The end of the American century?

Tomorrow, Americans may elect a fascist president. Tom Scott explores the disastrous impacts this would have on the world beyond the US.

Last month the astute American commentator and expert on authoritarian kleptocracies Sarah Kendzior posted a hauntingly brilliant essay to her Substack. It included this memorable passage, which may well  prove – like much that Kendzior has written – all too prophetic:

“Where were you when JFK was shot?” ask the Boomers.

“Where were you on 9/11?” asks Gen X.

“Where were you when Covid hit?” ask the Millennials.

Where were you when America ended, asks Gen Z, whispers freezing in the air, words scrawled in the frost of a window, words too cold to bear.

Words not set in stone — yet.

Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York last week – a sort of Walmart Nuremberg  – made it abundantly clear that a second Trump presidency would indeed be the end of the American Republic as we have known it for the last century.

Not that Kendzior, or anyone with more than a smattering of history, is under any illusion about the record of the US during this period. As the world’s most powerful military power for many decades, America has done some terrible things, often in the name of “freedom”.

But it has also played a crucial part in saving the world from Nazi domination and underwritten the defence of European democracies in the face of an aggressively expansionist Soviet Union and the attempts of its fascist successor to rebuild the Russian empire. And even under the worst of the presidencies during this period – Nixon’s being the nadir until Trump’s first term – it has remained a democracy under the rule of law.

For the presidency to fall for a second time into the hands of a multiply convicted criminal, admirer of Adolf Hitler, inciter of violent insurrection and full-on fascist would be a disaster for America itself. But it would also have seismic effects on the system of international relations sometimes called “the rules-based international order.”

This is a system that has come under increasing strain since the Iraq War – the biggest unforced foreign policy error in recent US history. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s ongoing mass murder of Palestinian civilians have also prompted many to question the utility of a system that has failed to stop such naked and massively lethal violations of international law.

One of the leading academic authorities on the rules-based international order is the Princeton-based  pollical scientist Professor John Ikenberry. In conversation last year with Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, Ikenberry summarised what he understands this order to mean:

“The underlying argument is that to get from a world of pure power politics, of empire, spheres of influence and anarchy dynamics, the powerful states give up ideally some of that ability to engage in arbitrary and indiscriminate power, in exchange for placing themselves in these institutions and subjecting them to global rules and institutions.”

Ikenberry – a vocal critic of the Iraq War – is well aware that the US has sometimes abused its power in ways that expose it to accusations of gross hypocrisy. He sees the rules-based order not as a perfect system that has been fully achieved but as a work in progress that aspires to create the conditions  for peaceful coexistence between nations, and that embodies, albeit imperfectly, the “normative principles” of democracy and the rule of law: “And so you fall short, but the world is not ready to write you off, at least ideally, because they know that they can work with you to hold you to account.”

A Trump victory would be a clear signal to the world that those normative principles no longer apply to the nation that has sought, however erratically, to embody them, and that the central place of the US in the international order can indeed be written off. We would be back to the naked power politics of the 1930s, the “nightmare of the dark” as W.H. Auden described it in 1939.

Kim Darroch, the UK’s Ambassador in Washington from 2016 to 2019, sees Trump’s claim that he has a plan to “end the Ukraine war in 24 hours” as the most immediate danger for Europe. Trump has not given any details of this plan, but his running-mate. J.D. Vance has – and it is one that amounts to giving Putin pretty much everything he hoped to get from his illegal invasion, including continued occupation of stolen land. As Darroch says: “That’s pretty much Putin’s ‘peace proposal’, to be frank. We’ve spent 250 billion in the West helping to defend Ukraine and we would be facing huge defeat if this happened.”

Rewarding Putin’s aggression in this way would by no means sate his appetite for restoring what he sees as Russia’s rightful imperium, and there’s little doubt that he sees Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as part of that – as his propagandists on Russian state television have repeatedly asserted.

Nor is there any reason to think Trump would wish to defend these countries against Putin, a man he clearly admires and who Dan Coats –  a former director of national intelligence in Trump’s first administration – suspects may have compromising material on Trump that can be used to blackmail him.

Trump has said more than once that he would like to take the US out of NATO. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020, he told  European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen :

“You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In case this was not clear enough, he added: “By the way, NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO.”

In September, J.D. Vance had a slightly different line: the US would remain a member of the defensive alliance, but: “We’ve got to say American power comes with certain strings attached.”

What might these strings be? Vance explained: “What America should be saying is, if NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance, why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” He was referring to a letter sent to Elon Musk in August by EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, warning the proprietor of X that the use of his platform to spread inflammatory disinformation of the sort that played a major part in inciting racist violence in the UK could fall foul of the EU’s Digital Services Act.

Whatever Vance means by “American values”, it is very different from the “normative principles” espoused by Ikenberg. And making US support for NATO contingent on European countries giving the tech bros a free hand to rile up violence on their streets does not sound like a commitment worth having.

In the Middle East, there are no signs that Trump would make even a token effort to restrain Benjamin Netanyahu’s government from killing even more Palestinian civilians or the wholesale expulsion of any survivors from their land in Gaza and the West Bank. Netanyahu, a corrupt ethno-nationalist whose government includes several outright fascists, is someone who Trump sees eye to eye with. They are in frequent contact and there is reason to believe that Netanyahu has deliberately delayed any let-up in the ongoing bloodbath in Gaza so as not to give the Harris campaign a good-news story ahead of 5 November.

Nor is there even a slight chance that Trump would support UN humanitarian efforts in the region, or anywhere else – indeed UN diplomats fully expect Trump to drastically cut US financial support for the organisation, as he did during his first term. Trump has previously attacked the UN, saying it is “it’s not a friend to freedom, it’s not a friend even to the United States of America where, as you know, it has its home. And it surely is not a friend to Israel.”

Elsewhere in the Middle East, US foreign policy would be used as a vehicle for further enrichment of the Trump family, not least through the lucrative relationship between Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the Saudi despot Mohammed bin Salman.

Like Netanyahu, bin Salman sees Iran as a major threat that he would like to neutralise, and Trump would be likely to favour a full-scale, US-supported war that aimed to do this. On learning that the Biden administration had restrained Israel from targeting Iranian oilfields and nuclear facilities in its recent attack, Trump was unimpressed: “Biden’s answer should have been: target the nuclear facilities first and worry about the rest later.”

Trump’s attitude to China is more ambivalent. While he clearly harbours a deeply racist attitude to Chinese people generally and sees China as a threat to US economic dominance, he has also praised Xi Jinping in terms similar to those he has used to describe Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un: “He runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect. There’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy.”

Trump’s admiration for figures like Putin and Xi has an obvious element of projection and is usually part of a pitch to present Trump himself as the only candidate tough and smart enough to deal effectively with such leaders. Putin and Xi will see things rather differently; for them Trump is an easily flattered chaos agent whose incompetence can only help them achieve their foreign policy goals, whether this is the conquest of Ukraine or the annexation of Taiwan (a country that Trump has been attacking on the grounds that it exports too many semiconductors to the US).

As Evan Medeiros, Professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University, observed last week: “I think a Trump presidency could be a huge opportunity for the Chinese. They look at Trump and think, well, as uncertain and volatile and challenging as it may be to manage relations with him, he is not someone who is going to keep the United States on the trajectory of long-term competition.”

That said, Trump has repeatedly promised to immediately introduce 60 per cent tariffs on imports from China (and 20 per cent on those from every other country), with scant regard for the trade wars that would follow from this and the impact that such a move would have on US inflation. (Trump’s infantile economic ideas are reminiscent of the Nazi concept of national ‘autarky’.)

As for the biggest single threat that the world now faces – the accelerating climate emergency – it is absolutely clear that Trump will immediately pull the US out of the Paris Agreement and reverse the Biden administration’s programme of green investment. Climate science denialism has been one of the key themes of his campaign, as has the promise to “drill, baby, drill”.

If Trump wins, Keir Starmer, along with every other European leader, will be faced with the challenge of adapting to a new and very hostile environment. In September, he had a two-hour dinner with Trump in New York, after which a government source said that the two men had “discussed the longstanding friendship between the UK and the US and the importance of continuing to develop the strong and enduring partnership between our two countries”.

Starmer is probably hoping that Trump’s worst impulses can be restrained by diplomatic efforts and/or wiser heads within his administration. This was at least partially the case after his election in 2016. But the lesson Trump has learned from this experience is not to appoint anyone who will try to temper his behaviour – whether this is overturning an election, ordering the military to fire on protesters or attacking a foreign state he regards as an enemy.

For many, a “strong and enduring partnership” with a fascist dictatorship will be a dismaying prospect, and not one that a British prime minister should be contemplating. How, for instance, would it be possible to continue sharing intelligence with a leader liable to pass this straight on to Putin? How would the UK respond to an American demand to use US airbases in this country for an attack on Iran? Or to the 20% tariffs on all its exports to the US that Trump is threatening? Any unilateral trade deals with Trump will be dependent on major UK concessions – for instance on allowing US private health firms to take over much larger parts of the NHS – that most Brits would regard as unacceptable.

One can only hope that, behind the scenes, Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence officials are  holding high-level meetings with their European counterparts to work out a joint approach to the radically different world that a second Trump presidency would bring.

With the US missing as a lynchpin of the “rules-based international order” and, in all likelihood, actively conspiring with other autocratic kleptocracies that wish to destroy it, there would be an urgent need for those countries that still value democratic norms to work together on ways to safeguard these. Hugely challenging as this would be – not least in terms of continued support for Ukraine – it would also be an opportunity for the UK to start thinking beyond its supposedly “special relationship” with the US – a relationship that has sometimes led it badly astray.

Safeguarding democracy and human rights was one of the main drivers of post-war efforts to build European unity that led to the establishment of the European Union. The UK may soon have even more reason to regret that it turned its back on this project  – and to reconsider the wisdom of that decision.

Where were you when America ended? We can only hope that this is not a question we will be asking each other over the coming months and years. In the meantime, we need to be clear about where we are now, and how we will respond if the nightmare of fascism in America becomes a reality.