise of Communism, led its leaders to envision its ‘manifest’ mission as a girdle for the whole globe, even if it was not polite to say so openly.
The US forged strategic alliances in Europe, apart from the Far and Middle East, to maintain its hegemony over what it liked to call the “free world," never mind that this world had a dozen-odd dictators, such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussain, Indonesia’s Suharto, The Philippines’ Marcos, Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq and also Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi, whose 1979 overthrow in an Islamic Revolution opened a theatre of geopolitics that often seemed to rival its pre-1991 Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Trump seems to see the past as irrelevant to future deals and likes to tell it like it is. He appears bent on the pursuit of US self-interest without making any bones about it, even if that means casting aside rules, conventions and treaties, or leaving American allies and dependents in the lurch.
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The per capita GDP of Missouri, the poorest state of the US, is higher than that of Britain. The market cap of US tech giants is greater than the value of all of Europe’s listed firms. The US military budget, at 40% of the global total, is larger than the combined outlays of the next seven biggest defence spenders.
In technology, only China can foreseeably hope to rival the US. All this adds up to American hubris, signs of which co-exist with anxiety over this turning out to be an Asian rather than American century. However, hubris is brittle and can shatter, as it did in Vietnam.
Trump’s disposition risks pushing US allies to seek alternate security arrangements, potentially disrupting current power equations. The only countries this would not impact adversely are a handful like India, which are either non-aligned or multi-aligned, depending on the context.
For the rest, it would mean a painful and costly reconfiguration of relations with other major powers. The global order, once scrambled, would be hard to unscramble, even with the horsepower of ‘Make America Great Again’ behind the effort.
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