MAGA and the End of Empire

The damage being done to global trade and influence may be permanent

MAGA may well mark the beginning of the end of the American empire. Empires are not just about seizing or controlling territory, least of all Greenland and Panama. They are about cultural as well as strategic dominance, about being the sum of a system which generally brings peace and a degree of prosperity through innovation and trade to a wide area in which different peoples acknowledge its benefits and so can tolerate the dilution of their own political and cultural independence.

Imperialism may now be a dirty word but historians generally look with admiration at the achievements of and benefits of a range of them – the Assyrian, Achaemenid, Roman, Abbasid, Tang, Mongol, Ottoman, and, dare I say it, British. All of these generally brought peace (other than with rival empires), the spread of new ideas, of trade, and of interaction via a lingua franca (not necessarily their own). America’s stemmed not from its brief occupation of foreign territory such as the Philippines. In 1945, the US was far more powerful than any combination of other powers. The Soviets were a nuclear threat but had scant engagement with the rest of the world in trade and its cultural contribution was mainly confined to Leninist doctrines wrapped in Russian nationalism, which would go on to fail spectacularly despite Vladimir Putin’s efforts to reclaim the Soviet empire with his foolhardy invasion of Ukraine.

The US meanwhile was largely responsible for the creation of a global system over which it was the dominant influence but which was at least tolerated and sometimes praised by new independent Asian and African countries as well as Western allies who were its junior partners.

That there were outrages from time to time is undeniable – the carpet bombings of North Korea and Vietnam, the Iraq invasion – but peace mostly reigned, world trade grew for 70 years under the wing of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor the World Trade Organization and an underlying belief in freer trade. Globally active offshoots of the United Nations, notably the World Health Organization, which Trump has now quit, enabled the benefits of advances in public health and disease prevention to be spread far more rapidly than otherwise would have been the case. Likewise, with the spread of the benefits of the Green Revolution which saw dramatic increases in crop yields. The sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in foreign aid that helped to fend off starvation, treat diseases, and provide shelter for some of the world’s most vulnerable is now signifying just how important that system is, or was.

Of course, the US naturally saw itself as above decisions of the institutions it created – for example – endless vetoes of attempts to rein in the expansion at the Palestinian expense of the newly forged Israel. Nonetheless, the system as a whole worked and became one in which Communist China and Vietnam became keen to participate. Freer trade pushed by the US and its handmaidens the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, became a general aim, whether via the WTO or regional groupings such as ASEAN and MERCOSUR. American popular culture and consumer brands spread everywhere, albeit followed closely by Japanese, Chinese, and others.

The US also preached the rule of law, separation of powers, liberal ideas, a free press, and democracy, even if the reality of global politics made this subject to US strategic interests. Its openness to immigration made it a magnet both for the poor who were needed for menial tasks and the gifted. who could advance American technology. The US has been the cornerstone of globalization, which before 1914 was ended by the World War which collapsed four empires. Creating disorder from order is properly the work of revolutionaries or nature, not governments. Hence Trump threatens the destruction of a formidable American achievement and hence invites global disorder.

In a few short days, the Trump administration has dumped on the very systems America created when at its greatest. The arbitrary tariffs on friends and rivals alike made a nonsense of due process and in the case of Canada and Mexico tore up a specific treaty. The US has exited the WTO and the WHO, stopped foreign aid, and taken a blunt instrument to address immigration issues.

It was bad for the world to see the American people freely voting for a convicted criminal, multiple bankrupt, uncouth liar, narcissist, and sexual predator. It was bad enough to see the further politicization of the legal system. This is no advert for democracy. But what has followed is worse. Given the threat to civilization from global warming, Donald Trump’s pulling the US, still the world’s biggest contributor of greenhouse gases, out of the global compact to ameliorate climate change is inexcusable, especially, as a Brookings Institution study notes, an estimated 14 million Americans live in cancer hotspots connected to oil and gas pollution and millions more are exposed to dangerous climate extremes.

Blaming the US trade deficit on others is largely absurd. It stems from over-consumption made possible by the role of the US dollar. It is anyway partly offset by the vast non-merchandise earnings from US companies with dominant, almost monopoly, global positions such as Microsoft and Google. As for fentanyl, an easily created and transported drug, the root of the problem lies in US demand.

Even if most of the above measures are reversed, the damage to US credibility has already been done as Europeans, Japanese, Koreans many others reassess their relations with each other and with China. Reversing course, in diplomacy and trade, if indeed it can be reversed, will be slow and uncertain. Others such as Taiwan and The Philippines anxiously await what it may mean for them – and indeed for a US military which hitherto has been keenly focused on the Luzon strait and the South China Sea. Trump’s one-deal-at-a-time transactional methods make a nonsense of the words of Lord Palmerston, British foreign minister at the height of that nation’s power, of the need to be guided by “permanent interests.”

Does Trump have a clue about what those are for the US today? He is supported without question by a claque of a Republican-dominated Congress that appears to have no more awareness of the consequences than he does – or if they do, they are keeping them to themselves, aided by a Wall Street and business sector interested in nothing more than short-term gains, which will inevitably be paid for with pain, first after the impact of his tariffs. What we can see is that his words and actions have been instrumental in boosting the appeal of the BRICS, with Indonesia the latest to sign up to a group with no real platform except to limit US influence.

Of course, not all of the US's recent mistakes are Donald Trump’s doing. Some were set in train by Joe Biden – the use of the dollar dominance against Russia and subsidies for some industries under the Inflation Reduction Act. But Trump has combined loudmouth arrogance with radical rejection of US past achievements.

His behavior is more that of a young power on the way up – for example Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914, with its own tragic results – than a mature empire past its peak but with huge reserves of influence and goodwill. The US cannot reverse its relative decline but its influence is best maintained by doing so gracefully and holding fast to old friends and to the treaties which keep strategic as well as trade peace. That is not going to happen over the next four years, if ever.