Trump's America, tariffs, canals & USAID

These are days of rapid fire politics in Donald Trump's America. Geopolitics has been pushed into chaotic unpredictability. With Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Elon Musk looking on, the world must now find the means of maintaining a sort of equilibrium in its dealings with the new regime in Washington. It will not be an easy task, for Trump has never been an easy man to deal with.

If there were many who had thought that his second presidency would be a qualitative improvement on his first, that it would be less confrontational than what it was by the time it ended in January 2021, they now realise that they have considerably more reasons for worry than they had in the years 2017-2021.

Begin at the beginning. The Trump team wishes to make, in its curious formulation, America great again. It has not been explained how America has lost, if indeed it has lost, its greatness in these past many years. Or it just might be that America's position as the world's sole superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s has in the twenty-first century come under assault from China, indeed from a whole combination of political factors working around the globe.

The rise of China, the clear path to assertiveness by Europe, the refusal of NATO and the EU to kowtow to Trump, the emergence of India as a powerful regional as well as global force are happenings which US policymakers did not foresee when Mikhail Gorbachev fell and his country disintegrated in the 1990s.

It is, from Trump's point of view, a condition which needs correction. The worrying fact here is that the President and his team have patently abjured diplomacy in their dealings with the rest of the world and have instead adopted the weapon of threats and intimidation as policy. Imposing 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, despite a 30-day pause in their implementation, is bad policy. One does not see any sign of traditional American foreign policy at work here.

The Canadians and the Mexicans have properly fallen into line after Justin Trudeau and Claudia Sheinbaum have spoken to Donald Trump. Both leaders have assured the US President that they will deploy thousands of their troops at their borders to ensure that no illegal movement of Canadians and Mexicans or contraband to the United States (US) occurs. That move is appreciated, but one will remember that it came about in the face of threats from an unconventional regime now holding the levers of power in Washington.

The aggressive policy pursued by the United States is nowhere more visible than in the insensitivity brought into play over the workings of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Elon Musk wants the organisation to be dispatched into oblivion. Trump has alleged that it is being run by leftist lunatics.

The consequences can be imagined: all around the globe, where USAID has been assisting governments in underprivileged nations with much needed foreign aid --- USAID has always been a significant agency disbursing aid to the poverty-stricken nations of the world --- in such fields as health, education, alleviating poverty, millions of people will now be pushed into circumstances that will only worsen their plight.

Already the ramifications of the Trump administration's onslaught on USAID are being felt, with thousands, indeed more, of people employed in diverse nations in carrying out the agency's programmes being served termination letters. An instance is Bangladesh's ICCDDR'B, where more than a thousand jobs dependent on USAID funding have been slashed.

Doing away with USAID by the Trump administration is an act of recklessness. It does little to make America great again. Indeed, it diminishes America's appeal before nations and societies which have since 1961, when President John F. Kennedy created USAID through executive action, benefited from American assistance in lifting the poor out of poverty and putting them at a reasonable level of survival as individuals and groups.

While tariffs on Mexico and Canada will affect the governments in Ottawa and Mexico City, the assault on USAID will simply push millions upon millions, in such crisis-driven places as Sudan, down the road to unmitigated disaster. More people will go to bed hungry, more health clinics will close down, more babies will succumb to malnutrition, more poor mothers will die. None of that will be in America's interest. Doing away with USAID is to strike down a long history of American efforts to help the world's poor. It is tragic that an admirable humanitarian legacy put in place by America's 35th President is being rudely dismantled by its 47th President.

Making America great again is no guarantee that a restoration of US leadership around the globe is assured. On the contrary, it points to two things. First, it holds the wherewithal of pushing Washington into isolationism. Second, it will be compelled to contend with such rising powers as China in exerting influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Beijing has already hit back with tariffs on American goods on its own, which is a broad hint of the slide that will define China-US ties over the next four years.

In Europe, where the EU has made it clear that it will respond to American tariffs once they are imposed on the continent, a decline in cooperation with and support for Washington will be the likely result. With Denmark, Trump's insistence on Greenland being handed over to Washington has opened another window of discord for Americans in terms of their relationship with Europe. The demand that the Panama Canal be handed back to the US, decades after President Jimmy Carter negotiated its transfer to Panama with Omar Torrijos, is another zone of potential conflict Trump and his Republican administration have set their sights on.

Hawkish diplomacy in modern times has always had its pitfalls. Hawks responsible for the making of foreign policy all over the world have caused esteem for their nations to slip before other nations. America needs a return to a process of moderation in its diplomatic approach to the world. Given that its influence has been under steady erosion almost everywhere, it will need to embrace a new world order where it will be expected to acknowledge the rising power and influence of nations and governments around the globe.

But that liberalism in US foreign policy will not return until this second Trump presidency draws to an end in January 2029.

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