Liberal Democracy and the Interests of Power

The United States is a liberal democracy and no president has the power to change that. Democracy only refers to the electoral system that guarantees U.S. citizens are represented by the government and does not apply to international relations.

Trump didn’t care about us. He turned away while we were comfortably looking eastward, watching the world change, feeling secure that we had a strong ally behind us to guarantee our protection. This is what we were led to believe, but is it really true?

Trump has been called an imperialist, and that’s true enough, but when in history has a great power not been? The British Empire used political power to govern its colonies, and now China is using financial leverage to gain control of ports, highways and railways, and even purchasing government debt. The United States colonized with industry in the last century, sending in the Marines to defend their colonies when necessary, and other democratic administrations have done this to an even greater or worse extent. Together, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sent Libya spinning out of control over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s oil mandate, making it more urgent than the immigration situation. Meanwhile, we were distracted by the concocted story of the dictator Moammar Ghadafi living in a tent. Having finished with the Mediterranean, the Obama and Clinton duo turned their attention to Ukraine, leading to the current situation, the Euromaidan revolution also hitting the front page there at the time.

This is precisely the difference. The Donald does not need to hide behind stories like the plight of the Inuits and broadcast them to half the world to complain about how oppressed they feel by Denmark. No, Trump shows his hand straight away, admitting that, like many other world powers, he has coveted Greenland for years for its strategic position in the Arctic Circle and its natural resources. Fairy tales, like the one told here to justify intervention, are always meant to do one thing: let us sleep at night knowing we are on the side of the good guys.

But waking up from such dreams means facing the harsh reality that this is not just a struggle between good and evil, but between stakeholders with opposing interests, all driven by the interests of their citizens. No, we didn’t need this, not after the fact that instead of securing affordable energy and resources to produce wealth, we set out on an eco-friendly mission to provide plastic bottles with attachable caps. No, Trump is just a dictator who wants to suffocate liberal democracy.

Poor us. Given that the United States is a liberal democracy and no president has the power to change that, democracy in this sense only refers to the domestic system of electoral representation and not to international relations. Regardless of the political system, international relations are governed by a balance of interests in which they sometimes agree and other times disagree. Every nation has alliances with dictatorships and democracies, and rivalries can even exist between democratic regimes.

Of course, when you assert an opinion on the international stage, there’s a difference between going crazy like Russia and sending in the tanks and a president sarcastically calling you a conqueror; in which case you just put up or shut up. As long as someone brings peace, obviously addressing the imbalance with land and wealth, it is difficult to turn your nose up at their effort. Between a fairytale war and a brutal peace, should it be that difficult?