John Rees analyses the new imperial order

The public version of President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) was controversial enough. But the longer unpublished version has now been revealed and it threatens to blow the roof off international relations as they have existed since the end of the Cold War.

The document seen by the US website Defence One admits the global failure of US strategy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It says: ‘After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country’. But the NSS states, ‘the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests’.

It ends in a brutal dismissal of the foreign-policy framework of every US administration since 1989, including that of President Trump’s first term. ‘Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable’ according to the document.

In truth, this is not just a reversal of the foreign policy which resulted in the disasters of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. It is also a reversal of US strategy since World War II.

The version of the NSS we’ve seen wants an end to a ‘perpetually expanding NATO’. The redacted version goes further. It quite literally calls for Europe to adopt the full Trump programme and to  ‘Make Europe Great Again’. It calls on European Nato members to wean themselves from American military support.

To this end, the US will work to pull apart Nato and the European Union by relating bi-laterally to those governments with far-right politics. Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland are listed as countries the US should ‘work more with … with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union].’

For the rest of the European states, the US will work to destabilise them and alter their political culture by supporting ‘parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life … while remaining pro-American,’ the document says.

The world order the US now wants to see is equally brutal and anti-democratic. Trump’s vision is to dump the G7 as a key forum for international diplomacy. The NSS proposes creating a new body of major powers, one that isn’t hemmed in by the G7’s requirements that the countries be both wealthy and democratically governed. In place of the G7, the unpublished NSS talks of a Core 5 composed of the US, China, Russia, India and Japan. Europe is not included.

The C5 would meet regularly, as the G7 does, for summits with specific themes. First on the C5’s proposed agenda: Middle East security, specifically, normalising relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Retooling imperialism

This is part of the NSS’s insistence that others should take over part of the burden of policing the globe. The document insists that the United States can’t do it all alone but also that China and Russia should not be allowed to replace US leadership. The strategy suggests partnering with ‘regional champions’ to help maintain stability.

This is a fatal faultline: the US wants to retain leadership but not to retain leadership at the same time, and certainly not to pay as much for leading.

Except in one department: the US’s own backyard which it sees as ‘the Western hemisphere’. Trump’s revised and extended Monroe Doctrine, named after President James Munroe who, in the 1820s, told the European empires to stay out of the US’s area of nearest influence, assumes US dominance in its near abroad.

The new doctrine is already causing chaos in international affairs. The Kremlin has welcomed the NSS, saying it is aligned with its world view. Russia will get a significant upgrade from the new US strategy, while the EU is relegated to the second tier and becomes little more than a US client state.

European leaders are close to meltdown. Mark Rutte, the head of Nato, who calls Trump ‘Daddy’, has set the new pattern by abasing himself in front of Trump no matter how much he is insulted. He’s demanding that Nato powers do exactly what Trump wants and increase arms spending to an unprecedented peace-time figure of 5% of GDP. This despite the new US strategy denouncing the European Union as anti-democratic, Europe as lacking in self-confidence and which said the goal of the US should be ‘to help Europe correct its current trajectory’.

EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas also agreed with Trump, saying, ‘There’s a lot of criticism, but I think some of it is also true, if you look at Europe, it has been underestimating its own power towards Russia.’

Rearmament, conscription, recently reintroduced in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and France, and war preparations are the European leaders’ response to Daddy leaving them in the lurch.

Meanwhile, in the US’s newly reappropriated ‘backyard’, the first fruit is perpetual military operations against Venezuela, justified as a war on drugs. The move is bound to provoke a Latin and South America which has enjoyed a generation and more of growing independence and developing economic power. 

The truth of the new US strategy is that it is a programme for retooling a declining empire by means of delegated authority, burden shifting, and the abandonment of even the pretence of international diplomacy. It is a brutal contact-sport version of imperialism in a world which is already hostile to US power and its disastrous application since the Afghan war. 

The attempt to create a new Axis-powers alliance of powerful, fundamentally nationalist, and anti-democratic states is redrawing the world order. In Europe, as in domestic politics, the liberal centre is copying and facilitating the far right, not opposing it. The work of resistance will be the task of the ordinary people of the continent.