The world might be on the cusp of the return of Great Power politics. On the face of it, the catalytic spur to this formulation or condition is the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump. And the eloquent emblematizing portrait of the same would be the televised ‘spat’ between the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky and team Trump.
The deliberately televised ‘debate’ between the former and the latter - essentially in the nature of a public drubbing of Zelensky - appeared to have been designed to suggest his irrelevance to the future of Ukraine and a prelude to great power talks between America and Russia.
But assuming away Donald Trump as the spur to Great Power politics would amount to denialism - that of profound structural shifts and transformations in America since the end of the Cold War.
Tsunami of tectonic shift
These tectonic shifts - obscured by a fawning media and elite - are what gave birth to ‘Trumpism’: a veritable tsunami that is ‘paradigm changing’ in the Kuhnian sense. The 47th president of the United States may be more in the nature of a face or emblem of this Tsunami.
Were, the question is, Americans and the sober sections of its intelligentsia blind to these trends and themes? Were they so caught up in the swoon of globalization, excessive consumption, drool over American power and the domestic plus international orientation of the country, that the United States sleepwalked into ‘Trumpism’?
(The reference to Trumpism is not a pejorative take on the same and has no negative connotations. The author of this essay believes that injected with some degree of ‘temperance’ and sobriety, Trumpism may even be good for the United States). Now returning to the questions of ‘American blindness’ and ‘sleepwalking’, the answer, in the main, to both is a resounding yes.
Is it anti-intellectualism?
One reason may lie in the erudite and sober late Richard Hofstadter’s assertion about a vigorous strand of ‘anti-intellectualism’ that appears to define the American collective conscious. When a given culture’s or society’s animating locus is not the intellect, and its moorings are determined more by consumption, and say, wanton hedonism, drift is not far away.
In this schema, what may have been among the founding and foundational myths of the United States or there may have been something to that is, ‘protestant ethic as the animating and determining aspect of American capitalism’ adumbrated by Max Weber may have been lost to vulgar consumerism and consumption.
Emblematized by the ubiquity of the ‘credit card’ and a lack of focus on thrift and savings, this theme and development has been ably ‘called out’ by the great social scientist, the late Daniel Bell.
But, all in all, it would be unfair to state there were no warning bells, calls to action, and bringing to public attention the ills that plagued America after the end of the Cold War. The best and most prominent of these was an American historian and a mild mannered, even shy, professor of International Relations, at Boston University, Professor Andrew Bacevich.
American condition after Cold War
In his magnificent oeuvre, ‘The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism’ (that I read as an angry thirty something old in 2008) and, ‘The Age of Illusions: How America squandered its Cold War victory’ (that I read as a more grounded person and which I reviewed) a few years ago, Professor Bacevich laid out brilliantly, eloquently, the American condition after the end of the Cold War.
Be it the mono-focal obsessive focus on globalization by the American elite, an obsessive focus on American hard power as a ‘force for global stability’, a notion of ‘freedom untethered from self-restraint’, and an ‘inflated American presidency as the fulcrum of government’ (as opposed to American founding father’s intent), Professor Bacevich laid it all out in a brilliantly prescient manner (all underpinned by typical thoughtfulness, sobriety and gravitas).
In his book, ‘The Limits of Power…’, Professor Bacevich averred that paralleling the ‘softness of American citizens, the United States was changing drastically: a ‘vast new permanent security establishment – the Pentagon, the FBI and the CIA and the NSC - was created which enabled a massive expansion in executive power’.
According to professor Bacevich, this may not have been too bad but for the fact that, ‘the vast bureaucracy proved more hindrance than help where individual agencies cared more for turf and their own interests, where generals became mere careerists looking out for themselves and frustrated Presidents turned to their coteries for advice and so on’.
War a permanent condition
The inevitable consequences of these developments fructified in ‘the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam war, the 70’s oil crisis, the First Gulf War, Somalia and Kosovo culminating post 9/11 the long ‘war on terror’, the Iraq and Afghan wars which made war a permanent condition’.
What the mild-mannered professor adumbrated is an eerie echo of the American condition since the end of the Cold War. And, on the face of it, it is these conditions (and forces) that the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump appears to be dismantling and taking on.
The correspondence between Professor Bacevich’s descriptive diagnosis of the American condition and what Donald Trump has made his ostensible agenda and aim is eerie. This is not to suggest that Professor Bacevich is the intellectual tour de force of President Trump’s policies and politics. No, it is far from it.
Trumpism as a force appears to have emerged as an ‘organic’ reaction to post-Cold War positioning, politics and the policy incubus of the United States. But it is here where the rub lies.
America’s deep, structural problems
While prescriptively, as in how to fix America’s deep and structural problems, Professor Bacevich’s work is not as sharp as his description and analysis of the same, but the 47th President of the United States could take the proverbial leaf from the good professor’s suggestions.
America, to employ a phrase from business terminology is at an ‘inflection point’, world politics at the cusp of great power competition and politics and so on. If America gets its wrong at this extremely delicate point in time, the consequences - intergenerational - would be disastrous for the country and by extension the world.
While I am sure that Donald Trump understands and realizes the enormity of his tasks, challenges and the very delicate nature of the world historical moment plus the power he has, it may be eminently prudent to dust off his bookshelf or open Amazon’s website, immediately order Professor Bacevich’s oeuvres and absorb his theses. America and the world may be better for it!
PS: Professor Andrew Bacevich - a vocal critic of the Second Gulf War and broadly militarism - lost his son in the same war. This epic tragedy, if one is making inferences from the good professor’s public utterances, works and essays, has neither made him bitter nor vindictive. Contrarily, the tragedy appears to have reinforced his anti-militaristic philosophy and stance.
Have you liked the news article?