By Professor Inderjeet Parmar
This Op-ed was originally published on The Wire

The “birther” president who up to the November 2016 general election maintained that Barack Obama was not American-born is continuing his campaign to redefine American identity as “whites only”.

Yet, the ramifications and understandings of Trump’s embrace of what is variously called “white identity politics”, “white nationalism” or the politics of “white supremacy”, while broadly sound, merely skim the surface of the racial politics, class economics, and state authoritarianism of the Trump phenomenon.

Also read: Trump Relished Racist Rally Chant, Claims Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

And the matter is rarely, if ever, linked with the fundamental attempt to close down opposition to the populist-authoritarian Mr Trump, and simultaneously deconstruct the administrative-regulatory state while bolstering its coercive agencies and powers. 

This is more than a class war too – for its enemies include elements of the liberal media, any dissenting parts of the GOP, the Supreme Court when it differs with the president (as on the census citizenship question), the House of Representatives on funding US military deployments to the southern border, and the Senate when it votes against US arms sales and military assistance to the Saudis’ war on Yemen.

This is a presidency that features in addition a personalist dictatorial president who wishes to run the White House like a semi-criminal enterprise with himself as its autocratic and tyrannical godfather. 

Trump’s is a presidency that is praised by openly neo-Nazi groups and seen as an ally and champion. His tweets are an open incitement to racist and political violence against elected representatives, particularly as Trump has falsely claimed that they support al Qaeda and terrorism, and noted how the latter are killing American soldiers.

In the context of the mail bomber last year targeting Democrats, the shootings at mosques and the Pittsburgh synagogue, neo-Nazi violence including the murder of Heather Heyer at Charlottesville, and the coast guard arrested with a cache of weapons and an assassination list of Trump opponents, president Trump is playing with fire.

This is principally for electoral gain as well as to engineer a radical shift to the Right within the US state and body politic, its coercive agencies, and a more actively mobilised mass of right wing extremists from among his political base.

The blatantly racist attacks, even as parts of the mainstream media continue to debate their degree or otherwise of racism, from the aptly-named “bully pulpit” the US president occupies are the tip of a spear: that spear has already pierced so much of an admittedly rather limited armour of a regulatory state that held corporations to account on environmental, worker and other protections, slashed their taxes and transferred billions into the pockets of America’s wealthiest.

Also read: Trump Renews Racist Criticism of Democratic Congresswomen

At the other end of the social spectrum, teachers, nurses, manufacturing workers, warehouse staff and drivers for UPS and Amazon, are being denied living wages, pensions, let alone long-term security.

Undocumented workers and immigrant communities live in fear of midnight and dawn raids as Trump threatens to deport a million people, split families and wreck communities. Concentration camps dot the border with Mexico as Trump praises ICE even as official reports document widespread violations of basic human rights and international and US law, and thousands of ICE and CBP staff are exposed and under official investigation for belonging to racist and fascistic extremist Facebook and other groups.   

By Professor Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire

The message to Assange and Wikileaks is clear: blow the whistle on anyone else, but not on the global powers that be.

The full fury of the American power elite – with regard to the exposure by classic investigative journalism seeking to hold accountable imperial power – is now being felt by Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, who was handed over to British police by the Ecuador embassy in London.

This not only heightens the war on independent checks on imperial power – including America’s war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, its violation of international law while spying on allies and foes alike, supporting Saudi Arabia and other Gulf state sponsors of political Islamist terror groups. It also intensifies censorship, in general, against anti-imperial, anti-war, socialist and progressive voices. It signals a full drive towards authoritarianism that violates the basic tenets of democracy, freedom of expression, and the rule of law.
Ben Wizner, of the American Civil Liberties Union, warned that:

“Any prosecution by the US of Mr Assange for WikiLeaks’ publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organisations. Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public’s interest.”

The extra-territorial application of US laws to foreign citizens not residing in the US is the height of imperial arrogance.

President Trump hypocritically declared parts of the corporate media, with which he has a mutually-beneficial relationship, enemies of the people. Fox News, virtually a state-sponsored private media corporation, is so close is it to the Trump White House, its essentially Trump’s Ministry of Propaganda.

Trump has declared socialism to be the enemy of the US, along with immigrants and refugees. The targeting and stigmatising of sections of the people is a key strategy of the representatives of the corporate rich when their political system is at so low an ebb, with so deep a legitimacy crisis, that they have no positive solutions, only mass repression.

Also Read: The Importance of Being a Conscientious Objector Within Systems of Power

Try as he might to build a mass movement of the most backward elements of American society, Trump’s core support is derived from the corporate class, corporate media, and the coercive police and military forces that he has empowered and emboldened since his election in 2016.

Suppressing dissent is core to his programme and he is fully backed, in that respect, by the Democratic leadership which has led the charge, based on spurious claims of Russian interference, Chinese ‘sharp power’, via social media in US elections and politics. In that charge, hundreds of Facebook and Twitter accounts have been shut down, principally belonging to socialist, progressive, anti-war and anti-imperial organisations and individuals.

Given the above, it was only a matter of time that US pressure would lead Ecuador – a state in economic and political crisis and in need of American aid and debt relief – to buckle and hand over Assange to the British authorities who are eager to extradite him to the US to be prosecuted under various laws, including the 1917 Espionage Act. The Espionage Act was passed to crush dissent against American participation in World War I and against corporate exploitation.

President Barack Obama used the Espionage Act six times during his presidency, twice as many times as it had been used by all the previous presidents, to crush dissent and especially to deter and punish whistle-blowers who exposed US imperial crimes, like waterboarding inmates at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Numerous public servants’ lives were destroyed and careers ruined by the ‘liberal’ Obama administration.

Also Read: The War against Julian Assange Must End

President Trump has intensified the process of mass repression and suppression of dissent, against the Left and progressives, that Obama enforced after the financial crisis of 2008 and in the wake of mass opposition to corporate bailouts and the rise of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests.

The fury of the US establishment has never abated since Wikileaks published, via several media outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian, hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and Afghanistan war logs, including a video – Collateral Murder – graphically showing the killing of 12 innocent civilians and journalists in Iraq by US helicopter gunships.

Chelsea Manning, who had leaked the State Department cables to Wikileaks, was imprisoned and tortured in a US Marines prison, according to the UN Rapporteur on Torture, and is now in prison again for refusing to lie in court that he conspired with Assange.

A sealed grand jury indictment has been active for several years, initially denied by the US authorities, but now openly declared as the US is pressing for Assange’s extradition. The Guardian, Britain’s self-appointed defender of the liberal conscience, which benefitted from its collaboration with Wikileaks, has hardly lifted a finger to campaign to end Assange’s persecution.

Indeed, for years The Guardian denied there was any wish on the part of the US to extradite Assange. Had they bothered to conduct some of their own investigative journalism, they would have seen so clearly that, this was the case and that the Swedish state’s case against Assange was riddled with flaws. 

Sweden’s hypocrisy

Given Sweden’s close relations with the US, despite its image as a pacifist, and the violations of Swedish legal and police procedures in pursuing cases of sexual assault against Julian Assange, there was always sufficient cause to worry that the Swedes would quite easily be persuaded to extradite him for prosecution in the US with the possibility of Assange being tried for a capital offence.

Sweden contributes military forces under US-NATO control in Afghanistan; it contributed military assistance during the Libyan intervention which has made it a failed state; Swedish ministers report regularly on military and intelligence matters to the US embassy; its Afghanistan-based aid agencies supply intelligence to the US on a regular basis.

It collaborated with the US on extraordinary rendition programmes by the CIA of people who had applied for asylum to Sweden. Assange’s Wikileaks  website exposed a whole range of US-Swedish cooperation deals that did not reflect well on Sweden’s global image as “a good state”.

The violations of police and judicial procedures during the early part of the investigation of Assange’s alleged sexual assault and rape of two Swedish women – which he denies – had an essential political context that was missing in most mainstream analyses of the matter.

Also Read: Rusbridger on Hacking, Snowden, Wikileaks and Making The Guardian Financially Secure

Some issues that are pertinent – based on the legal opinion of Sven-Erik Alhem, former Stockholm District Prosecutor, who now lectures at Lund University, among other roles, as submitted to the Stockholm Court are indicated below.
Together, they cast doubt on the nature of the investigation of rape allegations against Assange and, according to Alhem, made a fair trial in Sweden unlikely:

1. The police interviewed both female complainants together rather than separately which, according to Alhelm, was “a mistake” that “contaminated the evidence” which was “not professional”.

2. The prosecution informed the media of Assange’s identity during the investigation phase against normal procedure; rape trials are normally held in secret and the identity of suspects is maintained until after successful prosecution.

“Such confirmation of the identity of a suspect to the media is, in my view, completely against proper procedure and in violation of the Swedish law and rules regarding preliminary investigations.”

Alhelm also noted in his expert witness statement that the prosecutor should not have done this although there is no remedy against this in Swedish law. Hence, the word spread to the world’s media that Assange was a rape suspect, despite the early stage of the preliminary investigation.

3. Despite Assange making himself available for interview by police while still in Sweden, the prosecutor chose not to do so, even though one of the alleged rape victims was re-interviewed while Assange was in the country. Failing to obtain the alleged suspect’s side of events, at an early stage of the preliminary investigation, prevented the full picture of events from emerging, from all sides.

4. Assange could still have been interviewed in London, including at the Ecuadorian embassy, and had indicated his willingness to be interrogated by Swedish police, but to no avail.

5. Alhelm argues that issuance of European Arrest Warrant is “against the principle of proportionality”.

6. The-then Stockholm Prosecutor, Marianne Ny, could have sought British permission to interview Assange in London but claimed it was against Swedish law – a claim Alhelm denies has any grounds under Swedish law.

It is difficult to understand why Assange was not interviewed by Ny in Sweden when he was there and offered to be interrogated, or in London thereafter. To ask for extradition of an individual who was not interrogated when available and had yet to be charged with an offence was wholly disproportionate.

Also Read: Newspaper Editorials Across US Rebuke Trump for Attacks on Media

At the very least, there are grounds for Assange to credibly claim that he is unlikley to be dealt with fairly in Sweden and, at worst, to be handed over to the US for prosecution for the most heinous of crimes – leaking official information on how American power really works.

British slavishness

In that context, the-then UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague’s, thinly veiled threat to send in police to arrest Assange from within the Ecuadorian embassy, were reminiscent of the sort of gunboat diplomacy British imperial rule was built upon, with scant regard for international law.

It demonstrates that Hague – in citing a 1987 UK law passed after the shooting from the Libyan embassy of a policewoman – considered Assange to be a terrorist, just as much as many leading American politicians did and do, for leaking to the world’s publics information vital to understanding the nature of US power.
Indeed, the secret US embassy cables showed, among other things, that Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, ordered the CIA to violate the Vienna Convention to gain information on UN diplomats and representatives.

But the rule of law is hardly a principle when it comes to imperial interests and protecting the ‘special relationship’. As former British diplomat Craig Murray argued after Assange’s summary hearing a few hours after his arrest by London police:

“What we have seen today is extraordinary. It’s amazing that you can be dragged out of somewhere by armed police and within three hours brought up before a judge and found guilty of a crime involving a serious jail sentence. There was no jury and no chance to mount a proper defence or have a proper hearing.”

“The whole Sweden case has been a charade. It has always been about whether a journalist should be punished for publishing leaked documents showing a government offending against international law.

“I am hoping, maybe a long-shot, that the media pundits of a liberal disposition will realise that this is a fundamental threat to press freedom. If anyone who publishes a US leaked document wherever they are in the world can be dragged to the US and imprisoned, then the American government is going to have impunity for its crimes for ever more. All journalists must decide where they stand on this fundamental test of media freedom.”

Blow the whistle on anyone else, but not on the global powers that be – that’s the message of the case against Julian Assange and the Wikileaks organisation. In pursuing Assange the way they have, the Swedish and British authorities have demonstrated their slavish compliance with US power.
Inderjeet Parmar is professor in international politics at City, University of London. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire

By Professor Inderjeet Parmar
This Op-ed was originally published on The Wire

The recent death of US Senator John McCain has inspired an establishment ‘fightback’ against the ‘dangerously isolationistic’ Donald Trump presidency. There is near complete personalisation of US politics around mostly fictional political positions united by the desire to perpetuate American global preponderance, but at loggerheads over tactics.

McCain is painted as an all-American hero, almost a god and certainly a saint, while Trump is a pantomime villain at whom it is perfectly polite to hiss and boo. The former backed a broadly hegemonic ordering strategy for US global domination while Trump backs bilateral transactionalism resulting in part from his business experience and partly from the conservative-nationalist playbook.

In truth, neither McCain nor Trump occupy anything other than positions extolling the virtues of an aggressive and violent American empire at war virtually across the globe and responsible for mass suffering caused by illegal wars – Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and unconditional support for the Israeli onslaught against Palestinians, among others. The debate is over tactics to be deployed against America’s main perceived ‘rivals’ – Russia and China – and the way of dealing with traditional US allies to those ends. It is largely that simple.

Born at the arrogantly self-proclaimed ‘American century’s’ birth, to a family steeped in the country’s armed services, a man of the establishment, John McCain appears to have passed away in the midst of what some are claiming is the American century’s twilight. And he and his establishment allies view President Donald Trump as the extinguisher of America’s ‘light’. Hence, against all the evidence, McCain – who is relatively unknown beyond America’s shores – has been elevated to national hero and the voice of the global oppressed.

He is the non-existent hero the American establishment needed, and has therefore had to invent.

His much-lauded career as an honourable naval officer and ‘public’ servant is starkly contrasted with Trump’s acknowledged low moral standing, military service evasion and political buffoonery.

Yet McCain is hardly beyond criticism: he may have represented another, past, Republican party but it was he who ushered in the era of right-wing populism with Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008. Palin enthused the GOP base against Barack Obama, championed overt lying over any comprehensible political position, and hastened the emergence of the Tea party, the birther movement and eventually the rise of President Trump, if not a virulent Trumpism that may well outlive the man himself.

The establishment likes to paint Trump as an aberration. His roots, however, lie deep in the establishment’s own drive to the Right – since at least the time of Richard Nixon in the 1970s and the backlash against civil and women’s rights, and the crushing failures of an unchecked globalising corporate sector at home and its war machine abroad.

Of course, McCain claimed later to regret choosing Palin. But who had been his first choice? US Senator Joe Lieberman – the neoconservative who had backed the Iraq war and the whole war on terror against the so-called ‘axis of evil’. Not for nothing did Lieberman declare at McCain’s funeral that “The name John McCain was a source of hope and inspiration for oppressed people around the world.”

It was a staggeringly Orwellian moment, even by the standards of US hegemony.

The oppressed of Iraq felt the full fury of McCain’s inspiration. Having backed US military aggressions including Vietnam, he argued that the US military should remain in Iraq for a hundred years. He was honoured that the latest massive military budget passed by Congress had his name on it.

At home, Senator McCain largely backed every measure that has increased corporate power and diminished workers’ rights and conditions, opposed legitimate trade unionism, and supported tax cuts for the richest in American society. In the 1980s, as a Congressman, he voted against a national holiday to honour Martin Luther King, Jr.

According to FiveThirtyEight, McCain voted with Trump initiatives 83% of the time, 21% higher than he would have been predicted to on the basis of his positions in 2016.

McCain’s death has reopened fractures within US foreign policy elites on its global role, as ‘traditional’ imperial establishments at home and globally weigh in on praising McCain’s support of NATO and transatlanticism, opposition to Russia, among other things.

Trump is aggressive, nationalistic, and imperialistic but ultimately backs a more selective global engagement strategy to manage US power in globally-challenging conditions. His principal crime is to refuse the ‘hegemonic ordering’ strategy favoured by the establishment since 1940s, in favour of aggressively-nationalistic bilateral transactionalism. Where the establishment largely favoured building orders – the UN system, Bretton Woods, NATO, the European Union, and more recently NAFTA, WTO, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership – Trump favours a strategy of bilateral transactionalism to weaken blocs and agreements, and deal with each nation separately from America’s position of strength. He is leveraging American power in the most crude, brutal ways, showing its true face.

Trump recognises other states’ and blocs’ ‘bottom line’, and understands America’s most significant strengths – military superiority, dollar power in global finance and trade, and the leverage offered by a massive US domestic market.

And he is wielding it like a bludgeon. And bringing it into disrepute, diminishing its ‘moral’ authority, the cover of ‘soft’ power which the traditional establishment prefers.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, and the author of Foundations of the American Century. His twitter handle is @USEmpire

By  Naná de Graaff and Bastiaan van Apeldoorn
This op-ed was originally published on International Affairs Blog

Whose Crisis?

Amidst the clamour over the erratic leadership of the Trump presidency, and the predicted end of a liberal international order, what tends to get overlooked is that there is, at root, a crisis of leadership within America’s economic and political elite.

Trump is the symptom rather than the cause of this crisis, although he has arguably aggravated it. For decades the American power elite has been characterized by close entanglements between of the political and corporate elites, a power configuration that has become increasingly bound up with stagnant wages and widening inequality. Neo-liberal policies implemented at home have been mirrored by an ‘open door’ policy abroad, expanding free markets and maximizing the freedom of (above all) US capital — underpinned, crucially, by a globe-spanning military apparatus and US-centred multilateral institutions. Both these policies have reinforced the position of the power elite, with the top 1% becoming increasingly insulated from the rest of society. It is this which has generated the massive public discontent that has been mobilized by both the right and the left, and is one of the key reasons why Trump was elected.


Enter China

The crisis of elite leadership which Trump epitomizes, however, greatly accelerates a power shift from a world centred around Western power and built on US hegemony, to a more multipolar world order that includes non-Western powers — in particular China — that has been in the making for decades. From climate governance to trade, America’s retreat from multilateral agreements rolls out the red carpet for China . This opportunity to provide global leadership is not lost on the Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has been driving forward a signature shift in China’s foreign policy, from ‘keeping a low profile’ (tao guang yang hui) to ‘striving for achievement’ (fen fa you wei). Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement turned the US into something of a pariah (the next G20 summit was immediately recoined G19+1) and his retreat from the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the crown jewel in Obama’s ‘Asia Pivot’ — only had the effect of self-isolation: negotiations on free trade in the Pacific are now pursued without the US. China is stepping into this void created by the US, not with an explicit claim to global leadership, but with the convenient argument that it is just behaving as the ‘responsible stakeholder’ US foreign policy makers always pressured it to be. While former Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping advised to: ‘bide our time’, the timing of Xi Jinping’s assertiveness couldn’t have been better and he is making the most of the unexpected helping hand from the US. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wryly wrote, Trump is ‘helping make China great again’.


Xi’s Elite Power Concentration

The crisis and fragmentation of elite leadership in the US coincides with a strengthening and centralizing of elite leadership around the Communist Party and the leadership of its General Secretary Xi, on a scale not seen in China since Deng Xiaoping. Internal dissent, both within the Party and beyond, has effectively been ‘disciplined’ through an anti-graft campaign and a general strengthening of censorship and surveillance. Xi’s philosophy of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era’ has been incorporated as the guiding ideology of the Party, while Xi himself, ‘Chairman of Everything’, has centralized control over economic policy-making and the military, and has elevated himself to historical heights of political power, which rests on a solid and cohesive elite power base and wide legitimacy. This concentration of power was further enhanced by the recent announcement that the two-term limit for Xi’s presidency is to be scrapped.


A Hybrid Scenario

What does this mean for US–China relations and future of the liberal international order? As we argue in our International Affairs article, in contrast to many alarmist accounts, we do not see a major US–China conflict in the making, let alone an outright war. The interdependencies and mutual interests in terms of investments and trade on both sides are too large to make a major conflict scenario likely, bar any fatal accidents. But neither can we expect China to become entirely co-opted into the liberal order, contrary to what many US policy makers and liberal scholars have assumed until recently. The Chinese economy is increasingly integrated into the world economy, and as a result its leaders are embracing ‘inclusive’ globalization and advocating an open door to trade and investment. However, as we show in our article, China’s economy remains wedded to a ‘state-directed’ form of capitalism, which involves a partial adaptation to the liberal rules of the game, but also selective and decisive resistance against it. We therefore envisage a third, more hybrid scenario of co-existence, which will entail both competition and cooperation.


This hybrid scenario, however, does not imply the absence of contestation and, crucially, hinges on the resolution of domestic political and social contestation within both the US and China. The key question here is whether and how the American and Chinese elites are able to manage their societal contradictions, domestically and internationally. This will require, among other things, major structural solutions and a (re)distribution of social, societal and natural resources in order to lower inequality, improve employment opportunities, solve the immigration conundrum and to ecologically save the planet. China is facing many domestic challenges, from spiralling national debt to the middle income trap, nevertheless it seems to be in a better position to address these crises than the US under Trump.


Nana de Graaff is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Department of Political Science at the VU University Amsterdam.Bastiaan van Apeldoorn is Reader in International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the VU University Amsterdam.
Their co-authored article, ‘US–China relations and the liberal world order: contending elites, colliding visions’, appeared in the January 2018 special issue of International Affairs, ‘Ordering the world: liberal internationalism in theory and practice’.

Read the article here.
Explore the rest of the special issue here.

Further Information:

See: The end of liberal international order? | G. John Ikenberry | International Affairs
These are not happy times for liberal internationalists. No one can be sure how deep the crisis of liberal…cht.hm

See: US-Chinese power shift and the end of the Pax Americana | Christopher Layne | International Affairs
In this article, I show that far from consenting to be bound by institutions and rules of the Pax Americana, China is…cht.hm

See: US-China relations and the liberal world order: contending elites, colliding visions? | Nana De Graaff & Bastiaan van Apeldoorn
The future of liberal internationalism will be influenced increasingly by the re-emergence of China as a major power on…cht.hm

Will Trump make China great again? The belt and road initiative and international order | Astrid H. M. Nordin & Mikael Weissmann
Under President Xi Jinping's leadership, Chinese foreign relations have moved from keeping a low profile, to a more…academic.oup.com

By Professor Inderjeet Parmar
This Op-ed was originally published on The Wire

By Professor Inderjeet Parmar
This Op-ed was originally published on Oxford University Press.

One year into President Donald Trump’s administration, serious questions are being asked about the nature and extent of the ‘crisis’ of the US-led liberal order, and its hegemonic state. The most fervent proponents of that order – liberal internationalists – are in varying states of despair. According to their Whiggish narratives, the order was supposed to be open, universal, prosperous for most, and integrative. After the Cold War’s end, the triumph of liberalism seemed all but certain. Though success bred its own international challenges, liberals were ready for them. China, India, and the rest of the BRICS, not to mention South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, and Turkey (until recently), among others, continue to be seen as success stories of the order. Despite dark Realist mutterings of inevitable military conflict between extant and rising hegemons, liberal optimism remained. Until November 2016.

What is most shocking to liberals is that the significant threat appears to be at ‘home’, i.e., in the western heartlands: First, Britain voted to ‘Brexit’ the European Union; then Trump defeated liberal-order champion Hillary Clinton. For the first time since 1945, a US President won office by attacking the principal relationships that are the very sinews of established order – NATO, American Middle eastern policy, East Asian security treaties.

President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy and a governing style favouring illiberal and racialised authoritarian-populism, rather than tolerance and diversity, is narrowing American identity around the macho (angry) white male, being restored after decades of ‘humiliation’ at the hands of “usurpers.” Women’s rights, civil rights, immigrants, and liberal elite social engineering that ‘emasculated’ the American white man, tampered with the constitution and under the banner of diversity changed the very face of America.

The ‘other’ is a Muslim, refugee, terrorist, Mexican immigrant, the unwanted African and Haitian – when the immigrants Trump wants look like Norwegians, a position applauded by white supremacists. A recent Gallup poll shows the effects – collapse in America’s global approval from 48% in 2016 to 30% today, just above Russia, slightly behind China and significantly trailing Germany (43%).

The levels of social and economic inequality at home – alongside the crisis of ‘immigration’ and forced migration – much of it driven by war, poverty and military violence – makes a lethal political cocktail that has bred and encouraged leaders promoting right-wing xenophobic populism, challenging liberal norms.

Yet, those crises may have been predictable given fault-lines fundamental to the liberal order. Some are inherent in an expansionist liberalism – spreading its democracy and market economics across the world, creating its own competitors and challengers in the process, leaving nowhere for American and other western states to export their crises.

Other crises occurred because the promise of the liberal order was unequally shared. The liberal world order turned out to be the West plus Japan and pro-US South Korea. Large parts of the ‘periphery’ (across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, for example) did not share in the liberals’ bounty. That post-1945 era sublimated its colonial-era racialised-imperial impulse – embedded in the distribution of power within international institutions and the terms of trade, as well as the extraordinary violence during the North American-Western European ‘long peace.’

Yet the western ‘fix’ in the 1970s to the challenge of post-colonial nations’ demands for a New International Economic Order – leading to the export of capital to the global south through loans and investment in ‘middle class’ third world states, not only created competitors but also aided the industrial job-destruction process kick-started by automation: rust belt areas lost jobs and suffered socially. White working and middle classes drifted politically towards the Republicans, whose subliminal racialised appeals – against ‘reverse discrimination’, for example, nurtured a grievance at loss of position, viewed as others gaining unfair advantages over ‘real’ Americans. The seeds of the Trump triumph of 2016 were sown in the decline of the postwar social contract that initially fuelled Reaganism – and small government and low taxes conservatism. The wages of whiteness however delivered little in material terms to Reagan Democrats. And combined with globalisation and automation, their living standards fell, along with other large swathes of American society, as corporate wealth and political power increased.

President Trump’s ‘principled realism’ – sketched out in his inaugural address through the speech to the UN General Assembly in September, to his first National Security Strategy of December 2017, and General Mattis’s National Defense Strategy of January 2017 – is unilateral, selectively internationalist, and heavily militarised. It is also extractive, transactional, and based on American hard power. Trumpism is a kind of social Darwinism: unregulated corporate power with militarised policing at home; armed and dangerous states abroad eschewing diplomacy, loosening the bonds of international norms, underpinned by a survival-of-the-fittest mentality.

As his support erodes in practically all parts of the electorate, the legitimacy of American political and financial elite declines, and America’s global standing slips below China’s, Trump is pursuing a more militarist strategy against China and Russia – which he has labelled ‘revisionist’ powers, and closing down diplomatic pathways in dealing with major global crises. The growing threat of war, the downgrading of diplomacy and extolling the virtues of a global ‘national awakening’, augurs ill for the future of world politics, with strong undertones of worship of ‘strength’, ‘nation’ and ‘God’.

There is little room for soft power in Trump’s foreign policy; diplomacy has been side-lined in favour of military solutions. And America’s attitude to international organisations is ambivalent. Thus far, however, the effects have not fundamentally altered the international order – but President Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, UNESCO, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and selective engagement with other international institutions suggests a loosening of the international order created by Anglo-American power after World War II.

The title of a major report for discussion at the January 2018 meetings at Davos, based on a survey of global elite opinion, is ominous for the future of the international system: “Fractures, Fears and Failures.” The report’s subheadings include: “Grim Reaping,” “The Death of Trade,” “Democracy Buckles,” “Precision Extinction”, “Into the Abyss”, “Fears of Ecological Armageddon” and “War without Rules.”

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, and a columnist for The Wire. His twitter handle is @USEmpire.

By Dr Mark Ledwidge
This op-ed was originally published in International History & Politics 3(1): 14-16, Newsletter Summer 2017, An Organised Section of the American Political Science Association

This essay will not provide a historical legitimisation of the race first philosophy advocated by Marcus Garvey, nor will it attempt to legitimise the Pan- Africanist and Black Nationalist philosophies advocated by Garvey.1 The essay situates Garvey as the forerunner of the Black Nationalist leaders that came to prominence in Africa and the African diaspora during the mid-20th Century. That is, Garvey unleashed an African world view which challenged global white supremacy. In short, Garvey’s ideological thrust laid the basis for the trans-national liberation movement for Africans at home and abroad;2 Garvey influenced leaders such as Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Malcolm X and a cadre of Nationalists, reformists and revolutionaries.3 A key facet of Garvey’s leadership was countering the negative racial propaganda that Europeans and Euro- Americans had fastened onto the image of black people.4

As often occurs regarding counter hegemonic movements, mainstream historians have generally focused on Garvey’s failure to liberate Africa and people of African descent. Nonetheless it is not wrong to suggest that the Universal Improvement Association (UNIA) and the African Communities League (Founded July 15th 1914) did not fulfil Garvey’s aims. 5 Examined from a materialist perspective, the failings of the Black Star Line and the UNIA’s other business ventures, and the collapse of the UNIA could negate the assertion that Garvey possessed leadership credentials, accepting of course the external factors that caused the UNIA’s downfall.6 On reflection, Garvey’s leadership was best exemplified in his efforts to decolonize the minds of African people as he reached down into the fractured consciousness of a people whose self-image had been ravaged by centuries of racist and pseudo-scientific propaganda, and told them that they were heirs to a hidden history and stolen legacy.7 Indeed, Garvey concurred with the racial philosophy of Arthur A. Shomburg who exalted black pride in his seminal essay ‘The Negro Digs up his Past’ in the book The New Negro.

Unlike Du Bois, and the elite faction of the African American talented tenth, Garvey spoke to lay persons and the black masses across the globe by articulating his message of liberation in the Negro World and later the Black Man magazine.8 Garvey’s conflict with some members of the African American elite included issues related to colour, class9 and the double consciousness that Du Bois had identified in The Souls of Black Folk. Garvey theorised that centuries of racial oppression and colonialism had encouraged disunity among black people and deep suspicions regarding the legitimacy of black leadership. Ultimately Garvey’s activism forced black people to confront the externally induced self- loathing that hindered their efforts to meet their collective interests.10 Significantly Garvey argued that black liberation was dependent on self- knowledge bolstered by an appreciation of African peoples’ historical achievements. 11 Henceforth Garvey played a pivotal role in intellectualizing and internationalising Pan-Africanism, along with Du Bois and George Padmore12 but prior to Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and others. In short, Garvey understood that the principal battlefield exists within the mind of both the oppressed and the oppressor, and that liberation or behaviour modification requires the restructuring of a group's political and intellectual consciousness.

The under-acknowledgement of Garvey’s leadership credentials pertaining to international relations and black liberation are derived from three factors:

1. The successful covert counter-intelligence operations of British and American government intelligence apparatus.13

2. Garvey’s quest for African liberation was antithetical to the racial politics and interests of state actors in America and in the colonies.14

3. Despite exceptions, the academy’s tendency to construct, maintain, or perpetuate the Euro-centric and racial mores of Western society has created tensions in evaluating black freedom fighters like Garvey, whose activities threatened to destabilise the dominant social order.15

The fact that the UNIA was destabilised by British, American and colonial governments is indicative of the threat Garvey’s movement posed to Western interests. In America J. Edgar Hoover’s General Intelligence Division (the forerunner of the FBI) and other organs of the American State, willingly bypassed their own racism and utilised black informants and agent provocateurs to disrupt Garvey’s business and political ventures.16 Hoover, the US State Department, and the US Justice Department pursued Garvey with a vengeance. Hoover ordered his subordinates to find or manufacture illegal activities in order to destroy Garvey.17

“...Garvey understood that the principal battlefield exists within the mind of both the oppressed and the oppressor, and that liberation or behaviour modification requires the restructuring of a group's political and intellectual consciousness.”

In brief, persecution from the State coupled with the collaboration of African American leaders like Du Bois and members of the NAACP led to Garvey’s imprisonment and deportation from America.18 Suffice to say Garvey’s plans stimulated the significant opposition he faced.

The fact that Garvey travelled widely in the Caribbean, parts of South and North America and London provided him with insight into the international dimensions of white hegemony. 19 Ironically European Americans rejected Garvey’s revolutionary spirit despite their reverence of the American Revolution and Patrick Henry’s cry of “give me liberty or give me death”. Here racism, self- interest, and cognitive dissonance prevented the white collective from supporting the UNIA’s global agenda. It is conceivable that whites rejected the UNIA and its so-called militant tendencies. However historiographers must recognise that the brutality of racial oppression and colonialism undoubtedly fuelled the rise of Marcus Garvey.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St Ann’s Bay on August 17th 1887, on the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean.20 The history of the Caribbean was rudely interrupted by the rise of Europe, particularly Spain as a result of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492.21 The emergence of Spain and Portugal and the V oyages of Christopher Columbus stimulated European expansionism and had a cataclysmic impact on Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the world.22

European expansionism and the profiteering of commissioned and semi-commissioned adventurers like Sir Francis Drake and his cousin Sir John Hawkins,23 who was financed by the Virgin Queen to enslave, commoditise and sell Africans,24 helped fund the (so called) triangular trade, which Eric Williams maintains in the book, Capitalism and Slavery, assisted in financing Britain’s imperialist thrust into the Caribbean islands and America. 25 The profiteering of European Nation States led to the legalised enslavement of millions of Africans and the genocide of millions of the indigenous people of the Caribbean. Note the Catholic cleric Bartholomeo de las Casas estimated that 12 to 15 million Caribs were wiped out as a result of European imperialism.26 In addition, Europe’s conquests caused the construction of a hegemonic racial power paradigm.27

Garvey recognised that for centuries racism had impoverished the lives of Africans across the globe from a material, psychological, spiritual, cultural, and historical perspective.28 Clearly the descendants of enslaved Africans and Africans in general had inherited notions of inferiority that had damaged the African psyche.

Garvey realised before Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Joy Leary that white supremacy had left a legacy of psycho-cultural trauma which had distorted the political consciousness of Africans. In retrospect an unlettered man born in Jamaica pierced the veil of centuries of mis-education by identifying the so- called Negro’s African heritage. It is noteworthy that when Garvey was born there were no major texts that identified the existence of ancient African civilisations or an abundance of literary texts that exalted the virtues of an African identity, as Africans in Africa were viewed as savages and the descendants of enslaved Africans in the diaspora had been taught to reject Africa and their blackness. Consider also that in Garvey’s lifetime only Haiti, Ethiopia and Liberia had any semblance of political sovereignty.29

Conclusion

To conclude, Garvey made errors but became a leader of international stature because he spoke in a bold manner that began to address the damage that centuries of racial propaganda had wrought on the minds of Africans at home and abroad. Garvey recognised that his constituency had been taught to despise their features and made to believe that they had no legitimate history or corresponding culture.30 Marcus Garvey was an international leader, the intellectual black Moses, who reconstructed race relations internationally by spawning a greater awareness of Africa, African identity, and Africa’s role in politics, economics, and history. Finally, Garvey inspired generations of black and African people even beyond the grave. Clearly Garvey was one of the Fathers of Black Nationalism and Pan- Africanism in addition to despite the odds becoming a leader in both international and intellectual power politics.


Dr Mark Ledwidge is the Subject Lead and Senior Lecturer in American Studies in the School of Humanities. He has emerged as one of the UK’s leading scholars on the presidency of Barack Obama. His publications include: Obama and the World, 2nd edition (co-editor), Barack Obama and the Myth of Post-Racial America (co-editor) and Race and US Foreign Policy, all available from the University Bookshop.

To find out more about the American Studies courses at Christ Church, visit:
www.canterbury.ac.uk/american-studies



Footnotes
1 Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2002); Tony Martin., Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Massachusetts: Majority Press, 1986).
2 Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement (London: Methuen & Co., 1974), p. 274; Liz Mackie, The Great Marcus Garvey (London: Hansib Publications, 2001), p. 63; Adolph Edwards, Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 2000), p. 136.
4 Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (Massachusetts: Majority Press, 1986); John Henrik Clarke, Notes for an African World Revolution: Africans at the Crossroads (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1992).
5 David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000).
6 Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Theodore Kornweibel Jr., “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
7 Martin, Race First, p. 13; Robert A. Hill, Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p.15.
8 Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan, eds., Garvey: His Work and Impact (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1991); Mark Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy: The African-American Foreign Affairs Network (New York: Routledge, 2012).
9 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, p. 67.
10 Rupert Lewis, Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion (London: Karia Press, 1987); Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney (London: Hansib Publications, 1985).
11 Hill, Marcus Garvey.
12 Toyin Falola and Kwame Essien, Pan-Africanism, and the Politics of African Citizenship and Identity (London: Routledge, 2015); Ledwidge, The African-American Foreign Affairs Network.
13 Mackie, The Great Marcus Garvey; Clarke, Notes for an African World Revolution, p. 223; Ledwidge, The African- American Foreign Affairs Network, p. 42.
14 Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 (London: Routledge, 2003).
15 Ledwidge, The African-American Foreign Affairs Network.
16 Churchill Ward and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002), p. 94; Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 131.
17 Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 130; Powers, Secrecy and Power, p. 369.
18 Ledwidge, The African-American Foreign Affairs Network, p. 42.
19 Lewis, Marcus Garvey.
20 Hill, Marcus Garvey, p. lxiii.
21 John Henrik Clarke, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism (New York: A&B Publishers Group, 1998); Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1969 (Suffolk: St Edmundsbury Press, 1993).
22 Clarke, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust.
23 The Captain of the Jesus of Lubeck, the slaving ship given him to Queen Elizabeth the first.
24 Clarke, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust, p. 31; Harry Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 18.
25 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
26 Bartolomé De Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London: Penguin Group, 1992).
27 Frank Furedi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 1; Thoams McCarthy, Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 1.
28 John Henrik Clarke, ed., Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).
29 Ledwidge, The African-American Foreign Affairs Network. 30 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1993).

As Obama hands over the reins of power, Dr Mark Ledwidge, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, reflects on his administration and looks ahead to America’s new political landscape under the leadership of Donald Trump.

The Wider World

Obama was referred to as the new face of US foreign policy. He was viewed as someone who might be able to help America’s flagging image. The Bush years had increased polarisation and the ‘war on terror’ was perceived by some as an ethnocentric religious attack on Islam and Muslims generally. That was partly because of the Bush administration’s lack of diplomacy and extremely poor use of language regarding the ‘war on terror’.

When Obama came to office, he was identified as the first global president. As his ethnicity differentiated him from previous US presidents, it was thought he would take a new approach and this was seen as a potential breakthrough moment. The Obama administration wanted to tone down the rhetoric that depicted America as being omnipotent and inherently benign. What it did well was to position America with other nations, to discuss how to work together to solve global problems, and also to be more open to developments in Asia. I think history will judge Obama’s cultural sophistication and his understanding of global politics in a positive light – he did a much better job than his predecessor.

But the core question is, did Obama really differentiate his policies sufficiently from those of the Bush administration? He did not manage to close down Guantanamo Bay because he was blocked by the Republicans in Congress. He oversaw the ‘surge’ in numbers of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he also followed Bush’s policies by increasing the number of drone strikes. So one can argue that there were significant continuities, but this was inevitable, especially as many of Obama’s staff had also served under the Bush and Clinton administrations. However, it’s important to remember that the Obama administration was able to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, and remove him, something that the Bush administration failed to do.

New Global Dangers

Generally, people overestimate the power of the president in the first place. It is often said that the American president is the most powerful person in the world, but the truth is that the presidency exists within an institutional framework where the separation of powers limits the scope of presidential power. The world is moving toward a more dangerous position – irrespective of who the president is. The problems lie with the fact that America can no longer play the role of the global policeman it once did because it is overstretched, both in terms of manpower and the amount it spends on defence. The Bush administration arguably made the world a more dangerous place because it was too unpredictable. In addition, the Bush idea of striking first was clearly very problematic. These are characteristics the Obama administration were able to successfully curtail.

“The world is moving towards a more dangerous place – irrespective of who the president is.”

In terms of Syria and the US’s reluctance to engage in direct military action, we could either argue the world was made safer or it wasn’t. Some people maintain that ISIS exists because of the vacuum that was created when Saddam Hussein was removed in Iraq and with the removal of Gaddafi in Libya. Therefore, it has been argued that America failed to develop and craft comprehensive plans in relation to the crisis in both Libya and Syria, which has increased the problems within the region. However, this can’t be blamed on the Obama administration; instead, it can be traced back to lack of planning from the Bush administration that led to a deteriorating situation in the Middle East. In reality though, people will complain about America’s intervention and non-intervention creating global problems.

The UK-US ‘Special Relationship’

Obama made a decision that he would not necessarily put Britain at the forefront of American foreign policy. He paid attention to Europe per se, but he was also able to draw on the established relationship between America and the UK. With Trump now in the foreground, the relationship is going to be more tense than people imagine. Brexit is also of significance because it means Britain’s relative power and its influence in Europe could be seen as decreasing. Britain and America are in a bit of an unknown place right now and Britain has to begin to re-establish its political and economic identity. For instance, the fact that India has surpassed the British economy points to Britain’s fluctuating and declining status, which is something the British Government will have to address and adjust to.

The Race Relations Issue

Race relations is going to be a very problematic legacy for Obama. Racial inequalities have existed in America since its formation with the genocide of the Native Americans and the shameful history of slavery. Given that African Americans have only been legally and practically free in the full sense of the word since 1964-5, Obama was never going to fully resolve the race problem. But the question is, did he miss a golden opportunity to place the racial agenda at the forefront of American politics? The reason I ask this question is because race and ethnicity represent a major fault line in American politics, which affect millions of people’s lives within the social, economic and criminal justice context.

Obama was caught in a difficult position on controversial race issues as he tried to maintain a position of ‘objectivity’ but, when he did comment, he was often heavily criticised by sections of the media and political opponents for ‘taking sides’ (a criticism, it should be noted, that isn’t made of white presidents in similar circumstances). His position on some race relations issues was, therefore, rather muted. One of the most difficult historical problems in US society is the profound lack of trust between African Americans and the police. This is hardly surprising when so many black people have been killed by an increasingly militarised police force in the past few years and Obama’s intervention on this has been limited and ineffective.

The combination of having an African-American president and the oft-quoted demographic statistic that white people will not be a majority in the US by 2050 have also stoked up an increasingly racialised and sometimes overtly racist political backlash from Obama’s political opponents. Elements within the Republican Party, and conservative groups, such as the Tea Party, circulated the ludicrous conspiracies which allege that Obama was not an American by birth (while simultaneously implying in coded discourse that African Americans or Obama cannot be ‘real’ Americans). Trump himself was an early proponent of this baseless idea and his campaign was rightly criticised for its use of racist stereotyping as well as the overt support he received from a variety of white supremacist groups.

So the issue of race will not go away; it will increase and Trump may well shift his position and move back from some of his statements because of the difference between campaigning for election and becoming President. Nevertheless, the powder keg is there and the fuse may already have been lit.

Trump was underestimated by just about everybody. He showed an ability to read American society in a way others hadn’t. First of all, he’s media savvy and played that to his advantage. Trump didn’t do what Obama did, he spoke in an everyman language. Some may mock this approach, but this simple messaging resonated and was effective with sufficiently large sections of the electorate.

However, Trump has made it very difficult for himself. His brash approach to the election worked to get him in but we’ve already seen him backtracking. Trump’s tax cuts will only favour the rich 1%, not his working class support. His foreign policy is also difficult to read. Trump has spoken in very strong and powerful terms – he’s a so-called ‘man’s man’ who projects a macho image. The question is, can Trump follow through with his bold rhetoric and, if he does, at what cost to America and the world? Is he going to allow the extremes of his characterisations during the election to form the basis of his foreign policy?

The constraints against Trump’s belligerent world view might be the separation of powers and the sober fact that the presidency exists within the institutional framework of the US political system, including the Executive Office of the President, the White House and Congress. Indeed, in office, he will still be reliant on the advice of the Washington elites who one assumes have a deeper understanding of national security issues and foreign policy. So I suspect we are going to hear different noises from President – as opposed to candidate – Trump. Currently, he is making, or has made, overtures to certain people, which will seem to many to be very ‘non-Washington’. Some people say he’s moving towards people who have white supremacist or ultra-right leanings. That could be highly problematic for the US.

His relationship with Putin will also be of considerable interest. How will that be read by the rest of the world? Will his relationship with Putin reflect this alleged ‘love affair’ that some people say exists? Do countries, such as Russia and China, perceive that having someone less politically savvy in global terms like Trump would be better for them than someone who knows far more about how government and international relations really work?

US Politics in Crisis

In short, Obama’s core constituency claim he did not promote change or do enough either domestically or internationally. However, many people view Trump’s role as being somewhat extreme.

I would suggest that there is a crisis in American politics. It’s not a crisis with the Democrats or Republicans, but a crisis in US politics in general because it has lost its way. Scholars and laypersons alike have to ask whether a system that was developed centuries ago can rectify, resolve or contend with the key issues both at home and abroad. Either way, identity politics lies at the heart of this – not just in terms of race and ethnicity, but regarding America’s status and role in the world. In the final analysis, is America still a hegemonic power or an empire in decline, and does the election of Donald Trump reflect the symptoms of an unhealthy and troubled nation?

Dr Mark Ledwidge is the Subject Lead and Senior Lecturer in American Studies in the School of Humanities. He has emerged as one of the UK’s leading scholars on the presidency of Barack Obama. His publications include: Obama and the World, 2nd edition (co-editor), Barack Obama and the Myth of Post-Racial America (co-editor) and Race and US Foreign Policy, all available from the University Bookshop.

To find out more about the American Studies courses at Christ Church, visit:
www.canterbury.ac.uk/american-studies

By Dr Mark Ledwidge
This op-ed was originally published on Canterbury Christ Church University's Expert Comment blog: https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/expertcomment/obamas-legacy-to-the-world/

Dr Mark Ledwidge, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, reflects on the legacy of Obama’s foreign policy and looks ahead to what we might expect from the leadership of Donald Trump.

Elected on a tidal wave of hope, Barack Obama made history in 2008 when he became the first African American to win the US presidency. But eight years on, having served two terms in office, what legacy does he leave behind for international relations, security and peace?

Obama was referred to as the new face of US foreign policy. He was viewed as someone who might be able to help America’s flagging image. The Bush years had increased polarisation and the ‘war on terror’ was perceived by some as an ethnocentric religious attack on Islam and Muslims generally. That was partly because of the Bush administration’s lack of diplomacy and extremely poor use of language regarding the ‘war on terror’.

When Obama came to office, he was identified as the first global president. As his ethnicity differentiated him from other US presidents, it was thought he would take a new approach and this was seen as a potential breakthrough moment. The Obama administration wanted to tone down the rhetoric that depicted America as being omnipotent and inherently benign. What it did well was to position America with other nations, to discuss how to work together to solve global problems, and also to be more open to developments in Asia. I think history will judge Obama’s cultural sophistication and his understanding of global politics in a positive light – he did a much better job than his predecessor.

But the core question is, did Obama really differentiate his policies sufficiently from those of the Bush administration? He did not manage to close down Guantanamo Bay because he was blocked by the Republicans in Congress. He oversaw the ‘surge’ in numbers of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he also followed Bush’s policies by increasing the number of drone strikes. So one can argue that there were significant continuities, but this was inevitable, especially as many of Obama’s staff had also served under Bush and the Clinton administrations. However, it is important to remember that the Obama administration was able to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, and remove him, something that the Bush administration failed to do.

It is often said that the American president is the most powerful person in the world, but the truth is that the presidency exists within an institutional framework where the separation of powers limits the scope of presidential power. The world is moving towards a more dangerous position – irrespective of who the president is. The problems lie with the fact that America can no longer play the role of the global policeman it once did because it is overstretched, both in terms of manpower and the amount it spends on defence.

The Bush administration arguably made the world a more dangerous place because it was too unpredictable. In addition, the Bush idea of striking first was clearly very problematic. These are characteristics the Obama administration were able to successfully curtail.

In terms of Syria and the US’s reluctance to engage in direct military action, we could either argue the world was made safer or it was not. Some people maintain that ISIS exists because of the vacuum that was created when Saddam Hussein was removed in Iraq and with the removal of Gaddafi in Libya. Therefore, it has been argued that America failed to develop and craft comprehensive plans in relation to the crisis in both Libya and Syria, which has increased the problems within the region. However, this cannot be blamed on the Obama administration; instead it can be traced back to lack of planning from the Bush administration that led to a deteriorating situation in the Middle East. In reality though, people will complain about America’s intervention and non-intervention creating global problems.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy is difficult to read. He has spoken in very strong and powerful terms – he’s a so called ‘man’s man’ who projects a macho image. The question is, can Trump follow through with his bold rhetoric and, if he does, at what cost to America and the world? Is he going to allow the extremes of his characterisations during the election to form the basis of his foreign policy?

His relationship with Putin will also be of considerable interest. How will that be read by the rest of the world? Will his relationship with Putin reflect this alleged ‘love affair’ that some people say exists? Do countries, such as Russia and China, perceive that having someone less politically savvy in global terms like Trump would be better for them than someone who knows far more about how government and international relations really work?

There is a crisis in American politics. It’s not a crisis with the Democrats or Republicans, but a crisis in US politics in general because it has lost its way. Scholars and laypersons alike have to ask whether a system that was developed centuries ago can rectify, resolve or contend with the key issues both at home and abroad. Either way, identity politics lies at the heart of America’s status and role in the world. Is America still a hegemonic power or an empire in decline? And does the election of Donald Trump reflect the symptoms of an unhealthy and troubled nation.

Dr Mark Ledwidge is the Subject Lead and Senior Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of History and American Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. He has emerged as one of the UK’s leading scholars on the presidency of Barack Obama. His publications include: Obama and the World, 2nd edition (co-editor; Routledge 2014), Barack Obama and the Myth of Post-Racial America (co-editor; Routledge 2013) and Race and US Foreign Policy (Routledge 2013). Follow on Twitter.

By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: https://thewire.in/100377/trump-america-first-presidency/

In his hands, Donald Trump claims, the US will be like him – a winner. And if anything doesn’t go according to plan, it’s someone else’s fault.

Although US president-elect Donald Trump has a well-earned reputation for unpredictability and an unconventional political style, some aspects of what makes him tick are becoming clearer as his inauguration on January 20 approaches.

This is not a definitive list – and it’ll surely change as his presidency ‘progresses’ – but there are five inter-related discernible characteristics that may help us get a handle on Trump as president.


Master concept: ‘America First’


Trump has said it all along as a badge of pride that, in contrast to all other political leaders, he stands for the US before all else and above all others. American interests are supreme to him but have been compromised by his predecessors, especially Barack Obama, who have permitted the likes of China and Mexico to take advantage of American naïvete, good intentions and openness. China manipulates its currency to cheapen its exports and destroy American jobs, militarises the South China Sea and does little to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes. In response, the US does nothing, Trump claims.


As president, Trump will put a stop to all those compromises and reassert US power – and reconsider the US’s international relationships and agreements to see to it that the country gets value for money. ‘Make America Great Again!’


The domestic version of that is all those foreigners, immigrants and refugees coming to the US, committing crimes and living off welfare, under-cutting American workers or carrying out acts of terrorism in cahots with ISIS, need to be taught a lesson. Law and order must be restored, whatever it takes, to make Americans safe from the ‘enemy within’.


The other four characteristics worthy of note may derive from the master concept. In Trump’s hands, he claims, the US will be like him – a winner. His ‘winner’ self-concept indicates that he has what it takes and will do what it takes to achieve his goals – such as the US presidency and, now, the US’s interests at home and abroad. The US is a land of winners, not losers, and he’s the personification of success.


This means he finds it difficult to admit error or, when admitting error, to seem to be on the attack and blame someone else. And the Russian hacking of the US election claims are especially pertinent here: first, he needs to claim that he won the election on his own merits and is the people’s choice – despite losing the popular vote by almost three million; so denying any Russian involvement was his first line of attack against sore losers in the Democratic party.


But with the unanimity of US intelligence assessments of Russian interference, Trump accepted such interference had taken place, alongside others’ doing the same as well as arguing that the intervention had no impact on the final result. That helps explain his response to reporters’ questioning at his first news conference since winning in November.


The third characteristic – which ensures the US will always be first and therefore a winner, is because, as a successful businessman, Trump knows how to do a deal. And one aspect of getting the best deal is to open the bidding in dramatic fashion – showing strength from the start in the belief that others need the US more than the US needs them. The US can walk away and still remain the world’s policeman, its sole superpower.


Trump’s philosophy asserts power up-front and centre: unlike Theodore Roosevelt – who advised a strategy of “speak softly but carry a big stick”, Trump seems to favour big talk and big stick. No more soft power.


With such an attitude towards allies and competitors, the ultimate deal-doer will deliver best value, getting more from others in return for the US’s friendship, arms, market access or open hostility – sanctions or war.


Herein lies one of the greatest dangers of Trump’s presidency – taking negotiations with allies and enemies alike to the very brink, taking risks, unwillingness to admit error or defeat, reluctance to retreat from untenable initial positions. But even if he is forced to retreat, Trump will portray it as merely “advancing in a different direction”.


Global politics is in for a shock.


Sand in your eyes


The fourth major characteristic that might help explain Trump’s successful political strategy might be called “sand in your eyes” – the ability to divert attention from something he’d rather not talk about to something completely different and send the media scurrying off and analysing some off the wall outrageous public statement or tweet. “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he tweeted, suggesting that US intelligence services had leaked “fake news” to the media about him. This generated much media scrutiny, at home and abroad, deflecting attention from him onto the motives of the intelligence services.


While the media fact-check and report back, Trump and his people have already moved on.


Which brings us to the fifth principal feature of Trumpism – populism and the race card, or rather, the xenophobia card. When under attack, legitimately or otherwise, go on the offensive in the name of the people against the establishment and the outsider, the un-American. It could be the media, intelligence agencies, the Republican or Democratic establishments, Hollywood, or experts and university academics – but everyone is against Trump, who is all that stands between the people and the enemy within.


But this is just more sand in your eyes, agenda-setting for political pundits, media commentators and newsrooms – while behind the scenes a completely different agenda is followed. In the shadows, but mostly hidden in plain sight – Trump’s appointed billionaires to his cabinet, major international corporations now sit at the heart of the US administration, family members have taken over top White House positions. At the same time, right-wing think tanks like Heritage Foundation and Hoover Institution provide policy advice to deregulate Wall Street, abolish the few consumer financial protections implemented since the 2008 financial crash, empower energy corporations through denying climate change science, propose massive military spending, slashing healthcare provision, social security and welfare. Meanwhile, major construction and other corporations rub their hands in anticipation of major infrastructure-building contracts.


Big corporations and big money in politics – which is what Trump railed against to win office as a radical non-establishment outsider – is precisely what his administration stands for and is the source of his definition of American national interests.


There was an oft-used expression in the 1950s – “what’s good for General Motors is good for the United States” and vice versa. That was never quite true but the white working and middle classes that voted in their droves for Trump did see major improvements in living standards in that era. They have pinned their hopes for a return to the ‘good old days’ on a Trump presidency. He’s unlikely to deliver, because of the pro-business model at the core of his personality, policy ideas and senior appointments.


And that’s when he will be at his most dangerous at home – playing the race card, blaming minorities and enemies within, Chinese, Mexicans and Muslims. More sand in your eyes and tapping into the politics of white male identity – a self-assigned endangered species, besieged on all sides. And loyal to the new emperor.


If Obama could retain, purely on the basis of his African-American-ness, the near-total support of black voters, despite their material positions’ deterioration since 2008, Trump may well retain his white identity support base.


But the people who swung the election his way, in the rust belts of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, may not be satisfied with the smoke and mirrors of Trumpism unless they see some end to their economic woes and anxieties.


Division and rancour were the dominant effects of the Trump candidacy; as his inauguration draws near, this might be the new normal.


Future governor John Winthrop noted back in 1630 that the Puritan settlers would build “a city upon a hill.”


However that works out in Trump’s US, there is no doubting the truth of the second part of that quote – “the eyes of all people are upon us”.


Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.