What is Trump’s real crime?
Reflections on Trump’s populist anti-imperialism
A most interesting commentary by Christian Parenti, “Trump’s Real Crime Is Opposing Empire,” appeared on April 7 in Compact, which maintains that the indictment of Trump is part of a war against the former president by the U.S. establishment, and that the reason for said war is Trump’s foreign policy heresies and his disregard for the financial interests of the establishment that are at stake in U.S. imperialist foreign policies.
Parenti is on target in saying that the indictment of Trump distracts from issues that are far more important. And he perhaps is correct in predicting that local prosecutors “eager to make a name for themselves by prosecuting a former president of the United States” will now feel that they have “free rein to criminally investigate and prosecute presidents after they leave office.” For these reasons, “the indictment does real harm to the American body politic.”
Moreover, Parenti makes a good case, citing a number of anti-imperialist initiatives and declarations of Trump. Especially important is the fact that Trump as President did not start any new wars, and he negotiated a peace settlement in Afghanistan. And he reduced U.S. military presence in Iraq, Germany, and South Korea. Parenti recognizes that Trump’s maverick foreign policy initiatives were sabotaged by his own staff, thus leading the press to downplay Trump’s anti-imperialist instincts.
Parenti is correct in declaring that “Trump isn’t an anti-imperialist in the left-wing sense. Rather, he is an instinctual America-First isolationist who seems to harbor genuine disdain for global elites and policy insiders.” Parenti perhaps gets to an important aspect of the political appeal of Trump when he declares that “his anti-militarist policy moves played well with his base, the flyover country working- and middle-class people who feel that they and their regions bear the brunt of the taxes, military recruitment, and deindustrialization that serve to support the American empire.”
Yet Parenti overlooks an important dimension of the U.S. imperialism of the epoch of Obama-Trump-Biden, namely, the unconventional war launched against Latin America in 2015. In this imperialist initiative in Latin America, Trump has been a full supporter and a full-fledged participant. Trump intensified the U.S. blockade of Cuba, and he continued the Obama policy of ideological and economic attacks against Venezuela and Nicaragua, in accordance with Bolton’s characterization of the “troika of evil.”
So perhaps Trump’s foreign policy instincts are not best understood as a populist anti-imperialism. Perhaps they are best understood as reflecting a realistic adjustment to the fact that the USA no longer is the dominant economic power in the world that it was in the decade following the Second World War. In Trump’s more realistic view of world affairs, there is acceptance that China will be an increasingly important player in global affairs, and that China has a right to be dominant in its own region. Similarly, Russia is accepted as an important regional player. Moreover, Europe must finance the protection of its own interests. At the same time, the USA will aggressively pursue its imperialist interests in the Western Hemisphere. In Trump’s view, America will become great again by accepting what it no longer has the resources to prevent in world affairs, and by concentrating its resources in full control of Latin America and the Caribbean.
For those that know history, this is a new version of the Monroe Doctrine, updated to take into account the economic decline of the USA relative to Europe and China.
True anti-imperialism, of course, does not involve realistic adaptations to declining imperialist power. In today’s evolving world reality, a U.S. anti-imperialist policy would involve cooperation with China and the Third World in the construction of an alternative world-system guided by the principles of respect for the sovereignty of nations and mutually beneficial trade among nations.
If I am right that Trump´s foreign policy should be understood as regional imperialism adapted to American decline, it would not negate Parenti´s thesis that Trump´s heterodox foreign policy is his real crime. There are significant elite interests at stake in the misguided global projection of U.S. imperialist interests.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment has demonstrated ignorance and/or indifference to the negative consequences that result when a declining power overextends itself in the hopeless task of preserving its hegemony. In order to break its fall, the necessary course of action for the USA is to focus on increasing its economic productivity, which would require abandoning imperialism for cooperation and mutually beneficial trade.
A free subscription option is available, with capacity to read, send, and share all posts. A paid subscription ($5 per month or $40 per year) enables you to make comments and to support the costs of the column; full subscribers ($40 per year) also receive a free PDF copy of my book on Cuba and the world-system.
Follow me on Twitter: Charles McKelvey@CharlesMcKelv14