Could Trump be a world leader? | David Smith | The Critic Magazine

For a Republican, the party’s convention in Milwaukee has offered much to celebrate. Their candidate, who survived an assassination attempt, is so clearly poised to make the most of “courageous victimhood,” a speciality of Donald Trump since he entered the political arena. On the other side sits an incumbent President bedevilled by obvious signs of ageing — a leader whose own party is bitterly divided over whether he should fight the election.

Yet seen from Kiev, where the Russians have recently blasted the main children’s hospital and rained down missiles on cities across Ukraine, killing dozens of people, the political landscape  of the United States triggers fear of annihilation. Just ponder the words of Trump’s newly-minted choice for Vice-President, Ohio Senator J.D.Vance. “I gotta be honest with you,” he said on taking his seat in Congress a while ago, “I really don’t care what happens to Ukraine.”

Consider then the view from Gaza, where the Israeli army has launched devastating attacks on everything from refugee shelters, to schools, to hospital compounds — insistent that their target is the leadership of Hamas, the authors of the bloodthirsty invasion of Israel last October. One United Nations colleague of my time with the organisation reports from Gaza : “I saw toddlers who are double amputees, children paralysed with no treatment available, parents not knowing if their kids are alive. And what comes from the United States? Just words.”

You can even listen to the bureaucrats and professional politicians working those corridors in Brussels and Mons, at the EU and NATO, and you sense the power vacuum in Washington writ large. “The American President looks so like yesterday’s man,” to quote one member of the European Union’s Foreign Policy team, “and his probable successor doesn’t give a damn about America’s role in the world, unless it’s to America’s obvious advantage.”

Yes. But never forget the very basic thinking, and the even cruder sloganising, of the movement that has propelled one Donald J. Trump from TV-celebrity status to the Presidency, and leadership of the Western world. “Make America great again!” sounds so deeply shallow, and akin to a football-stadium shout. But it speaks to a widely held belief that America has lost its way, not just at home, but abroad too. And that it’s time to reconsider what constitutes not just America’s strengths, but the American way, and America’s global role.

I had the somewhat bizarre experience of sharing an afternoon with Donald Trump in the US Senate almost 20 years ago, chronicled in these pages. 

What I learned was that the fellow had a very cynical, deeply pragmatic view of how the world should work. The United Nations, for example, the subject that day, was okay for him just as long as it did “stuff” the United States then didn’t have to do. “You people at the UN need to remember who you work for,” he told me, “You work for us.” Point taken, especially as my UN job back then, head of its Washington DC mission, was to ensure the huge contributions from the White House and the Congress.

So here’s a thought, as we contemplate the return of Trump to power. Yes, for sure it could be beyond cynical when it comes to Vladimir Putin and the war for Ukraine. When Trump says he will solve the conflict within 24 hours, it signals a blueprint for giving Russia a serious slice of Eastern Ukraine and taking money and weapons for President Zelensky in Kiev off the table. In the words of former congresswoman Liz Cheney, the daughter of that no-nonsense Republican father Dick — remember him? — “they would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of Ukraine.”

As for Gaza, and the relationship with Israel, we should have few illusions. Trump set out his stall in his first administration, moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, making the holy city Israel’s de facto capital, and dispatching his son-in-law Jared Kushner, to negotiate a blueprint for peace that barely mentioned the idea of a Palestinian state. The chances of Trump, second time around, restraining the Israelis when it comes to destroying what’s left of Gaza seem fanciful — let alone pushing the notion of an independent Palestine.

An afternoon next to Donald Trump years ago made me think the man never takes second-place to anyone

On China, which Trump and his allies “the real enemy” — citing Xi Jinping’s designs on global economic superiority as well as his military ambitions in Taiwan — tell-tale signs abound. For many, even those who opposed Trump, his trade war approach to Beijing the first time around was warranted, to stop the open theft of American technology and China’s use of it on everything from exports to electric cars to nuclear weaponry. Trump’s promise now to slap tariffs on Chinese imports, and trigger another round of conflict, making economics the battleground of a new cold war, even at the cost of raising inflation at home, could be a foregone conclusion. 

And yet. Does a foreign policy of such unbridled self-centredness, of such eyes-closed hubris, make America great again? The voices of gloom and doom are loud. Liz Cheney, who has fought Trump in the trenches, suggests as we watched that convention in Milwaukee: “The Trump Republican movement is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan, or the Constitution.” 

But hold on — if the polls are right, Trump looks set to inherit a world in conflict, from Europe to the Middle East, to potentially the South China Sea. America’s primacy, its global leadership, is so questionable, as we watch others (think Xi in China, Modi in India, Putin in Russia) take centre stage. An afternoon next to Donald Trump years ago made me think the man never takes second-place to anyone. It suggested that the narrative has to be about him and no one else. He knows no other way. There surely, in the fellow’s very being, lies the chance that a second Trump term will seek to salvage not just order at home but American leadership abroad.