Fyodor Lukyanov: Trump is back, and this time it’s different

The era of Washington’s belief in the need to manage global affairs is coming to an end, and the president-elect will help shape the world

Let’s be clear, the outcome of the US election won’t change the world. Processes that didn’t begin yesterday won’t tomorrow. But the American vote has become an important indicator of long-term change.

The columnists of the liberal New York Times, which actively supported Kamala Harris, declared on the morning after the election: It is time to recognize that Trump and the Trumpists aren’t an accidental aberration and they don’t represent a temporary deviation from the course of history. They reflect the mood of most Americans. And we have to proceed on that basis.

Indeed, Trump’s current victory differs from his first success eight years ago. Firstly, he won convincingly not only the electoral college but also the popular vote, i.e. the majority of the country as a whole. Second, the outcome was largely a foregone conclusion.

In 2016, nobody knew what kind of president Trump might be. Now we do – all his traits and foibles are out in the open. And, to put it mildly, the ambiguous and not entirely effective nature of his presidential style. Democrats expected that the shambles of the first term would turn many away from the Republican. But that didn’t happen. 

To be fair, the initial nomination of the not-so-capable Biden and his sudden replacement by a frankly unfit candidate did make the Republicans’ task easier. The hope that it would be possible to fill an empty shell with celebrity endorsements and thereby create the impression of a political choice has not materialized. This in itself shows that American voters are more aware of what is going on than political technologists have long believed.

US citizens are concerned with issues that directly affect their lives. Foreign policy has never been a priority. But influencing the international behavior of the United States certainly is. The era in which Washington was convinced of the need (and, of course, its right) to manage world affairs is coming to an end. The desire for leadership has been embedded in American political culture since its inception three hundred years ago, but the forms it has taken have varied. After the successful conclusion of the Cold War in favor of the US in the second half of the last century, expansionist sentiments took over completely.

The reasons are clear – the obstacles to external dissemination had disappeared. A more realistic part of the establishment believed that this was a favorable – but temporary – opportunity and it should be seized quickly. The other part fell into an anti-historical illusion about the finality of American domination. That Washington now could remake the world in its own image and then rest on its laurels.

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The golden age of the ‘American world’ lasted from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. The second term of Republican President George W. Bush. brought the first signs of a retrenchment. In reality, all subsequent presidents have continued this process, in various formulations. The inconsistency, however, was that while the framework of what was possible shifted, the ideational basis of the policy didn’t adapt. Rhetoric is not just words, it leads you into a rut. And this brings you to places that may not have been intended.

The situation in Ukraine is a vivid manifestation of this phenomenon. The US fell into this acute and very dangerous crisis through inertia, guided not by a well-thought-out strategy but by ideological slogans and specific lobbying interests. As a result, the conflict turned into a decisive battle for the principles of world order, which no one back at “headquarters” had planned or expected. In addition, the battle became a test of the real combat potential of all sides, including the West under American leadership.

Trump tried to make a conceptual turnaround during his first term, but at the time he himself was very ill-prepared to run the country, and his associates could not consolidate power. The situation is different now. The Republican Party is almost entirely on Trump’s side, and the Trumpist core intends to go after the ‘deep state’ in its first months in power in order to clean it up. In other words, to install like-minded people in the apparatus, including at mid-level, to prevent the systematic sabotage of the president’s policies that was done during his first term.

God knows whether it will work or not, especially since Trump himself has not changed: instincts and spontaneous reactions prevail over consistency and restraint. What’s important, however, is that the intentions of Trump and his allies – a turn towards America’s rigidly understood mercantile interests and away from ideology – are in line with the general direction of the world. This does not make the US a comfortable, let alone pleasant, partner for other countries, but it does offer hope for a more rational approach.

Trump keeps talking about ‘deals’, which he understands in a generally simplistic way. The Republicans around him believe in the strength and power of America, not to rule the whole world, but to impose its terms where it’s of benefit. What will come of all this is anyone’s guess. But there is a sense of turning the page and opening a new chapter. Firstly, because of the bankruptcy of those who wrote the previous one.

This article was first published by the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta and was translated and edited by the RT team