Deep divisions at home will go on weakening America regardless of who is elected

Students taking exams in modern history in coming decades are likely to be asked about the nature and importance of Donald Trump’s years in office. Among the questions those future students may have to answer, there is likely to be one along the following lines: “President Trump promised when elected in 2016 to make America great again. How far did he succeed in doing so and, if he did not, why not?”

This should be an easy question for the students to answer because they can truthfully give a categorical black-and-white response: the US is demonstrably weaker as a world power than it was in 2016 because, as a nation, it is more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War, a century-and-a-half ago. This multifaceted division is not going to disappear, regardless of whether Trump or Joe Biden win the presidential election, and it may well be exacerbated by the result.

American hegemony was originally based on its economic might and by victory in the Second World War, enhanced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, its only rival, in 1991. Its economic dominance has been challenged by China and the EU, though it remains the sole financial superpower. Its military superiority is sustained by vast expenditure but has been dented by its failure to win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

American political, economic and military decline is real, though not cataclysmic, and the whole ramshackle system might have gone on for a long time without disastrous consequences if it had not been unexpectedly put to the test. This came in the shape of the coronavirus pandemic and every day brings news that it is a test the US is failing dismally. 

It is exposing the competence of the government and the unity of the people as spectacularly inadequate when it comes to coping with a real crisis. For all Trump’s rants about “the China virus” and the launching of a new cold war against China, the Chinese state has so far succeeded in controlling the virus and the US state has not.  

The exam-taking students of the future may be faced with a second question about the same topic. This would ask something like: “Was President Trump a symptom or a cause of America's decline as a super-power in the 21st century?” The answer is, of course, that it was a bit of both, and Trump would not have reached the White House if America had not already been in a slow-burning crisis, but he certainly exacerbated the trajectory downwards.

But students who want to get the highest marks should at this point introduce a note of caution, writing in nuanced terms about America’s decline. They should recall that distinguished political scientists made just such Cassandra-like prophecies about the decline of the US 30 years ago – and then witnessed the Soviet Union collapse, leaving the US as the sole superpower.

What is not in doubt is that the US has long been faltering compared to the rest of the world and, for the last 40 years, many Americans have seen their standard of living stagnate or fall below their previous level. This is not just an American phenomenon from which Trump has benefited since a wave of right-wing populist nationalist leaders across the globe have done so too. Radical dislocation caused by globalisation has energised half-buried hatreds and rivalries enabling Trump-type leaders to ride into power on the back of these grievances.  

Racial differences are at the bottom of America’s wide political and cultural divide, more acute than in much of the world because they have their origins in the  toxic legacy of slavery and the civil war between slave and free states. Differences between North and South never ended, kept alive by the Jim Crow laws, the apartheid faced by black Americans for a 100 years after the formal abolition of slavery. 

What is surprising is that even after civil rights were granted in the 1960s, it was the political and cultural norms of the South – appealing to white male Protestants without college degrees outside metropolitan centres – that expanded into other parts of the country. In Trump  this constituency found their messiah to whom they show cult-like devotion, however disastrous his performance as head of state during the pandemic.

Again, the student historians of the future will have to be careful about their sources of information. The fact that Trump lies all the time does not mean that his opponents habitually tell the truth. Hatred towards Trump shown by much of the western media and pundit class is so extreme that it is difficult to get a clear picture, undistorted by bias, of what Trump has or has not done.

This is particularly true of his foreign policy. It would be easy, for instance, to miss the fact that Trump has not started any wars during his time in office. The same could not be said of President George W Bush (Afghanistan, Iraq) or President Obama (Libya). Such an outcome did not seem probable back in 2016, given Trump’s bombastic jingoism which often sounded like a prelude to military action, particularly in the Middle East.

Making America Great Again turned out to be a non-militaristic project – to the surprise and disappointment of several of Trump’s neo-conservative appointees. At times over the past four years, wars with Iran and Syria seemed all too likely but, in the event, they never happened.  Trump’s chosen instrument for exercising US power has been sanctions rather than airstrikes and he has looked to the US Treasury rather than to the Pentagon to lead the attack.

I realise that anything that smells like a defence of Trump will get short shrift among many readers who have seen and heard nothing but demonisation of his policies as idiotic or criminal. There is a good deal to be said for this view, but there is also a crude realism about what Trump does. Demonic he may be – certainly the worst US president ever – but detestation of him on the part of American and European pundits often turns into exaggerated praise and unthinking  acceptance of what was done by the Obama/Biden administration in the past and may be done by a Biden-run White House in future.

The slogan of the Biden campaign, when it comes to foreign policy, is ‘Restoring American Leadership, which sounds comfortingly bland and uncontroversial.  But what exactly is to be restored and will its restoration be a good or a bad thing for America and the world. Trump’s attention-grabbing belligerence obscures the fact that the alternative policies being offered by Biden could be a rerun of those that produced endless wars in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Such disastrous conflicts are the outcome of what President Obama identified as ‘the Washington Playbook’, derided by him as an unthinking willingness by the US foreign policy establishment to use force to meet any international challenge.

If Biden is elected president, then the world may give a collective sigh of relief as he fulfils his pledges to re-join organisations like the World Health Organisation and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Yet we may also see a return to this old ‘Washington Playbook’, as the US national security elite gets back in the saddle. Biden, more than any other Democrat, has been a leading member of that disaster-prone group since the 1980s. A Biden-led restoration threatens to be like that of the Bourbon monarchs in France after Napoleon in 1815, who turned out, during their exile from power, “to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

Not every failing of American foreign policy stems from Trump and often, despite his own claims to the contrary, he has followed roughly the same course as the Obama/Biden administration.  He fulsomely embraces brutal autocrats like Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, but Obama/Biden did not behave much differently towards him when he came to power in 2015. They may baulk at Trump’s dismissive attitude towards the murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, but would they really have taken serious measures against the Saudi ruler?  

The precedents suggest that they would not. The Obama/Biden era was big on taking the moral high ground, but poor at turning high-minded words into positive action. Obama entered the White House in 2009 openly sceptical about US military intervention in Afghanistan, but he rapidly caved in to Pentagon demands for a surge in the number of troops to be sent there. This U-turn might be explained as the act of a newly elected Democratic president with no choice but to go along with whatever his generals wanted him to do. Yet after he had been six years in office in 2015,  he gave a green light for Saudi and UAE military intervention in Yemen that has left 20 million Yemenis short of food, 10 million of them on the edge of starvation according to the World Food Programme. 

A feature of the Obama/Biden years was that they spoke privately and publicly about the failings of official American Government policy – notably in the Middle East – but then, after some ritual hand-wringing, they went along with it anyway. Often it is easy to forget that they were supposedly running the country. A classic example of this is Obama’s description of his frustrations over American foreign policy that he gave in a fascinating series of interviews published in The Atlantic magazine during his last year in office. 

He questioned, often harshly, “the role that America’s Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally.” He says much the same about Pakistan, his scepticism about the real motives and intentions of America’s purported allies abroad extended to their proxies and supporters in the US. 

The report says that “a widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think-tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders”. One administration official referred to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think-tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory”.

How far will a president Biden differ in style and substance from Obama? As a senator, Biden voted for the Iraq war, but he insists that as vice-president – and unlike Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – he opposed intervention in Libya and the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011: “My question was, 'OK, tell me what happens.' He's gone. What happens? Doesn't the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn't it become a place where it becomes a Petri dish for the growth of extremism?” But, as so often, Biden’s reservations made no difference.

Trump furiously denounced Obama’s policies in the Middle East as weak, and even treacherous. The biggest point at issue was the nuclear deal with Iran signed in 2015 and from which Trump withdrew, introducing swingeing sanctions against Iran. On other issues, notably the wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya, Obama and Trump expressed similar views about them being “messes” which the US should keep out of. As successful politicians,  they knew that, following the Iraq and Afghan wars, Americans have little appetite for foreign ventures that turn into quagmires from which the US cannot extract itself.

The nearest that Trump came to a shooting war was against Iran in 2019/2020 when there was an escalating series of pinprick attacks by Iran or Iranian proxies against the UAE and Saudi Arabia. This shadowy guerrilla conflict was the Iranian response to the US strategy of “maximum pressure” through economic sanctions. It culminated in Trump ordering a US drone attack that killed the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the head of al-Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the orchestrater of the anti-US shadow war, at Baghdad airport on 3 January. But Trump was careful not to let the conflict escalate after the assassination, allowing the Iranians to fire missiles openly at two US bases in Iraq without retaliation.

A feature of the present generation of far-right populist nationalist leaders such as Trump is that they are averse to foreign wars. In this, their actions are in sharp contrast to extreme right European leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Mussolini, who were eager to launch foreign military interventions to strengthen their nationalist credentials. Contemporary far-right leaders such as Narendra Modi in India are equally willing to use force, but their violence so far is primarily directed against minorities at home (Blacks and Latinos in the US, Kurds in Turkey, Muslims in India). This violence can turn outwards, an example being Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan launching intervention in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh, but in most countries ruled by such regimes this has not yet happened.

Biden may want to restore American leadership in a post-Trump era. But it is doubtful if this can be done because the very fact that Trump was elected is strong evidence that the American political system is becoming dysfunctional. Trump is cause and effect of an implosion disabling the system but, even so, he might have got away with it had he not been capsized by the coronavirus epidemic with which he manifestly could not cope. If Biden wins many will want to dismiss Trump as an aberration, but a system that produces such aberrations is in deep trouble.