How the West was lost by Trump, a predator upon his own allies

Of the torrent of words written about American foreign policy under Donald Trump, none are more revealing than the six that his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, uttered to commentator Megyn Kelly recently: “We live in a multipolar world.” They are words that would never have been uttered by any secretary of state – let alone president – in the past 80 years.

For the first half of that period, the defining feature of global politics was the division of the world into the two rival camps of the Cold War. Such wars as they fought were proxy conflicts in developing countries. The non-aligned nations mattered, particularly in global forums such as the United Nations, but when it came to grand strategy, essentially, it was a bipolar world.

Donald Trump went to his golf course in Florida on Friday as global financial markets collapsed after his tariffs announcement.Credit: Bloomberg

After America won the Cold War and the Soviet Union collapsed, the world entered a new period in which, complacently and wrongly, many Western policymakers assumed that the ascendancy of the West – with its democratic and pluralist values – was more or less a given. The collapse of communism was seen by many as a proof of concept that democratic capitalism was the optimal form of governance to which human development had naturally evolved. One renowned Harvard scholar Francis Fukuyama even published a book with the provocative title The End of History. (As Fukuyama’s thesis began to fray in light of events, subsequent editions added a question mark to the title.)

The thesis was not unchallenged: two years later, Fukuyama’s rival, Samuel P. Huntington, published an alternative prognosis of the post-Cold War world, The Clash of Civilisations, which predicted the rise of militant Islamism. Nevertheless – particularly during the lotus-eating years of the Clinton presidency – the pre-eminence of the West, led by a globally engaged United States, was the prevailing expectation.

Scholars spoke of the 1990s and early 2000s as a “unipolar moment”. They underestimated the rise of China and wrongly assumed the economic liberalisation begun under Deng Xiaoping would inevitably evolve into political liberalisation as well.

For a short time after the beginning of the new century, there was even a hope that post-communist Russia might be integrated into the democratic world. The new presidents who both gained office in 2000 – George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin – briefly enjoyed something of a bromance, which reached its peak with Bush’s visit to Russia in 2002.

As New York Times journalist David Sanger writes in his recent book, New Cold Wars: “The sense … was not simply that the Cold War was over but that with effort it could almost be erased from history … Russia would join the World Trade Organisation, just as China had done. Then, perhaps, the European Union. And maybe – just maybe – NATO itself … There remained plenty of brewing disputes, many of them concerning the Western drift of the former Soviet states. But the idea that Russia might follow [East European nations] into NATO didn’t, at that moment, sound insane.”

There was even an office established at NATO headquarters in Brussels to plan for future Russian membership.

Best buddies: But Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush’s close relationship did not last. Credit: Reuters

None of this happened. Putin grew increasingly entranced by his dream of reconsolidating the old Soviet Union – the collapse of which he described as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. America became mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. The old Cold War rivalries began to emerge (although nobody used that term at first). The post-Cold War world was beginning to resemble the epoch that went before. A bipolar world was back.

Through all those evolutions, one thing remained constant: that America, as “leader of the free world”, was a globally engaged protector of liberal democratic values. That might sometimes lead to misadventures such as Vietnam and the second Gulf War, sometimes to stalemates such as Korea and, for nearly two decades, Afghanistan. But America’s commitment to internationalism was a constant.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the unified, American-led response of the West brought us back to explicit strategic competition. Unlike the proxy wars of earlier years, this was not a conflict on the strategic periphery but in the heart of Europe, posing an existential threat to European security.

It is important not to miss the deeper strategic significance of Trump’s decision not only to abandon Ukraine but, in effect, to change sides. This was not merely a pragmatic calculation that the defence of Ukraine was not America’s concern. It is the most dramatic example of what “America First” foreign policy implies.

Not only does Trump not consider it America’s role to defend threatened democracies. He does not appear to believe in “the West”, as an association of nations united by shared values, at all, let alone that America has a role as its leader.

How else is one to understand his belligerent attacks on Canada, America’s closest ally? Or his declared predatory intentions towards Denmark, evident in his demands for the cession of its largest external territory? He obviously won’t succeed in making Canada the 51st state, but don’t be at all surprised if he forcibly occupies Greenland. How else to interpret his trade war, with the announcement last week, which made no distinction between America’s traditional friends and its strategic rivals? (Tariffs on China are 67 per cent, on Taiwan 64 per cent.)

An administration whose policy is to be a predator upon its own allies, waging an unapologetic economic war on them while in some cases threatening their actual sovereignty, not only does not view America as the leader of the democratic world; it has abandoned any meaningful notion of “the West” altogether. Or, at least, of America’s membership of it.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.