Throughout history, people in powerful countries tended to relish the idea that they were entitled to rule the world, but in the United States, such sentiments went out of fashion decades ago. While most North Americans seem willing to assume that, given the chance, those unfortunate enough to live elsewhere would adopt their way of doing things, few these days feel morally obliged to help them get rid of the authoritarian regimes that prevent them from doing so. The dominant view is that attempts to export democracy and the mutual respect it entails to places such as Afghanistan and Iraq where it has never taken root cannot succeed, so it would be foolish to try.
However, though recent experience has taught the superpower’s leaders and thinkers that refashioning a foreign political culture can be extremely hard, this does not mean it is impossible. Had it not been for US patronage, Germany and Japan would not be prosperous democracies today. As for Afghanistan and Iraq, the failures there can be attributed to the habit people who are used to a four-year electoral cycle have of wanting quick results. Had they been more realistic, they would have thought in terms of decades or even of centuries. They would have also had to have had far more faith in the virtues of their own civilisation than, in an age much given to self-flagellation, it is easy to find among members of the cultural elites in Western countries.
In any event, Donald Trump is far from being the only North American politician who would like to see his country leave the rest of the world to its own wretched devices. Many Democrats agree that it is grossly unfair to expect the United States – that is to say the US taxpayer – to solve other people’s problems.
The Democrats may not be isolationists, but they have good reason to fear that events abroad – what some call “an October surprise” – could make it much harder for Kamala Harris to win the upcoming elections. This is the main reason why they are trying to get Israel to call a halt, or at least a pause, to the war she is waging against the genocidal terrorists that hold power in Gaza, though of late they have taken to adding that – as a quid pro quo – Hamas, should release all the surviving Israeli hostages it is holding.
Democrat strategists hope that loudly demanding peace will be enough to let them hold onto Muslim votes in key “battleground states” such as Michigan and, while about it, put an end to the noisy pro-Hamas demos staged by college students. While the influence of these usually well-off young adults may be limited, they harm the Democrat Party by giving the impression that it is split in half between left-wing “progressives” who are allegedly on the rise and others of a more conservative bent who are in retreat.
Harold Wilson, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom half a century ago, is remembered largely for having said that “a week is a long time in politics.” In international affairs, the almost five months that still separate us from the swearing-in of Joe Biden’s successor, look like an eternity. Until then, the men and women in charge of the United States will be distracted by electoral matters and spend much of their time worrying about the impact of what they could do to Kamala’s chances, but in other parts of the world there are plenty of people who are wondering how best to take advantage of the opportunity they think they have been given. Some will surely want to try their luck in the hope that Biden, who has been all-but declared mentally unfit to seek re-election but nonetheless will remain in the White House until January 20, will be unable to handle whatever happens.
One such individual is Vladimir Putin, who has long taken it for granted that if Trump returns to power, he will cease supplying the Ukrainians with the high-tech arms they so desperately need to keep his troops at bay. The Russian dictator may be in for a nasty surprise if he thinks Trump, who sees himself as a tough customer, would be willing to grovel before him, but his nemesis, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, clearly thinks time is not on Ukraine’s side. According to some presumably well-informed military experts, this is why he sent his troops into Russia proper where they quickly occupied large parts of the Kursk region, thereby acquiring what could be a valuable bargaining-chip if he is obliged to sue for peace.
However, even if Trump fails to win in November, US support for Ukraine could weaken considerably. Though Kamala Harris has said very little about anything significant since becoming the Democrat’s presidential candidate, she will probably be less keen than Biden on spending tens of billions of much-needed dollars in order to prop up a foreign country she does not know much about. What is more, doubts about her fitness for high office must have entered into the calculations being made not only by Putin but also his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, who has his eye on a smallish democracy, Taiwan, and the ferocious Iranian clerics who dream aloud of wiping out the “Zionist entity,” Israel.
Were the US the cunning and ruthless behemoth led by insatiable imperialists of leftist demonology, Putin, Xi and Ali Khamenei would be shaking in their boots. Their regimes confront short-term problems, closely followed by long-term ones, which are far worse than those Biden and whoever comes next will have to face. The failure of Putin’s attempt to take over Ukraine in a couple of days, as he had expected, may not have weakened his hold on power overnight, but the endeavour has proved so costly in lives and economic resources that fewer people than before now regard Russia as a first-rate power or likely to become one in the foreseeable future. Until they were put to the test, Russia’s Armed Forces were rated as the world’s second after those of the United States; humorists now say they have shown themselves to be “the second-best in Ukraine” or, since the invasion of Kursk, in Russia.
To make the outlook even bleaker, Russia’s population is steadily shrinking as, indeed, it is in China and will soon do in Iran, where birthrates have plummeted. This means that the autocracies that Biden wanted the West to take on will have grown old long before they are rich enough to tackle the many problems rapid ageing will bring about. Putin, Xi and Ali Khamenei know this, which is one reason, perhaps the main one, why they will be sorely tempted to make the most of the political disarray that is affecting what is still the world’s top country.
Comments