America: Unraveling the Trump Doctrine

Dropping bombs in Nigeria, snatching a president and his wife in the dead of the night in Venezuela, seizing an oil tanker in international waters, threatening to capture and occupy Greenland, the largest island in the world, and introducing tariffs against just about every other country in the world and withdrawing membership from international institutions.

Looking at all this, lots of people around the world would be like;  “Hey what’s with the Americans? What’s jerking them off and why are they beating the crap and scaring the hell out of everyone in the world?’’

Welcome to the Trump doctrine of America first and everyone else behind. Under President Trump whatever pretense America used to have of being benign and helpful with the world has now given way to a meanness that is frightening and foreboding.

Some countries seeing what America has done to others under this doctrine have now elected to stay on the straight and narrow in order not to incur the unforgiving wrath of Uncle Sam.

So, if America wants your oil or mineral resources you better give it to them without argument. If they want to establish military bases in your country, by all means allow them. If the Yanks tell you the food you are eating in your country offends American noses, your best option would be to ask your people to stop cooking the stuff else you will be visited by swarms of tomahawks and drones from all directions.

This may sound a touch satirical but we had better be serious. President Donald Trump may sound like a maverick in the way he speaks and conduct himself, but as he had shown the capacity to back his words with action it will serve us well to take a closer look at what drives him into taking the actions he had taken and what lessons we can draw from them. As Trump has stated that under his doctrine, international law holds no truck with him and that he rather prefers his own morality, we will need to look at how this shapes his doctrine in global affairs.

First off, it will serve us to know that President Trump did not become president of the United States of America out of happenstance. In the developed countries of the world political power transition is very often a function of the constellation of power groups who take it upon themselves to choose the direction the country should follow and the team (s) to drive it. This is more often arrived at in relation to local or global trends and their effects.

American politics, right from inception, have been governed by the existential need of keeping the country on the defined path of being a nation of nations in a world in constant flux.

Thus, when the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now Donald Trump emerged as Presidents over the three centuries of America’s existence as a country, it was to reflect and address identified existential challenges facing the American state at their times of emergence.

Thus, Washington was chosen to lead the war of independence against the British. Jefferson, Monroe and Jackson were to consolidate the independence, ward off constant threats from the British and westward expansion of the country. Lincoln emerged to lead the country in the civil war between the northern and southern parts of it. Teddy Roosevelt at the beginning of the 20th century was installed to streamline and organise the emerging American business corporations.

And down the line his distant relation Franklin Delano Roosevelt emerged to stop the drift of the American economy and the resultant social consequences through far reaching social and economic restructuring policies in time for American recovery and participation in the second world war.

Harry Truman rode through the remaining years of the second world war following the demise of Roosevelt and consolidated American emergence as a global superpower in the post war years.

Eisenhower right through to Carter presided over the military industrial fortress that emerged from post war America and the wars they instigated successive American governments to fight in the name of rolling back communism.

The years from Ronald Reagan right through to George Snr were thrust on to the stage to finish off the ailing Russian-led Communist order in Europe and to warn off the Islamic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere as well as other third world groups that America would not tolerate any challenge to its global dominance.

Barack Obama, the odd one out of American presidents being the only black man so far to occupy the position, was chosen by the American establishment to roll back the uncontrolled excesses of American global engagement with the developing world and even close allies which reached a dangerous high during the years of George Bush Jnr.

Obama being a black man with a Muslim name (Hussein) and whose father was a Kenyan looked good for both the optics and also for the goal of strategic re-engagement with key American allies in the Islamic world and with the global south generally.

After Obama this is where Trump comes on to the stage. Why would the American establishment put forward an unlikely person with over 32 convictions and a draft dodger who was impeached by the Congress to lead the country at this stage of its over three centuries of existence.

The plain answer is that from the tea leaves, the situation both locally and globally does not look good for America. The American economy is tanking against emerging economies like China and the Asians and also Brazil, India and South Africa. And very importantly, the petrodollar arrangement signed with Saudi Arabia in 1974 for global oil sales to be designated in American dollars which replaced the gold standard, to shore up the American dollar as global reserve currency has practically collapsed. While it lasted America could virtually print up dollars, passed up the cost to the world and reap hugely in economic terms from it.

But 50 years after, the petrodollar is coming to an end as the Saudis are scaling the agreement down.

So the Trump doctrine is the end game of global American political and economic dominance since the end of the second world war. It is a combination of the Monroe doctrine enacted in the 1820s to keep Latin America completely under the dominance of the United States against any other power. The Trump doctrine also majorly incorporates the Truman doctrine which established and consolidated American global dominance from the post second world war era. President Trump and the American right-wing establishment that thrust him up are banking on using American military might to restore American global dominance. But while during the second world war and after it American economic dominance was evident and helped the country internally, now under the Trump doctrine, America is hurting both internally and externally. It is conceivable that under Trump doctrine, America rather than mend will break it abroad and within.

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