Donald Trump Election: ‘Make America Small Again’ Good News?

Recognizing the end of the United States’ aim to rule the world, Europeans must now grow closer to the Global South and contribute to building a truly multipolar world, believes journalist and columnist Guillaume Duval.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please,” Karl Marx rightly said. It is obviously too early to grasp all the implications of Donald Trump’s victory. However, it seems very likely that one of its main consequences, contrary to Trump’s campaign slogan, will be to “make America small again,” putting an end to the imperial claim of the United States to rule the world, a claim that has gradually developed since 1918 and culminated after 1989.

Despite his campaign rhetoric, Trump’s victory is first and foremost a recognition that the United States no longer has the means for this imperial ambition, that American society is too divided and weakened, that Americans themselves are in too bad a situation to continue spending big bucks to support Ukraine today, Israel or Taiwan tomorrow. Barack Obama and Joe Biden had already started this movement when they gave up on the Syrians and abandoned Iraq and Afghanistan, but Trump will most likely complete it with a more radically isolationist policy.

The Americans can afford it. They are self-sufficient in gas and oil and have only two immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico. In a way, this is obviously a good thing, given the many stupid things the United States has done all over the world in the name of empire (even if, of course, we must also remain eternally grateful to them for having saved democracy in Europe three times in the 20th century, during two world wars and the Cold War). Not to mention the considerable damage that the expansion of the American way of life and consumption has done throughout the planet due to the soft power associated with this empire, in terms of pollution, deterioration of social relations and (poor) public health.

The central question in this context is, of course, who will fill this void in the future. If it is Xi Jinping’s dictatorial China, we will obviously not have really gained from the change. But the worst is not always certain: Xi’s China, aging, in a deep economic and social crisis, is probably weaker than it seems. If what succeeds the American empire is instead a lasting multipolar world without a clearly dominant hegemon, this could perhaps make it possible this time to build a true multilateralism where everyone could find their place. And this is what Europeans must work on now. But this will entail making great efforts to grow closer to the Global South. Although, on the contrary, European migration policy and support for the Benjamin Netanyahu regime have set these countries against us in recent years.