Ethnocentric and practical geopolitics
Trump’s outside-the-box approach to Gaza, Ukraine, and foreign affairs
Ethnocentrism is the Achilles heel of the MAGA movement for American renewal. Wikipedia describes an Achilles heel as “a weakness despite overall strength, which can lead to downfall,” and I am using the expression in precisely this sense, as a weakness that could cause the downfall of MAGA, despite its strengths.
I have in recent commentaries discussed the positive response of the MAGA movement to the current national crisis. Its faith in America and its vision of American renewal. Its interpretation of the history of the American Republic as a continuous expansion of its democratic project. Its proposal to revitalize the American economy by unleashing national production of energy and by international trade that benefits national interests. Its decisive steps toward enforcing immigration law. Its opposition to the bureaucratic administrative state. Its belief in “peace through strength,” using military force primarily as a deterrent, and minimizing foreign entanglements. Its elimination of DEI, proposing selection of individuals on the basis of merit and not group membership. Its espousal of a spiritual worldview. Its desire to renew national purpose, unity, and identity. The MAGA movement, led by Donald Trump, is an anti-establishment people’s movement, based in the working class and middle America, and rooted in populist nationalism. (See “Renewing American identity and values: The people are rising to save the American republic,” February 7, 2025).
However, I also have in six recent commentaries addressed the lack of consistent anti-imperialist consciousness in the MAGA movement. (See, for example, “A critique of MAGA from real socialism: Economic nationalism as constructive cooperation with the world,” December 27, 2024). This defect is rooted in a profound ignorance of the world, particularly the evolving characteristics of real socialism in the Global East and South, as well as the anti-imperialist movement of the states of the Global South and East, which are cooperating in the piece-by-piece practical construction of a democratic, post-colonial world order. This defect of MAGA and Trump, which involves ethnocentrism rather than racism, is shared by practically all political parties and theoretical currents in the political culture of the United States.
In the case of MAGA, however, the ethnocentric cultural blindness is particularly unfortunate, because the positive characteristics of MAGA, as an anti-establishment movement based in the working class and middle America, brings it close to a necessary and vital step, in which, driven by the need to improve American productivity, it seeks mutually beneficial trade with the nations of the Global East and South, thus implementing in practice the principal demand of the world anti-imperialist movement. The ethnocentrism of MAGA prevents it from seeing that the finding of common ground with the nations of the East and South is the key to Making America Great Again.
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The need to understand surviving colonial structures
If you do not understand the colonial foundations of the world-system, you cannot understand U.S. ascent to world dominance. Because the key to U.S. ascent was its strategic insertion into global economic structures being forged by European colonial domination of the world. Said strategic insertions included the trade between, on the one hand, farmers and merchants of the New England and Middle Atlantic colonies, and on the other hand, the slaveholders of the Caribbean Islands. This lucrative trade, involving the sale of a variety of food and animal products to the owners of slave plantations, enabled merchants in the emerging American Republic to constitute itself as a rising industrial class by the nineteenth century. The rising manufacturing class in the U.S. North developed a lucrative core-peripheral trading relation with the U.S. South, which rapidly converted itself into a peripheral zone, primarily on a base of African slave labor, during the first half of the nineteenth century. A second important insertion occurred during the first half of the twentieth century, when weak states in Latin America and the Caribbean were economically penetrated through U.S. imperialist policies, including numerous military interventions, providing raw materials and markets for U.S. industrial and agricultural producers. These strategic insertions were supplemented by U.S. territorial expansion and by profits from the manufacturing of arms during the two world wars of the twentieth century.
If you do not understand U.S. ascent, you cannot understand that such strategies for economic advancement are no longer available. The world has changed. There are no new lands to peripheralize. And the colonized peoples of the earth have organized themselves to defend their right to freely determine their national path to modern economic development, and in exercising this right, they stand in opposition to the structures of the Western-centered neocolonial world economy. Their universal and sustained resistance makes the continuation of the Western project more difficult and costly.
If you do not understand these global dynamics, you cannot understand what adjustments need to be made to protect your own interests. You wind up taking steps that are detrimental to your interests, which means that you have arrived to a condition of decadence, in which you not only decline, but you also do not know how to reverse your decline. There are several signs of American decadence: lost wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan; failed and costly efforts at regime change; enormous state budget and balance of trade deficits; the rise of China’s productive capacity and international prestige, combined with the relative fall of the USA in these dimensions; and profound political and cultural divisions in the United States.
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Trump’s pragmatic approach to geopolitics
Donald Trump is the creator and leader of the MAGA movement. He created the movement when, already a known personality outside of politics, he entered the Republican presidential primaries in 2016. As Steve Bannon has explained (interview by Ross Douthat, “Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism,” The New York Times, January 31, 2025), Trump stood out from the other presidential candidates and broke ahead of the crowd. He resonated with voters through a discourse that improvised on the headlines and that drew upon a populist nationalism that was both economic and cultural. Trump is of that generation of Americans which came of age when the nation was still a great economic and military power and have lived the experience of American decline since 1965. In formulating a vision to Make America Great Again, he of course could not avoid the prevailing ethnocentrism of American political culture.
At the same time, there can be discerned in Trump’s political instincts a strong practicality. He accepts to some extent that the USA is not the hegemonic power that it once was, capable of imposing its political will and economic interests on all the world. During his first administration, he was disposed to negotiate for better trade relations with rival world powers like China and Russia (and also North Korea), recognizing their role in the world-system as nearly equal powers as a fact that could not practically be denied. At the same time, with the same practicality, he was oriented to the reassertion of U.S. control over Latin America and the Caribbean, as the zone of appropriate U.S. regional power. He therefore sought to undermine Latin American governments, like Cuba and Venezuela, which were seeking to defend their sovereignty and were leading the nations of the region toward true independence from the USA. In addition, he called upon NATO nations to take greater responsibility for the defense of Europe, inasmuch as the USA no longer has the capacity to bankroll their defense.
Trump therefore envisions a multilateral world, in which the basic structural economic advantages for the powerful nations are preserved. In the emerging multilateral world order, the world powers respect the regional zones of influence of rival powers, and if they are intelligent, they avoid costly wars that seek to economically penetrate the lands of the once-colonized zones.
At the same time, because of the pervasive ethnocentrism of American political culture, Trump is not aware that Xi Jinping and Putin, in concert with many States of the Global East and South, are putting forth a proposal that goes beyond the notion of a multilateral world order. They are proposing a new world order based on mutually beneficial trade among all nations, as the best possible guarantor of world peace and prosperity. This vision of Xi and Putin is not a vision that Trump shares. He does not see that participation in a more just and democratic world of mutually beneficial trade would be beneficial for the USA, because it would facilitate revitalization of the American economy. And it would enable a restoration of U.S. prestige in the world, because the large size and advanced technology of the American national economy would ensure that it would be a welcome and desired partner among the nations of the world, if the partnership were to be based in win-win.
Thus, the MAGA proposal for the development of the American national economy implicitly points to a road that Trump and MAGA cannot see. As a result, with respect to Latin America, Trump wants to resurrect the practice of a Latin America backyard, which may explain the designation of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.
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Seeking peace in Gaza
In addition to preserving the nation’s backyard in Latin America, Trump wants to preserve the special relation between the United States and Israel, which dates to the end of the Second World War. Among other factors, this special relation is driven by the fact that there are approximately as many Jews living in the United States as in Israel, and there are many times more Jews in the USA than any other country, except Isreal. American Jews were central to the migrations from Europe to the USA during the period 1865 to 1914, which was an integral part of the formation of the American people. In addition, Trump views Israel as its most important ally in the Middle East, ensuring a proxy military presence in the region without the necessity of U.S. troops.
In accordance with this view of Israel as a special ally, Trump’s outside-the-box proposal for Gaza can be seen as a move to complete Israel’s three-decade-long plan to subvert the two-state solution and to relocate the Palestinian people. Trump’s proposal is long on pragmatics and short on principles. As a practical matter, the two-state solution has been undermined in practice by Israeli settlements and military occupation, which when combined with the destruction of Gaza, poses serious practical obstacles to the revitalization of the two-state solution. States and civil society organizations of the world have repeatedly declared for years in favor of the two-state solution (with pre-1967 borders and East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine), but they have been unable to prevent Israel (with U.S. backing) from undermining the two-state solution in practice. On the other hand, the relocation of Palestinians to Arab states is a practical possibility, taking into account the access of said states to financial resources as well as their increasing desire to participate in the solution of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. And so is the relocation of Palestinians to Western nations a practical possibility; those Western governments that have involved themselves in the conflict by declaring that Israel is engaging in genocide could follow their moral posturing with practical action in the form of resettlement programs, providing an option for Palestinian families. And Trump’s idea to redevelop the leveled zones of Gaza as an area of beach tourism is a proposal that could generate income for Gaza residents in the long term.
But Trump’s outside-the-box proclamations with respect to Gaza lack an important element, namely, anti-imperialist principles. Trump seems to think that a permanent peace settlement can be attained without the participation of delegates of the Palestinian people. To be sure, Israeli expansionism and militarism has led to a situation is which the structures of Palestinian representation have been to a degree delegitimated among the Palestinian people, such that a reconstruction of processes of representation in Palestine is one of the current rebuilding tasks. This problem must be addressed in some reasonable form, enabling Palestinian participation in the peace process.
The right of nations and peoples to freely determine their future is one of the most basic principles of the world anti-imperialist movement. Trump’s lack of anti-imperialist consciousness leads him to think that a practical solution to the conflict in the Middle East can be found without attention to this fundamental principle. Trump understands the importance of principles in political affairs, which he demonstrates by his constant expression of the principle that the bureaucracy of the U.S. government ought to be controlled and administered by the elected representatives of the people. And during his first administration, he declared before the United Nations General Assembly that all nations have the right to defend their economic interests. Apparently, determined to defend Israel against a barrage of attacks, Trump has lost sight of this principle with respect to the people and the nation of Palestine.
Trump’s declarations appear to be suggesting a solution that abandons the historic Palestinian struggle for statehood, in the face of the practical obstacles that the goal of Palestinian statehood now confronts. But the abandonment of the struggle for statehood in favor of other approaches to defending the Palestinian people is a decision that can only be made by the Palestinian people.
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Seeking peace in Ukraine
Trump’s multilateralist practicality with respect to Russia has led him to a degree of anti-imperialist consciousness, in that he discerns that NATO expansionism and Western interventionism in the political affairs of Ukraine are the causes of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, which he declares never would have happened if he had been in the White House. He now puts forth a practical notion, that negotiations ought to take into account the territory that Russia now occupies, which are areas of Ukraine with a high proportion of Russian people, where the Russian military presence is supported. As is logical, Putin appears to be responding favorably to Trump’s peace initiative.
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Final considerations
The MAGA movement is the only vibrant movement of the working class in the United States in the current historic moments of national crisis, which gives it legitimacy. The MAGA movement has been called into being by Donald Trump, for which he deserves credit. The movement stayed with him in spite of the personal attacks by the legacy media and the lawfare strategy of the political establishment, bringing him to a second presidency.
The second Trump administration takes off with decisive action seeking to fulfill promises to the people, and seeking to rectify decades of unpatriotic betrayal by the political establishment. The administration is essentially on the correct road toward the renewal of the republic, which does not mean that every decision is correct.
The great weakness of Trump and the MAGA movement is ethnocentrism, which is a normal human tendency. Rather than dismissing the MAGA movement as racism, xenophobic, and so on, it should be critically and constructively engaged, with an orientation to moving it beyond ethnocentrism.
Although a normal human tendency, ethnocentrism can be overcome through personal encounter and critical listening with persons of different cultures, which must occur as a collective and sustained process, which has been given the name “Dialogue of Civilizations” by the peoples of the Global South. Such dialogue is the necessary road for the construction of a more just, democratic, and sustainable world order. And without a sustainable world order, the American republic cannot be renewed.
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