US election: profound trauma will continue after poll

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

The tightening polls, the FBI’s letter suggesting possible new evidence against Hillary Clinton and crowing by Donald Trump who believes Clinton should be in jail, further guarantees the American trauma will not end on election day.

Indeed, it is more likely this crisis of American culture and politics is closer to its commencement than its conclusion. An unconvincing victory by Clinton will cripple her governing ability arising from a permanently divided polity. An unexpected Trump win would generate even deeper domestic trauma and plunge the world into hazardous uncertainty.

The America we have known is changing in ways that suggest no turning back. The notion of any return to past normality is utterly fanciful. It is wrong to regard this as merely the US in inexorable decline. That is too facile and most likely a misleading exaggeration. The reality, however, is that America will be preoccupied by profound homegrown traumas for some years and given its role as the major global power this will have a vast impact on world events and power relations.

A historical age many of us lived through is now truly ending. It was an age of authentic craftsmen when figures such as George Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and James A. Baker among others shaped the US dominance in a different world from that of today in a different America from that of today.

Trump’s pledge to “make America great again” resonates precisely because many people feel their country is slipping and they are victims. Yet Trump has not the slightest interest in restoring the US role as upholder of a liberal international order. Indeed, he seems hostile to the idea and, presumably, so are the 50 million Americans who will vote for him.

As secretary of state, Clinton once articulated the optimism of the US as the indispensable power, saying: “Americans have always risen to the challenges we have faced. It is in our DNA. We do believe there are no limits on what is possible or what can be achieved.”

Well, there are limits now, big time, limits everywhere. The truth, however, is that limits on American power have been growing for 25 years and are now on embarrassing display for the entire world, notably US rivals.

Trump repudiates the conception of US global leadership as we have known it. He thinks this burden no longer works for America. He is devoid of the democratic idealism, moral purpose, liberal economics and faith in alliance networks that have defined US foreign policy since World War II.

He comes from outside the political system and sees foreign policy as a populist, not as a strategist. No wonder the Bush family and their former advisers detest him. Trump has not just seized the Republican Party: he has ruined the basis of its internationalism.

His legacy will deny any post-election Republican return to orthodoxy. This will impose limits on the Democrats and what Clinton can do in the White Office.

It is the end of an era but nobody can perceive the replacement era.

The deeper, agonising truth is that Trump is calling out a sustained failure. For the entire post-Cold War generation the US has been trapped between its absurdly unrealistic foreign policy aspirations and its growing domestic fractures. That contradiction is now a convulsion. You can only run a failed policy for so long before provoking retribution.

It is fantastic, in retrospect, to contemplate the cracked foundations in US policy under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, a project summarised by US analyst Michael Mandelbaum in his 2016 book Mission Failure.

Take Russia, where Clinton’s aspirations were of epoch making stature — he hoped to make Russia a free market democracy and, in this endeavour, met 17 times with its leader, Boris Yeltsin. He tolerated Yeltsin’s excesses but made an unforgivable blunder.

Clinton decided to expand NATO through Eastern Europe and also include former Soviet republics. Mandelbaum says there was no formal US executive government decision for this epic folly.

The process began in 1997 and over the decade saw 10 countries join the alliance. The entire Russian political system revolted. They felt excluded and deceived since the former Bush administration told Moscow at the time of German reunification there would be no expanded NATO. Yeltsin warned it meant a “cold peace”.

The US and Russia became permanently alienated. Russia turned against the US-imposed post-Cold War sentiment for Europe. As Mandelbaum says “peace in Europe came to rest not on Russian consent but on Russian weakness”.

The US got nothing in return, making NATO expansion “one of the greatest blunders in the history of American foreign policy”.

The late and great George Kennan voiced his opposition from retirement but Clinton was playing to ethnic minorities at home.

The legacy was fixed — a stronger Russia under Vladimir Putin would operate on two proven beliefs: the US was not to be trusted and would exploit a weak Russia. Clinton begot Putin. Putin never forgot. Today he punishes the US from Ukraine to Syria. The evidence is manifest: US policy towards Russia was seeded in catastrophe.

Take China. Clinton’s early hope was to pressure China into human rights and civil liberties concessions as its system slowly modified towards that of Jefferson.

But Beijing simply repudiated such US tactics. As if America could intimidate China on its political system! Correctly reading the situation Clinton then decided that engaged economies, trade and liberalisation were the best tools of 1990s global politics. The US would play a long game with China, waiting till its system was shaken from within by prosperity. That folly now lies in ruins. President Xi Jinping has shown that the Communist Party will keep control.

Its principles are: no democracy, no deference to US values, a system based on China’s principles. Xi runs a more assertive, arrogant, military policy to challenge the US in Asia. The message from China and Russia is that old fashioned power politics are back — and the US, despite its immense military power, looks weak because it is internally divided, irresolute, confused about its beliefs and has an electorate in revolt.

Meanwhile the test for the US was recently set by a pessimistic Paul Keating who said: “I do not think the US is capable of discerning or divining a new power arrangement towards China. Certainly in Asia, it (the US) is unled, this is not having a relevant strategic template.”

Take Iraq, where the naivety of the Bush team was almost beyond belief in thinking Iraq could quickly be converted into a pro-US free market democracy.

Ultimately, as Mandelbaum says, Bush assumed that what the Iraqi people wanted for themselves “was, more or less, what Americans wanted”. In the end the US achieved none of its goals — Iraq is not a democracy, not pro-US, not in control of its territory and not sure to survive as a nation. The project sucked the US into a giant machine of regional and domestic dislocation. The only conclusion is that its original aims were never realisable.

Meanwhile from 2008-09 the US-led liberal economic order was plunged into a prolonged crisis originating in flaws arising from its banking and financial system.

The picture, overall, is of sustained failure by US elites for a generation. Finally, the US public had no burning desire to commit to these ambitious agendas in re-shaping nations embarked upon by its leaders. There is a visceral bottom line — much of the public thinks the mistakes and the costs were not worth the price of entry.

At this point enter Trump, stage right. Power politics is back, big time. The US post-Cold War dreams are ruined. Trump is an agent of this revolt but clueless to the world he would face while Hillary Clinton would be seriously damaged as a new president in coming to grips with it.