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Source: Strategic Culture Foundation
The greatest (geo-political) showman’s “inside out” political solution
Putin hinted this week that the Ukraine conflict could end in weeks, so Trump may not have a long wait.
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How to do the impossible? America is instinctively an expansionist power, needing new fields to conquer; new financial horizons to master and to exploit. The U.S. is built that way. Always was.
But – if you are Trump, wanting to withdraw from wars on the empire’s periphery, yet nonetheless wanting too, to cast a shiny image of a muscular America expanding and leading global politics and finance – how to do it?
Well, President Trump – ever the showman – has a solution. Disdain the now-discredited intellectual ideology of muscular American global hegemony; suggest rather, that these earlier ‘forever wars’ should never really have been ‘our wars’; and, as Alon Mizrahi has advanced and suggested, set about re-colonising that which was already colonised: Canada; Greenland; Panama – and Europe too, of course.
America thus will be bigger; Trump will act with decisive muscularity (i.e. as in Colombia); make a big ‘show’ of things, but at the same time, shrink the mainstream U.S. security interest to centre on the Western Hemisphere. As Trump keeps observing, Americans live in the ‘western hemisphere’, not in the Middle East or elsewhere.
Trump thus attempts to detach from the American expansionist war periphery – ‘the outside’ – to proclaim that the ‘inside’ (i.e. the western hemisphere’s sphere), has become bigger and is unquestionably American. And that is what matters.
It is a big shift, yet it has the virtue of beginning to be recognized by many Americans as a more accurate reflection of reality. America’s instinct remains expansionary (that doesn’t change), but many Americans advocate a focus on American domestic needs, and its ‘near neighbourhood’.
Mizrahi calls this inside-out adjustment ‘self-cannibalisation’: Europe is part of the western sphere of interest.Indeed, ‘Europe’ regards itself as its progenitor, yet the Trump team has set about re-colonising it – albeit in a Trump vein.
Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat sent to Brussels, famously in 2002 coined the term liberal imperialism as Europe’s new purpose. It was to be imperialism of soft-power. Yet, still Cooper couldn’t quite let go of European ‘old empire orientalism’, writing:
“The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves however, we keep the law: But when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle”.
Cooper’s world-view was influential in the thinking of Tony Blair, as well as in the development of European Security and Defence Policy.
The EU élite however, began optimistically to see itself as having top-table (real) ‘empire’ status (global clout),based on its regulatory control of a market of 400 million consumers. It didn’t work. The EU had adopted the Obama stratagem that promised a ‘mind control’ framework which asserts that reality can be ‘created’ through managed narrative.
Europeans were never properly told that an EU trans-national empire implied (and required) the relinquishment of their sovereign parliamentary decision-making. They imagined, rather, that they were joining a free-trade area. Instead, they were being taken to an EU identity through stealth and the careful management of a confected EU ‘reality’.
That European liberal empire aspiration – in the wake of the Trump cultural assault in Davos – looks very passé. The atmospherics hint rather at the passage from one cultural zeitgeist to another.
Elon Musk seems to be tasked with tipping Germany and Britain out from the old worldview and into the new. This is important for the Trump agenda, as these two states are the primary agitators for war to sustain a global – rather than a western hemisphere – primacy. Europe’s decision-making failures over the last years, however, makes Europe an obvious target to a President determined on radical cultural change.
There is precedent for Trump’s Inside-Out ploy: Old Rome too, withdrew from its peripheral imperial provinces to concentrate on its core, when distant wars drained too many resources at the centre, and its army was being outmatched in the Field. Rome would never openly admit to the retreat.
Which takes us back to today’s ‘radical Inside-Out solution’: It seems to consist of ‘go like a demented whirlwind’ domestically – which is what matters most to his base – and, in the international sphere, project confusion and unpredictability. Continue repeating the ancient régime’s ideological shibboleths and counter-factual statistics, but then brace it up with occasional contrarian throw-away comments (such as saying in reference to the Gaza ceasefire that it is ‘their [Israel’s] war’, and that Israel’s interests may not always be those of the U.S., and, seemingly as an aside – that Putin may have already made up his mind ‘not to make a deal’ on Ukraine).
Dissing Putin as a loser in Ukraine perhaps was more addressed to the U.S. Senate and its ongoing confirmation hearings. Trump made these comments days before Tulsi Gabbard faces Senate hearings. Gabbard already is criticised by U.S. ‘hawks’ for allegedly holding ‘pro-Putin’ sentiments, as well as being subjected to a media slur campaign by the deep state.
Was Trump’s apparent disrespect toward Putin and Russia (which caused anger in Russia) said primarily for the ears of U.S. Senators? (The Senate is home to some of the most ardent ‘never-Trumpers’).
And were Trump’s egregious comments about ‘cleansing’ Gaza’s Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan (co-ordinated with Netanyahu, according to an Israeli Minister) intended primarily for the ears of the Israeli Right? According to that Minister, the issue of encouraging voluntary Palestinian migration is now back on the agenda, just as the Right-wing parties have long wanted – and many in Netanyahu’s Likud had hoped. Music to their ears.
Was it then a Trumpian pre-emptive move, designed to save Netanyahu’s government from imminent collapse over the ceasefire’s second-stage, and the threat of a walk-out by his Right Wing contingent? Was Trump’s target audience in this case then Ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich?
Trump pointedly confuses us – by never making it clear to which audience he is addressing his ruminations at any one time.
Is there nonetheless some substance sedimented within Trump’s comment that any Palestinian state must be resolved ‘in some other way’ than the Two-State formula? Maybe. We should not discount Trump’s strong leanings towards Israel.
Netanyahu faces harsh criticism for mis-handling both the Gaza and Lebanese ceasefires. He has been guilty of promising one thing to one party and the opposite to the other (an old vice): He has promised the Right a return to war in Gaza, yet committed to the unequivocal end to war in the actual ceasefire agreement. In Lebanon, Israel was committed to withdrawal by 26 January on the one hand, yet its military is still there, provoking a human wave of Lebanese returning to the south, hoping to reclaim their homes.
Consequently, Netanyahu at this juncture is utterly dependent on Trump. The PM’s wiles will not be enough to get him off the hooks: Trump has him where he wants him. Trump will get ceasefires, and will tell Netanyahu,no attack on Iran (at least until Trump has explored the possibility of a deal with Tehran).
With Putin and with Russia, the opposite is the case. Trump there has no leverage (the favourite word in Washington). He has no leverage for four reasons:
Firstly, since Russia steadfastly refuses the idea of any compromise that “boils down to freezing the conflict along the line of engagement, that will give time to the U.S. and NATO to rearm the remnants of the Ukrainian army – and then start a new round of hostilities”.
Secondly, because Moscow’s conditions for ending the war will prove to be unacceptable to Washington, as they would not be susceptible to being presented as an American ‘win’.
Thirdly, because Russia holds the clear military advantage: Ukraine is about to lose this war. Major Ukrainian strongholds are now being taken by Russian forces without resistance. This ultimately will lead to a cascade effect. Ukraine may cease to exist if serious negotiations do not take place before summer, the head of the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Kyrylo Budanov recently warned.
But fourthly, because history is not reflected at all in the word leverage. When peoples who occupy the same geography have different and often irreconcilable versions of history, the western transactional ‘split the power spectrum’ simply doesn’t work. The opposed sides will not be moved – unless some solution recognises and takes account of their history.
The U.S. needs to always to ‘win’. So does Trump understand that the ineluctable dynamics of this war militate against presenting any transactional outcome as a clear ‘win’ for the U.S.? Of course he does (or will do, when professionally briefed by his team).
The logic of the Ukraine situation, to be blunt, suggests that President Putin should quietly advise President Trump to walk away from the Ukraine conflict – to avoid taking ownership of a western débacle.
Putin hinted this week that the Ukraine conflict could end in weeks, so Trump may not have a long wait.
Should Trump want a ‘win’ (highly likely), then he should be steered by Putin’s many hints: Intermediate missile deployments by both parties are creating heightened risk and ‘cry out’ for a new limitation agreement. Trump could say that he saved us all from WW3 – and there could be more than a grain of truth to it.
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