Washington is in the grip of a revolution. The bleak cadence of last month’s inauguration was still in the air when President Donald Trump lobbed the first Molotov cocktail of policies and executive orders against the capital’s brilliant-white porticos.
He has not stopped. Quitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, demanding a renegotiation of NAFTA and a wall with Mexico, overhauling immigration, warming to Brexit-bound Britain and to Russia, cooling to the European Union, defending torture, attacking the press—onward he and his people have charged, leaving the wreckage of received opinion smoldering in their wake.
To his critics Trump is reckless and chaotic, nowhere more so than in last week’s temporary ban on entry for citizens from seven Middle Eastern countries—drafted in secret, enacted in haste and unlikely to fulfil its declared aim of sparing America from terrorism. Even his Republican allies lamented that a fine, popular policy had been marred by its execution.
In politics chaos normally leads to failure. With Trump, chaos seems to be part of the plan. Promises that sounded like hyperbole in the campaign now amount to a deadly-serious revolt aimed at shaking up Washington and the world.
To understand Trump’s insurgency, start with the uses of outrage. In a divided America, where the other side is not only mistaken but malign, conflict is a political asset. The more Trump used his stump speeches to offend polite opinion, the more his supporters were convinced that he really would evict the treacherous, greedy elite from their Washington salons.
His grenade-chuckers-in-chief, Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, have now carried that logic into government. Every time demonstrators and the media rail against Trump, it is proof that he must be doing something right. If the outpourings of the West Wing are chaotic, it only goes to show that Trump is a man of action, even as he promised. The secrecy and confusion of the immigration ban are a sign not of failure, but of how his people shun the self-serving experts who habitually subvert the popular will.
The politics of conflict are harnessed to a world view that rejects decades of American foreign policy. Tactically Trump has little time for the multilateral bodies that govern everything from security to trade to the environment. He believes that lesser countries reap most of the rewards while America foots the bill. It can exploit its bargaining power to get a better deal by picking off countries one by one.
Bannon and others reject American diplomacy strategically too. They believe that multilateralism embodies an obsolete liberal internationalism. Today’s ideological struggle is not for universal human rights, but for the defense of “Judeo-Christian” culture from the onslaught of other civilizations, in particular Islam. Seen through this prism, the United Nations and the European Union are obstacles and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, for the moment, a potential ally.
Nobody can say how firmly Trump believes all this. Perhaps, amid the trappings of power, he will tire of guerrilla warfare. Perhaps a stock-market correction will so unsettle the nation’s CEO that he will cast Bannon out. Perhaps a crisis will force him into the arms of his chief of staff and his secretaries of defense and state, none of whom is quite the insurgent type.
Americans who reject Trump will, naturally, fear most for what he could do to their own country. They are right to worry, but they gain some protection from their institutions and the law. In the world at large, however, checks on Trump are few. The consequences could be grave.
Without active American support and participation, the machinery of global cooperation could well fail. The World Trade Organization would not be worthy of the name. The United Nations would fall into disuse. Countless treaties and conventions would be undermined.
What to do? The first task is to limit the damage.
Moderate Republicans and America’s allies need to tell him why Bannon and his co-ideologues are wrong. Even in the narrowest sense of American self-interest, their appetite for bilateralism is misguided, not least because the economic harm from the complexity and contradictions of a web of bilateral relations would outweigh any gains to be won from tougher negotiations.
Trump also needs to be persuaded that alliances are America’s greatest source of power. Its unique network plays as large a role as its economy and its military might in making it the global superpower. Alliances help raise it above its regional rivals—China in East Asia, Russia in eastern Europe, Iran in the Middle East. If Trump truly wants to put America first, his priority should be strengthening ties, not treating allies with contempt.
If this advice is ignored? America’s allies must strive to preserve multilateral institutions for the day after Trump, by bolstering their finances and limiting the strife within them.
They also must plan for a world without American leadership.
© 2017 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (February 4). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Image credits: Al Drago/The New York Times