Worldview: Threat of Trump must not be underestimated

People in the US and around the world who remain mesmerised, fascinated or appalled by the daily drama of the Trump administration may wonder whether there is any strategic or ideological consistency in the new president’s programme.

The more conviction there is, the more likely he is to survive the initial shocks and mistakes arising from lack of experience in government. As Henry Kissinger put it in 1979: “The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.” Without that capital they are likely to be less effective and more prone to capture by factions or a pragmatism of policy continuity.

To treat Donald Trump and his team as right-wing buffoons seriously underestimates their preparedness for power and their ideological determination to use it.

Studies of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy positions show they are long-standing and consistent. And those he has appointed as his closest advisers share a bleak, radical, even apocalyptic view of US society and its place in the world that heralds sharp conflicts. They are unlikely to be easily constrained by existing checks and balances, especially on foreign policy issues more subject to executive control.

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The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office

The Kissinger quote comes at the beginning of a new book by international historians Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms called Donald Trump: The Making of a World View. It tracks what he has been saying in interviews, articles and speeches since 1980. It reprints and documents many of them and concludes that: "When Donald Trump entered the White House, he did so with a worldview that has been constantly advanced and relatively consistently articulated in countless statements over the past three decades."

Chilling prospect

They identify several major themes. The idiocy of successive US leaders who presided over alliances and trade deals which defend wealthy nations such as Japan, Germany or Saudi Arabia too cheaply, allow Mexico or China to steal US manufacturing jobs and tolerate Opec’s oil price-fixing is a constant refrain. Real leadership is required to reverse that pattern and to put America first and in a winning position. A mercantilist philosophy to reverse bad trade deals with protective tariffs should be applied. Manufacturing should be brought home and jobs created through large infrastructural investments.

As the authors point out, these criticisms are more often directed against friends and allies of the US, rather than its traditional enemies such as Russia. Nato is obsolete and its burden-sharing unfair; the European Union is scorned; multilateral trade deals are repudiated; and the international liberal order which sustained them under US leadership is rejected.

Worse still, they write, the promised wall with Mexico may inspire similar endeavours in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and in central Europe. “The period 1989-2016 may become known as the inter-wall era,” they say.

That chilling prospect concerning migration should focus attention on the group of “alternative right” ideologues which Trump has gathered around him. Led by chief strategist Steve Bannon, they include Michael Anton, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka – and Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn until he resigned this week.

Ethnic war

These people are convinced that the US is fighting a civilisational war for survival against Muslim jihadis as well as an ethnic war to protect white America against dilution by immigration. As Anton has put it: “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

The promised wall with Mexico may inspire similar endeavours in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and in central Europe

An illuminating study of Bannon’s beliefs on the Quartz website divides them into three major tenets: on capitalism and the liberal order; on nationalism; and on Judeo-Christian values. Capitalism has been changed by a cosseted generation of self-obsessed and increasingly left-liberal offspring, giving rise to the globalised and technocratic elites who run today’s world, he argues.

Their role must be confronted by a renewed nationalism informed by Judeo-Christian values pitched against Islamic jihadism. The system is at a turning or tipping point, in crisis and needs a shock, probably a war with China, to correct it.

Bannon describes himself as a Leninist determined to bring down the left-liberal establishment, like Thomas Cromwell in the Tudor court. His wide reading in right-wing political theory is set out in a recent Politico feature.

“Don’t say he didn’t warn you,” Laderman and Simms say in the last sentence of their book on Trump. His weaknesses have more to do with contradictions between his goals and US interests than with being ill-prepared for power.

pegillespie@gmail.com