For decades, US presidents, secretaries of state and politicians from the two major parties have liked to refer to their country as the “indispensable nation.” “When a typhoon hits the Philippines or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century past and it will be true for the century to come,” President Barack Obama declared in 2014. This view was dominant a lot earlier, as the US intervened decisively in two world wars and then managed an international system of governance that achieved the greatest expansion of liberal democracy and prosperity the world has known.
Despite its frequently catastrophic intervention in foreign countries, the United States had the democratic depth to acknowledge its mistakes and correct its course. In humanity’s collective efforts, as in fighting disease, defending human rights and dealing with climate crisis, the United States was always in the lead, in close cooperation with the European Union. It put its unparalleled economic and military might into maintaining its hegemony but also into the fruitful cooperation of an ever-growing number of countries. In recent years, with the inequality spawned by almost uncontrolled globalization, domestic friction in the United States (as in many other countries) began to affect America’s behavior.
Donald Trump’s presidency is the product of the dissociation between the vision of globalization and the reality of ever-greater inequality among citizens. Trump benefits from this discontent, presenting America as the victim of the rest of the world and himself as its savior. This tactic demands “enemies” who must be subdued by all means. Because this conflict will disturb society, Trump needs to proclaim a series of great “narratives,” lies and visions. And so, domestic enemies must be defeated, the allies must be cowed into submitting to whatever Trump desires, and the president must be able to underline his greatness through the conquest of new territory. That’s how Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal were dragged into the picture. That is why Trump and Company are waging war on the domestic front, not only against immigrants and the “woke,” but also against any part of the state apparatus that might get in the president’s way.
With the trade war that he has declared on Canada, Mexico, China and (soon), the EU, Trump confirms that he wishes to control public opinion at home by stoking tension abroad. And so, the concept of the “indispensable nation” will become the delusion of a country that is both introspective and belligerent, which, instead of leading, will unite the world against it.
