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Nalo
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Posted: Thu, 3rd Apr 2025 06:50 Post subject: Trump the Neoliberal President |
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Rather than an American anomaly, the impetuous 47th president of the United States is in control of a power system that was already broken after decades of unipolarity and neoliberal agendas. Donald Trump’s true innovation in today’s politics is therefore in the blunt language with which he announces his “America First” priorities, while his country’s goals of world supremacy remain the same.
Common sentiments perceive Donald Trump as a political anomaly for America. Allegedly disrupting two centuries of administrative and diplomatic traditions, his political directions are often accompanied by surprise and shock in the media. When we hear such interpretations, we should find a minute to reflect outside the noise. Trump does what statesmen do and have done in America—and the rest of the world—since the birth of nation-states. They serve a grand national narrative. In the case of the US, whoever comes into office attends the mythology of American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and the American Dream. All presidents do that, including Trump. Indeed, the current president, like his predecessor Joe Biden, follows the fixed idea that America has a historic mission, and that mission requires the country to be at the helm of the world and set the pace for all other countries. That is because America, the beacon of the New World, is always on the right side of history. Or so we were raised to believe.
A true neoliberal president
Considered under this light, the Trump administration is not a strange, crazy, or unexpected incident. Rather, it appears in continuity with the post-Cold War power politics that the US adopted to expand and consolidate its position of the world’s first economy. This went under the name of “Unipolar System,” which emerged in the Clinton years. Some call this “neoliberalism,” a political doctrine dictated primarily by economic goals and an ideology steeped in the firm conviction that every action is a transaction and that every organisation is a “business” (not to be confused with the use done by others who equate neoliberalism with globalisation). Trump is the natural heir of that system in today’s monetised world, where cosmopolitan oligarchies shape political agendas.
The difference between Trump and his predecessors is essentially in the language used in foreign policy. His dialectic comes from the domain of business and it is a crude, simple, and straight language. CEOs don’t need to talk about individual rights or democracy to justify a strategy or a business choice. Those are unnecessary categories when all one needs to produce is profit, no matter how. And profit translated into political language is interest. Trump, like all businesspeople, works for the profit/interest of the business he runs—currently the government of the United States of America.
With neoliberalism, we witness the primacy of the market over politics, economic freedom being regarded of greater importance than political freedom—that is the freedom to manage the economy democratically, for the greater good. Unpopular policies that tend to disfavour large portions of a society, often labelled as “austerity measures,” are adopted under the justification of the imperative goal of economic growth by ruling classes that have internalised the firm belief that the public sector can and should be run as a private business. As a result, state entities today operate like private firms under the pressure of annual budgets and credit rating agencies in a phenomenon that economist Mariana Mazzucato calls the “infantilisation” of governments. This circumstance is amplified when entrepreneurs surge to the position of heads of government, as is the case with Trump.
The dismantling of the Liberal World Order
So, rather than thinking of Trump as anti-American, we should narrow the debate down to his neoliberal rejection of government, an idea that he shares with many other business moguls in America and around the world. Government is a useless red-tape problem and an obstacle to economic returns (this idea finds in Ronald Reagan its greatest political precursor). After targeting national governments for decades with deregulation, liberalisation, devolution, and austerity measures, the time has arrived for neoliberals to embark on a bigger contest. That is, the dismantling of the global red-tape of multilateral organisations. If there is an America that Trump is challenging, that is the America of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the architect of the liberal international order as we have known it under the umbrella of the United Nations’ (UN) system of international law since 1945. That, in my humble view, was one of the greatest achievements of modern history, the one experiment that has come closest to Immanuel Kant’s utopia of perpetual peace. However, the America that masterminded the liberal order had been betrayed by the US several times before Trump.
America had de facto conducted its affairs mostly outside the boundaries of that order since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That epochal event gave the US the unprecedented position of “unipolar” hegemon, allowing the US to pursue its geopolitical goals first and foremost, with no or very little regard for its allies’ or other global interests. The different residents of the White House pursued a position of dominance in all regions, while maintaining the narrative of liberal democracy. This meant that every foreign policy decision was accompanied by justifications for “exporting democracy,” “protecting human rights,” or defending the “international rules-based order.”
When we look at the post-Cold War conflicts led by the US, from the Balkans to Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, we see a superpower seeking to impose its will outside its borders, notwithstanding the interests of its allies or partners. That is the essence of US foreign policy according to critics like American scholar Jeffrey Sachs, as he recently explained to the European Parliament. Trump’s approach to foreign policy seems to confirm this quest for global dominance, although it is accompanied by a new narrative. The bare language of Power Politics
Before accepting the conventional idea that Trump is radically disrupting American and world politics, therefore, we should consider that the difference that he is making is, for the moment, predominantly semantic. We are now, unequivocally, witnessing the full display of power politics, where the strong prosper and the weak do what they’re told. With such language, the major powers will not need to invoke liberal values or principles like self-determination or state sovereignty to disguise wars as just. And no one will need to conduct perilous investigations about undercover regime change activities to expose the hypocrisy of those powers. All that is now out in the open thanks to a new muscular neoliberal communication. For this dramatic change to political formality, the nostalgic supporters of diplomatic rituals (like me) will blame Trump, while political analysts should thank him for bringing clarity and sincerity into their field of inquiry
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https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/trump-the-neoliberal-president-new-language-same-old-politics-for-now/
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