Trump’s Answer to What is America’s Role in a Multi-Polar World

In his book “Diplomacy” Henry Kissinger observed: “Americans have two contradictory attitudes towards foreign policy:  One, America serves its values best by perfecting democracy at home, i.e., beacon for the rest of mankind; Two, America’s values impose on its an obligation to crusade for them around the world.”[1] 

The fact is that since Woodrow Wilson, and especially after the end of World War Two, the United States opted for the second option, crusading around the world to impose American values, espousing internationalist and globalist political structures such as the United Nations and regional alliances to advance its own interests. 

“Empires have no interest in operating without an international system; they aspire to be [original italics] the international system.  Empires have no need for a balance of power.  That is how the United States has conducted its foreign policy in the Americas, and China through most of its history in Asia.”[2]   Or as Nikita Khrushchev is alleged to have said at the United Nations General Assembly (October 12, 1960):   “Mr. President, call the toady of American imperialism to order.”[3]

After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, an often-asked question for American foreign policy has been what is America’s role in a multi-polar world?  Or more philosophically what ought America’s role be in the multi-polar world?   

Despite a lot of opaque efforts and political palliatives about new world orders, fight for democracy and human rights, wars on terror with accompanying foreign military interventions, and supposed obligations that America as a superpower owes to the world[4]--this question has remained largely unanswered until now.

            Enter President Donald J. Trump who is not known for mincing-words:  The nation state “remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition”[5]  and America’s role in the world is to serve as a beacon for others to emulate and that America will engage the world on its terms as America’s interests are America’s guiding force.[6]

Moreover, Trump placed current and potential adversaries on notice that if forced to defend these interest, America will destroy them.[7] 

“The statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time he is making them; he [or she] will be judged by history on the basis of how wisely he managed the inevitable change and, above all, by how well he preserves the peace.”[8]  

Whether Trump is right or not depends on the results.  In this regard Vince Lombardi is most on point for in the end, “some of us will do our jobs well and some will not; but we will all be judged on one thing: the results.” 

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[1] Henry A. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 18

[2] Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 21

[3] From Wikiquote but without citation

[4] E.g., Robert Kagan, Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire: What our tired country still owes the world, in New Republic (May 26, 2014) https://newrepublic.com/article/117859/superpowers-dont-get-retire; accessed September 24, 2017.

[5] Gerald F. Seib, “Trump Signals U.S.’s Return to Realpolitik”, Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2017, p. A10.

[6] Id.

[7] Id.

[8] Kissinger, Diplomacy, pp. 27-28

Problem of Historical Backwardness

From: Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, pp. 2-3.

A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the stages of their past. The theory of the repetition of historic cycles – Vico and his more recent followers – rests upon an observation of the orbits of old pre-capitalist cultures, and in part upon the first experiments of capitalist development. A certain repetition of cultural stages in ever new settlements was in fact bound up with the provincial and episodic character of that whole process. Capitalism means, however, an overcoming of those conditions. It prepares and in a certain sense realises the universality and permanence of man’s development. By this a repetition of the forms of development by different nations is ruled out. Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. The European colonists in America did not begin history all over again from the beginning. The fact that Germany and the United States have now economically outstripped England was made possible by the very backwardness of their capitalist development. On the other hand, the conservative anarchy in the British coal industry – as also in the heads of MacDonald and his friends - is a paying-up for the past when England played too long the role of capitalist pathfinder.

The development of historically backward nations leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process. Their development as a whole acquires a planless, complex, combined character.

The possibility of skipping over intermediate steps is of course by no means absolute. Its degree is determined in the long run by the economic and cultural capacities of the country. The backward nation, moreover, not infrequently debases the achievements borrowed from outside in the process of adapting them to its own more primitive culture. In this the very process of assimilation acquires a self-contradictory character. Thus the introduction of certain elements of Western technique and training, above all military and industrial, under Peter I, led to a strengthening of serfdom as the fundamental form of labour organisation. European armament and European loans – both indubitable products of a higher culture - led to a strengthening of tzarism, which delayed in its turn the development of the country.

The laws of history have nothing in common with a pedantic schematism. Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. Without this law, to be taken of course, in its whole material content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, and indeed of any country of the second, third or tenth cultural class.