The Greatest (Geo-Political) Showman’s ‘Inside Out’ Political Solution
Putin hinted this week that the Ukraine conflict could end in weeks, so Trump may not have a long wait.
How to do the impossible? America is instinctively an expansionist power, needing new fields to conquer; new financial horizons to master and to exploit. The U.S. is built that way. Always was.
But – if you are Trump, wanting to withdraw from wars on the empire’s periphery, yet nonetheless wanting too, to cast a shiny image of a muscular America expanding and leading global politics and finance – how to do it?
Well, President Trump – ever the showman – has a solution. Disdain the now-discredited intellectual ideology of muscular American global hegemony; suggest rather, that these earlier ‘forever wars’ should never really have been ‘our wars’; and, as Alon Mizrahi has advanced and suggested, set about re-colonising that which was already colonised: Canada; Greenland; Panama – and Europe too, of course.
America thus will be bigger; Trump will act with decisive muscularity (i.e. as in Colombia); make a big ‘show’ of things, but at the same time, shrink the mainstream U.S. security interest to centre on the Western Hemisphere. As Trump keeps observing, Americans live in the ‘western hemisphere’, not in the Middle East or elsewhere.
Trump thus attempts to detach from the American expansionist war periphery – ‘the outside’ – to proclaim that the ‘inside’ (i.e. the western hemisphere’s sphere), has become bigger and is unquestionably American. And that is what matters.
It is a big shift, yet it has the virtue of beginning to be recognized by many Americans as a more accurate reflection of reality. America’s instinct remains expansionary (that doesn’t change), but many Americans advocate a focus on American domestic needs, and its ‘near neighbourhood’.
Mizrahi calls this inside-out adjustment ‘self-cannibalisation’: Europe is part of the western sphere of interest.Indeed, ‘Europe’ regards itself as its progenitor, yet the Trump team has set about re-colonising it – albeit in a Trump vein.
Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat sent to Brussels, famously in 2002 coined the term liberal imperialism as Europe’s new purpose. It was to be imperialism of soft-power. Yet, still Cooper couldn’t quite let go of European ‘old empire orientalism’, writing:
“The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves however, we keep the law: But when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle”.
Cooper’s world-view was influential in the thinking of Tony Blair, as well as in the development of European Secu
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
