From Republic.ru, Jan. 14. 2024, https://republic.ru/posts/114750. Complete text:
This past week brought a good bit of chaos to the world. Without even waiting for his inauguration, US president-elect Donald Trump got going with a bang, firing off unpresidential initiatives in all directions – he planned to annex Canada, Greenland and Panama to the US all at the same time, and did not rule out the use of military force. The generals of global business are going over to his side, while regular people are bracing for an unprecedented ride.
It’s as if Trump has decided to make a point of fulfilling everyone’s worst expectations for him and even exceeding them. And billionaire technocrat Elon Musk, who has emerged as Trump’s most important adviser as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, is adding more fuel to the fire – he rudely insulted outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and declared his intention to oust British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, saying: “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Similar statements used to only be heard in relation to third world dictators.
The world community is reacting to this invective in the tone of a person whose best friend has suddenly bitten them on the leg, as the saying goes. Naturally, the Canadian, Panamanian and Danish (Greenland is still an autonomous region within Denmark) governments have said that there can be no talk of annexation, and that they will resist any attempts to resolve the issue by force. However, they all understand that the degree of their resistance against the US Army, if anything happens, is unlikely to be particularly high. Therefore, these statements are more like cautious admonitions along the lines of: “Hey, man, put down your knife!”
It goes without saying that Trump and his associates are exploiting their image as brutes to the fullest. A similar “madman” strategy was used by [former US president] Richard Nixon in the 1960s, when the 37th president tried to portray himself as an unpredictable politician to intimidate opponents from the Communist bloc and sent bombers carrying nuclear weapons to sniff around Soviet borders. Many experts believe that Donald Trump is now playing the same role in an attempt to gain advantages in future international negotiations. These same experts usually note that Nixon’s strategy ultimately failed and didn’t even help win the Vietnam War.
But what if Trump isn’t actually playing at all? After all, Pandora’s box has already been opened by [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, so it’s safe to assume that anything can happen in world politics.
What to do if the chief guarantor of Western security takes it into his head to abuse his power? Who will guard against the guards themselves? This question has been posed in the starkest manner. For many, it seems, the very idea that the US military machine is essentially not limited by anything and, like the Terminator, can be programmed for anything, has come as an unpleasant revelation. The Terminator doesn’t care if it’s [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein or Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino; he’s made of steel.
A hypothetical US invasion of Greenland would most likely have far-reaching consequences, possibly even leading to the destruction of the EU and NATO (Trump doesn’t appear to have any use for either). There was a case when the armies of NATO members clashed directly with each other – when Turkish and Greek forces fought on Cyprus in 1974 – but in this case, the scale and circumstances of the conflict will clearly be much greater. Among other things, Washington may not want to protect European countries from Russia if something happens.
For now, Trump’s swashbuckling plans appear largely far-fetched. While he could actually make a lucrative offer to Greenland (where the stage has been set for independence since 2009, and then bargaining would theoretically be possible), the forcible annexation of Canada looks like a fantasy. If that happens, the Republicans will most likely never come to power again in the US – there is no doubt that the newly acquired Canadian electorate will vote for the Democrats.
Nevertheless, it appears that the returning president has only four years, and this is not such a long period of time that it cannot be endured in the same way that the first Trump presidency was endured. The problem is that people have started taking him, or, rather, Trumpism, seriously.
For example, Meta (deemed an extremist organization in Russia) founder Mark Zuckerberg has publicly surrendered. The billionaire, who is considered to be an advocate for the ideas of the Democratic Party and an opponent of Donald Trump (who was famously banned from Facebook, which is owned by Meta, in 2021), contributed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund, had dinner with Trump, released a video about reforming Facebook’s moderation system, and even spoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast about the political censorship of social media that was pushed through by the “Democratic” administration after 2016, the year of Trump’s first victory in a presidential election. It turns out that officials in the [US President] Joe Biden administration literally shouted and cursed at Facebook employees to delete content criticizing coronavirus vaccines and attacking Hunter Biden.
Now Facebook will no longer have fact-checkers reviewing content. They will be replaced with assessments from the user community itself, just like on X (formerly Twitter), which has been owned by Elon Musk for some time now. In other words, Zuckerberg is turning his social media networks into what the Trumpists want to see and giving freedom of speech to antivaxxers, populists, conspiracy theorists, and critics of contemporary racial and gender theories.
The contours of the new information policy can already be discerned – the conservative Trumpists successfully used the powerful fires that swept through the suburbs of Los Angeles to discredit the Democrats, criticizing the city’s fire chief for being excessively interested in her department’s racial and gender policy. The objective circumstances of the natural disaster are of little interest to anyone – [now] it is clear to everyone that Los Angeles was burned down by unhinged leftists.
Mark Zuckerberg’s admission was also criticized – he had never said anything like this before. It seems that he simply wants to adapt to the new government by saying what it wants to hear. And perhaps not just adapt to the new government, but set it against his competitors from Apple – at least in the same podcast Zuckerberg complained suspiciously profusely about that company’s policies. But Meta will no longer have teams responsible for inclusivity, and one company after another, including behemoths like McDonalds and Disney, have been announcing the same thing in recent days. They are all abandoning the policy of “forced equality,” which had become mainstream under the Democrats.
Of course, the effectiveness and need for the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies that have been widely implemented in the US can (and should) be debated. But what’s interesting here is the sweeping and abrupt turn made with the clear belief that Trumpism is here to stay, that society is moving to the right and will continue to do so, and that resistance is pointless.
Trends in Europe only confirm these forecasts.
Over the past couple of years, right-wing and extreme-right parties have consolidated their positions by increasing their representation in the European Parliament and the national parliaments of a number of countries like Portugal, Croatia, France and Slovenia. There was a major scandal in Romania when the result of the presidential election, which the nationalist Calin Georgescu won [see Vol. 76, No. 47, p. 19], was cancelled. In Austria, power has passed to the extreme-right Freedom Party, so now, considering the well-known views of the governments in neighboring Hungary and Slovakia, everything appears set for the reincarnation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in the form of some kind of East European alliance, for example; although, if all else fails, the descendants of the Habsburgs are still around). All these parties support Euroscepticism and antimigrant policies, and even in Germany, the bulwark of the EU, the Alternative for Germany party is gaining in popularity.
The European structure has begun to look not so much completely unstable as somehow unhinged, having lost its focus and faith. Even if Trump does not decide to annex Greenland, his policy still resembles blatant arm-twisting. The only ally Trump appears unwilling to pressure is Israel. One of the many reasons for this could be [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s radicalism, which has impressed Trump.
Trump did not organize an antidemocratic and nationalist movement, but he was able to ride the wave thanks to his brilliant use of populist techniques. The speed of social change in the 21st century has perhaps turned out to be too rapid for the average person – every conservative revolution happens because the masses do not receive any tangible benefit from progress, but instead see their familiar picture of the world being destroyed. It looks like the situation is developing exactly in accordance with Lenin’s formulation: “the bottoms don’t want to and the tops cannot live in the old way.” And they want freedom from boring democratic discipline.
Donald Trump clearly relishes the image of a person who can destroy and rebuild. He needed mere weeks to gain the status of troublemaker in chief and leader of the world revolution without a shot being fired. This is a status Vladimir Putin has spent years trying to achieve. The Russian president is fading into the background. The world is awaiting Trump’s inauguration and appears unprepared to resist him. Or at the very least, it is not averse to seeing how quickly it is possible to become disillusioned in a leader.