World War Trump
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In an effort to prevent the global system from polarizing into two rival alliances, and in working with the major and regional actors, Washington needs to look toward ways to forge new systems of cooperative-collective security, involving international administrations or agreements of joint sovereignty in both the Euro-Atlantic region (with a focus on the Black Sea and Caucasus region) and in the Indo-Pacific region. In Europe, this means forging a new Euro-Atlantic security pact with Russia, based in large part on a new regional “peace and development community” for the Black Sea region under the auspices of the OSCE.
In the Indo-Pacific, this means supporting Japan's efforts to forge the new rapprochement with Russia that was initiated in 2016, while concurrently finding areas where the United States, Japan, Russia, and India can cooperate with China with respect to North Korea, island disputes, and Taiwan. In addition, despite their apparent reluctance to do so, India and Pakistan, with US, Russian, and Chinese diplomatic backing, need to negotiate their differences over Kashmir, among other issues. Washington likewise needs to back the efforts of the new South Korean leadership to forge a rapprochement with Russia, so that Seoul can pursue a new Sunshine Policy—in the effort to establish a long-term peace between North and South Korea. (See chapter 7.)
Establishing a system of peace in the Indo-Pacific could mean the creation of a new Organization for Security and Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific (OSCIP) modeled after the OSCE and interacting with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). A proposed OSCIP could find international, legal ways to move toward differing forms of confederation and systems of joint sovereignty over specific regions of contention. All of this implies a US-led multilateral approach to conflict resolution, which means that Washington will also need to make significant compromises, as well as concessions in some cases—if peace is to be sustained in the long term. Here, one of Trump's more positive proposals on his trip to Asia in November 2017 was his offer to negotiate the island disputes in the South China Sea between China and its neighbors.50 Whether this offer will work out remains to be seen, but it represents a very positive sign that Trump may begin to be actually thinking of the greater good, instead of just America First.
In this perspective, Washington will concurrently need to work collectively through the United Nations, the OSCE and other multilateral Contact Groups with the major powers and regional partners, as well as with the states and certain anti-state actors involved, in order to quell the turmoil throughout the wider Middle East. Here the United States and its partners should engage in a multidimensional strategy designed to co-opt differing Islamist movements, while seeking to isolate and destroy IS and al-Qaeda offshoots where possible. This multidimensional strategy involves concerted multilateral diplomacy that is sometimes US-led and sometimes not. Such diplomacy would be intended to transform issues of dispute and conflicts in a more positive direction, if not resolve them altogether.
With respect to the wider Middle East, there are several increasingly interrelated conflicts that threaten to merge with major power rivalries and explode into war. The first is the ongoing regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which manifests itself in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and which has begun to implicate Qatar and Lebanon and divide countries and political movements throughout the region. The second is the indirectly related conflict between Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Kurds. The third is the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, which needs to be resolved through power-sharing accords. And the fourth is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which helps fuel pan-Sunni and pan-Shi'a pan-Islamist movements in the background. All of these above regions need the concerted attention of Contact Groups that work with the United Nations and the major actors involved. (See chapter 8.)
Without making reasonable compromises—or even some significant concessions—with both rivals and allies, Trump's nationalistic America First project risks stumbling into a dangerous unilateralism that will result in a dangerous and destabilizing arms race and will further provoke not only US rivals but also those states that are presently US allies as well—and whose pro-American stance cannot be absolutely taken for granted in the future.
TOWARD A REEVALUATION OF “AMERICA FIRST”
Donald Trump may have initially hoped to change the geopolitical map and fulfill many of his campaign promises in his first one hundred days in office, but disputes over Crimea, Taiwan, Iran, and North Korea, among other crucial concerns, including the natural environment, are not issues that can be rapidly altered by threats to use force or hastily conceived real-estate-like “deals.” This is because the complex and interwoven geo-strategic, military, political-economic, and even sociocultural and ideological issues that surround these areas represent the tip of the now-melting iceberg.
Each dispute will require very careful attention and patient irenic diplomacy—if they are not to continue to fester and ultimately result in a crisis, like an iceberg that does sink US warships. The problem is that traditional, realistic prudence and the need for careful long-term negotiations is not a trademark of the Trump casino dynasty. Trump definitely needs to sail with greater tact toward these issues and others. He also needs to sail more carefully if he wants to retain US allies, who could either float into neutrality or else look toward either Russia or China, as is the case with Bulgaria, Hungary, the Philippines, Qatar, Turkey, and others, if the United States opts to apply tougher protectionist and other nationalist measures.
It will prove nearly impossible for the United States to reach international agreements if all countries continue to assert their presumed national interests above the interests of other states—as Trump put it in his inauguration speech, “It is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.” On the one hand, Trump stated his preference for the United States to work positively with all countries; on the other, he has also promised to assert presumed US national self-interests first, with respect to all other states. This means that US interests may be seen as literally trumping the interests of second and third parties, against their will—rather than making fair and equitable compromises or even concessions.
These latter states will generally argue in response to Trump that the United States, as the predominant hegemonic power at least since the end of the Cold War, has always had an unfair advantage over a large number of areas—so his assertions appear completely false even if the United States may appear to be losing some of its economic advantages and ideological support for American-style democracy in recent years. Trump's assertion of an American First doctrine could consequently make international agreements and compromises either impossible to achieve or else very difficult to maintain in the long term.
In response to America First, some US allies could drift into neutrality or else seek out trade, political-economic, and financial deals from China, or seek out energy, resource, and arms deals from Russia—thus ignoring US interests as much as possible. A number of states, including China, could opt to nationalize or even expropriate US or European multinational firms, for example—and then militarize in the assertion of their own presumed vital interests—“first.”
If the United States wants to retain its position of global diplomatic leadership, Trump's America First policies are not the right way to do it—that is, unless Trump ultimately proves willing to compromise, if not make concessions, on a number of issues with Russia and China, among other secondary powers, and only if his administration shows a willingness to engage in multilateral processes that involve both states and societies. What is needed is not a rush toward absolute military superiority but prudent steps toward an engaged and concerted US diplomacy that seeks to mitigate, if not resolve, through mutual compromise and concessions, the disputes and conflicts that divide various states and sociopolitical movements. Without engaged and concerted diplomacy that works to defuse significant disputes among both major and regional powers, and that incorporates the interests of both US allies and potential rivals, Russia and Chi
na, US military superiority alone will not prove capable of preserving the peace.
Moreover, US global hegemony cannot be sustained if the United States becomes entrenched in conflicts in its own hemisphere. The possibility of conflict in Mexico and the Caribbean region becomes increasingly plausible if the Trump administration tries to repel Mexican and Latin American immigrants (meaning that their remittances would no longer help float the economies of these foreign countries), while threatening to intervene militarily in Mexico's drug wars or in Venezuela's social strife—all without engaging in regional Contact Group diplomacy, that could involve Cuba, for example, in the case of Venezuela. (See chapter 3.)
With respect to immigration, there is another way to deal with that question, through the effective use of the Earnings Suspense File. One factor that needs consideration is that even undocumented workers have often paid into Social Security using fake or stolen Social Security numbers. This money goes into what is called the Earnings Suspense File (ESF). In 2010, unauthorized immigrants worked and contributed as much as $13 billion in payroll taxes to the Social Security Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program; at that time, only about $1 billion in benefit payments during 2010 were attributable to unauthorized work.51 Moreover, the ESF reached a whopping $1.2 trillion in uncredited wages for the tax years 1937 to 2012—even if the number of W-2s posted to the ESF declined by 36 percent from 2007 to 2012; the latter is in part because of high unemployment, which contributed to the decrease in suspended wage items.52 And the decline in W-2s was also due to Obama's efforts to crack down on false Social Security numbers. What is to be done with this money needs an open public debate, for it could fund numerous social programs, including helping to pay for better integrating undocumented workers into American society, as well as other educational “infrastructure” projects.
Another issue is the need for a new approach to the War on Drugs that was initiated by President Richard Nixon, and which has spread from Columbia throughout Latin America and the world, much like the Global War on Terrorism has spread beyond the wider Middle East. It is clear that the War on Drugs has failed miserably, whether in Latin America, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.53 And the November 2016 peace accord between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government offers some hope for ending the drug wars throughout the region, even though new social and political tensions have come to the surface in the aftermath of that agreement. (See chapter 3.)
An approach that should help stabilize the general Latin American region economically, given the spread of drug production primarily for the American market, would be the legalization of less addictive drugs such as marijuana, hashish, and possibly cocaine, among other drugs—but with clear warnings about health effects, as is already the case for cigarettes and alcohol. There should be very strong laws against driving while under the influence, for example, but not against drug use and drug possession itself. Such an approach would be accompanied by a major police crackdown on more-dangerous drugs, including crack cocaine, PCP, scopolamine, crystal meth, among others. The legalization of some drugs, but not others, would represent an effort to push drug mafias into legal business as much as possible—and to obtain significant tax gains with significant cuts in law enforcement costs as well.54 At a minimum, drug use and possession should be decriminalized so the police can focus on terrorism and high-level crimes. Ireland, for example, is considering decriminalizing heroin possession, among other drugs.55 But decriminalization alone would not be sufficient to deal with the depth of the drug epidemic, which should be considered a health, and not a criminal, issue.
As was the case for legalizing alcohol after the Great Depression, which helped to eliminate at least some of the more pernicious influences and crimes of the Mafia, the drug issue is a major social and health issue and needs to be dealt with realistically. Drug legalization would additionally help to reduce gun violence, in that many urban shootings are a result of wars between drug gangs. With 1.5 million arrests for drug infractions, more persons are incarcerated for drug infractions than for all violent crimes combined, so that 50 percent of the US federal prison population comprises narcotics violators. This draws the police and the courts away from other, more vital, concerns.56 Despite US government efforts since the Nixon administration, drugs continue to flow into the country or else are produced in basement labs. Many dangerous drugs are formulated with the use of readily available chemicals and pharmaceutical products, helping to create the opioid epidemic in the United States, for example, which killed 64,000 people in 2016.57 A new approach is imperative.
REVIVING US DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES
Finally, as pointed out in the first chapters of this book, the United States will not be able to continue to engage in global leadership unless it truly begins to practice what it preaches. Trump himself recognized a number of the incongruences in the American system of governance. But instead of attempting to expand democratic practices, he has attempted to shift the country toward a more authoritarian form of governance under his leadership.
In his inaugural address in January 2017, Trump declared that “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.” Yet the very nature of his own presidential victory—in which the billionaire Trump did not possess a clear mandate from the American people themselves—has raised questions as to whether many countries and peoples in the world will follow the American lead on various issues.
Ironically, in 2012, Trump himself had demanded some sort of reform of the democratic process—if not a “revolution”—when he mistakenly believed that Obama had won the electoral college vote but not the popular vote. He declared by tweet: “The phoney [sic] electoral college made a laughing stock [sic] out of our nation.”58 Trump then called for a “revolution.” By revolution, Trump was certainly referring an authoritarian, right-wing revolution that serves the interests of the military-industrial-congressional complex and the major fossil fuel industries. After Trump's victory (during which he lost the popular vote by a colossal 2.8 million votes), the electoral college system has indeed appeared to have made the United States a laughingstock—as Trump himself had put it.
The issue raised here is that the complexity of American governance fuels the propaganda machines of US rivals, terrorist groups, and other enemies—who seek to justify their own forms of illiberal, authoritarian, or theocratic systems of governance—by the failure of the American system of democracy to live up to its own principles and values. Yet it appears highly unlikely that these crucial of issues of democratic governance will be addressed by the Trump administration, which appears more interested in challenging the US judicial system than in tackling problems raised by liberal majoritarian democracy.
Even though it was only the fifth time in US history that a president won the election without winning the popular vote,59 some form of electoral reforms appear absolutely necessary, given huge imbalances in the population sizes across the fifty American states. One option—which would not require a constitutional amendment—is for every state to cast its votes for whomever won the popular vote within that state.60 A more radical option would be to reduce the number of states to thirty-eight in such a way as to better balance rural and urban areas.61 This option would provide fairer local and regional governance, while cutting state and federal governmental costs significantly, given the rising debt crisis. It would help simplify the process of American governance. If the French can reduce the number of regions from twenty-two to thirteen, as it did in 2014–2016,62 so can the Americans!
Another radical option intended to cut costs, strengthen local regional representation, improve efficiency, and attempt to ameliorate incapacity to act resulting from “vetocracy”63 (which seems to depict many issues except for defense appropriations), is to eliminate the aristocratic Senate and augment the power of the House of Representatives by making each member run for a single term of
office, without chance of reelection, for four to six years, instead of two years. As discussed in chapter 2 in relation to defense appropriations, this would lessen the chances that crucial decisions would be made for demagogic purposes in order for congresspersons to be reelected, and it would also strengthen the role of the House. Because there would be sufficient checks and balances between regions and individual congresspersons inside such a unicameral system, a bicameral system is not necessary. Another proposal would be to limit the presidency to one five-year term of office, once again to minimize election-year demagoguery.
The goal of these proposed constitutional reforms is to make the US government less costly, more effective, and more responsive to the needs and interest of the American people. If the US government is to provide positive leadership for its own citizens, while likewise working in good faith with all other peoples and countries of the world community, it will need to rebuild its credibility and its democratic legitimacy that has been lost in the aftermath of its post–Cold War military interventions abroad, and further desecrated by the unstatesmanlike and untrustworthy nature of Donald Trump's presidency. (See chapters 1, 2, and 3.) The US Constitution has not been altered significantly for more than two hundred years, so it may be time to do so!
Even more crucially, and what should be given priority, is the fact that Trump's domestic policies do nothing to address the crucial issue of growing inequity and gross disproportion in incomes. One way to do this would be a global tax on financial transactions, as previously discussed, coupled with a reduction in national taxation. Another way to do this—which should become part of the national and international debate—is to better distribute the income of major corporations through employee stock-ownership plans combined with greater employee power-sharing in product and investment decisions through shared capitalism and “workplace democracy.”64 There are, after all, times when employees possess more common sense and innovative ideas than their managers do—and they should be better rewarded for their contributions.