RSN: Stephen Eric Bronner | Trump Country

By Stephen Eric Bronner, Reader Supported News

03 October 10

t is now just over a year since President Donald Trump addressed the UN General Assembly for the first time. His most recent speech on September 25, 2018, differed from the first only in gall. Delegates were shell-shocked in 2017; this time they laughed when the president boasted that his administration had achieved more than any other in American history. He took credit for a robust Trump stock market but said nothing about nearly $1 trillion targeted for defense spending, and a national debt threatening to exceed even that. Education and human welfare are under attack, social services are being cut, infrastructure is rotting, voting rights are imperiled in the “red” states, and the “material level of culture” (Marx) is sinking, even while support for Trump’s exercise of executive power is being made into the hallmark of patriotism. All this underlies the dominant theme of the president’s most recent speech: namely, sovereignty.

“America first!” is sovereignty’s apparent cornerstone. The usual coarsening of even the most basic political concepts, with hardly a word of criticism by pundits, has again come into play. Sovereignty was also the topic of Trump’s 2017 speech to the United Nations. But this time it was used to justify his own unique policy-mixture of counter-enlightenment and counter-revolution. Sovereignty became the justification for the president’s employment of the double standard and a bullying foreign policy based on a saber-rattling protectionism. China is blasted for retaliating against the American imposition of what can amount to $200 billion in tariffs with $30-40 billion of its own even as Europe is threatened with economic retribution should its member nations continue trading with Iran once the next set of American sanctions go into effect. Indeed, while democracies come under attack, the president happily lauds (friendly) authoritarian regimes ranging from Russia to Saudi Arabia to North Korea.

Sovereignty projects international stability and, against popular misconceptions, a kind of cosmopolitan reciprocity. But stability and reciprocity are precisely what Trump’s arbitrary “America first!” policy threatens to undermine. The policy has been marked by rejection of international norms abroad and self-generated chaos at home. Or, to put it another way, the United States is marked by an ethically rudderless outlook on matters of foreign policy and the kind of domestic polarization that paralyzes any meaningful notion of the national interest. President Trump’s personal whims and arbitrarily determined interests step into the breach. Emotional reactions to the spur of the moment become the substitute for reasoned deliberation.

Critical questioning inspires fear and further withdrawal. Xenophobic sentiments will only grow as the United States is chastised for its retreat from transnational commitments and reciprocal obligations on matters ranging from NATO to the International Court to climate change to funding the United Nations and its agencies. To suggest that this is just an extension of Obama’s foreign policy is misguided. Trump’s administration privileges unilateral over multilateral action, coercion over diplomacy, arbitrary determination of the American national interest over international cooperation, and a crude and traditional “power politics” over human rights.

Sovereignty emerged from the crucible of religious and internecine wars that plagued Europe from the 14th until the 15th centuries. Sick of the bloodshed that cost the continent nearly 1/3 of its population, poised between the intolerant absolutism of contentious Christian churches, principalities participating in the barbarism agreed to the Treaty of Westphalia. It was intended to provide a modicum of stability by countering the hegemonic aspirations of any state by decentralizing international power, facilitating pragmatic alliances (even with rivals), while remaining sensitive to the constant possibility for reconfiguring the existing constellation of political forces. Sovereignty, in short, arose in connection with the new appreciation for the “balance of power,” the right of sovereign states to decide upon their religion and form of government that would ultimately inform the ideal of national self-determination, and thus the basic principles of reciprocity that would underpin the formal elaboration of international law.

Trump’s view threatens the inner connection existing between national self-determination, republicanism, and universal right that marks modern notions of sovereignty. It connotes little more than the right of the United States to go it alone and yet intervene when and where it wishes. Nonsense about “fake news” only makes matters worse: accusing China (rather than Russia) of interfering with American elections is a case in point. No evidence is necessary for making such claims and only “interest” – or, better, the president’s whims – serves as the criterion for making decisions in foreign policy. Any state can appear as an “enemy” or “friend” at any time, not merely in principle but in fact. The result is a dissolution of strategy into tactics and an inability to formulate any coherent or consistent policy on any issue. Trump considers international law an expression of naiveté while unpredictability (rather than stability) becomes a virtue in its own right.

What Trump likes to call “principled realism” is neither principled nor realistic. American distrust of the world community has produced an increasing distrust of the United States, thereby fueling paranoia and xenophobia along with a spate of arbitrary decisions in terms of foreign policy. Ties with traditional allies have been weakened while (half-hidden) collaboration with regimes (whose contempt for human rights is legendary) is now simply viewed as one option among others. Under the rule of Trump, the United States symbolizes nothing more than bluster. It is America – accept its unilateral decisions or suffer the consequences.

Only America’s enemies, not its friends, pose threats to sovereignty. The United States can have as many nuclear bombs as it likes, and provide them to India and Pakistan, but that is not the case for Iran. American sovereignty is threatened not by Russian electoral interference but by Mexico’s refusal to endorse and pay for a wall on its border. The double standard, so notable in Trump’s UN speech, comes down to this: America (or an arbitrarily chosen ally) can do what it wishes, when it wishes, and by whatever means it wishes while its arbitrarily chosen rivals cannot. Such is the president’s understanding of sovereignty.

Worse: the real threats are ignored. Nearly one billion refugees are crossing borders. Wealth is becoming ever more centralized, and the inequalities between North and South are endangering already vulnerable and fragile states. New cyber technologies have no respect for national borders or legitimate popular will formation. The question today is the same as it was more than a year ago: namely, can sovereignty co-exist with cosmopolitan attitudes, liberal ideals, and new forms of institutional accountability. Such is the real issue that should fuel a critical inquiry into the viability of the state and the role of sovereignty.

Stephen Eric Bronner is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of Global Relations for the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. His most recent books are The Bitter Taste of Hope: Ideas, Ideals and Interests in the Age of Obama and The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.