DC Edit | A Year Of Trump: Chaos In US, Across The World
Mr Trump may not have gone the whole hog in punishing China as a trade partner with a historically monstrous surplus, but he has been quite happy to turn the screws on allies and friends, including India and Brazil
It is one year to the day since Donald Trump came to the White House to begin his second term in which time he has overturned the rules-based world order that had got by for 80 years since the end of World War II, with its fair share of problems for humanity of course. What harm Mr Trump has done in one year to the world with his tariffs on trade is beyond calculation, but what he has done to the image of the United States in that time may be considerably worse.
If the 47th US President’s action in getting the Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, abducted from Caracas and bringing him to face the US justice system in New York shook the world, his threats to take over the world’s largest island, Greenland, for the sake of his country’s security has had his allies balk at the belligerent posture of a global policeman who wishes to go way beyond orchestrating regime changes.
Bombing Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, striking at ISIS terror campuses and bombing boats at sea were extraterritorial actions that saw the rebirth of America as the protector of the free world. But the readiness to trample upon sovereignty in grabbing territory belonging to an ally in Denmark, a member of the EU and Nato, is causing no end of heartache to a whole continent.
Europe may have been at fault for largely underserving its security interests by not funding Nato liberally, which was owed to their belief in America being the willing and voluntary protector of the free world after its leading role in western conquests of World War II. In being willing to abandon Europe so callously is what sets apart Mr Trump as the most enigmatic, if quixotic, US President in history.
Mr Trump may not have gone the whole hog in punishing China as a trade partner with a historically monstrous surplus, but he has been quite happy to turn the screws on allies and friends, including India and Brazil. The average American may ultimately pay the price of tariffs, but who is to bell the cat with a leader who believes he has put America first and is set to rule — through trade following military action — anywhere that pleases him while also pulling his country out of 66 global associations meant to serve the people.
Beyond the rest of the world that Mr Trump is treating with contempt for its inability to govern and protect itself, what he has done to the USA challenges logic. He has attacked and defunded universities and research while gouging cultural institutions. And his ICE agents have been firing at US citizens in the name of flushing out infiltrators even as he has ordered the building of an ‘Alcatraz’ for illegal migrants and other large detention facilities, besides deploying armed forces that are terrorising the streets of major cities. So seriously damaged have American institutions, especially the Department of Justice, become that not much dust has risen over the Mr Trump family’s aggrandisement in cryptocurrency trading, real estate and allied businesses. Woebegone leaders have been reduced to currying favour with an egomaniac by showering him with gifts and nominations to the Nobel Peace Prize.
It boggles the imagination to take account of how much the world has come down in a year of Mr Trump’s second innings. With events taking place at a rapid pace, the world has been numbed to second-guessing a man who was anointed as the leader of the free world by a democratic process, which he himself seriously doubted when it did not favour him. So reduced is a world that may long to alleviate the evil but cannot and must suffer for it.
