The utmost nature of what has been happening in front of us on the American and global scene for any time should not make us feel that Donald Trump is the main origin of risks and problems of the modern world. Let us not think that it would only be adequate to repel his conservative revolution, return to the liberal consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, and everything would return to average again.
In fact, neither Trump nor his twins on another continents and in another countries are the cause, but the sign and accelerator of changes whose first swallows appeared erstwhile the planet tried to shake off the financial and economical crisis in 2008 and 2009.
I tended to see the crisis of liberal consensus and the boom of national conservatism in the mid-1990s as a return to statism and collectivism, which had taken possession of the authoritarian and xenophobic right after the democratic and global left missed the chance to resurrect them again. And it was in the light of opposition between individualism and collectivism that the category of "populism" was to be utilized between marketplace neoliberalism and social etatism to identify the phenomenon that could take on the left-wing (universalist) and right-wing (nationalistic) form. However, it is an explanation grid that has become anachronistic in fresh years. present populism It's just euphemism for the far right.
The increasingly visible libertarian wing and its associated rhetoric of deregulation cast uncertainty not only on the erstwhile perception of the utmost right as the other of neoliberalism, but besides on the usefulness of this concept. Liberalism attacked by the far right is liberalism of principles set and supervised by experts in power from state anointing. This is not liberalism of the free market, in any way by a country without limits. If we do not clearly separate these 2 wings from each other, then the ritualized left-wing evocation of “bad” neoliberalism does not explain much, but alternatively causes confusion.
One way to separate them is by French philosopher Barbara Stiegler, who opposes the dominant Anglo-American Uzus referring to the first wing of liberalism as “neoliberalism” and calling the second “ultraliberalism”. Both wings have functioned since the last decades of the erstwhile century as 2 complementary faces of 1 global ideology.
According to Stiegler, if the left is to be opposed to both wings, then the current utmost right is connected to the second wing against the first, but it inactive cannot be explained as an opposition between the marketplace and the state: it undermines the authority and power of experts in the name of free competition, but in their place proposes a stronger oligopoly of the largest players to whom it entrusts a key influence on the functioning of the state. And that's what we're witnessing in Washington right now: although no 1 has chosen Muska, he rules America together with Trump.
Sovereign will against rules
This alliance of nationalism with libertarianism undermines, on the 1 hand, the dichotomy of the state and free trade, on the another hand, the dichotomy of collectiveism and individualism. With Trump coming to power, it did not prevail first over the other. The cult of free and strong individuals is not excluded, but it is simply a complement to the worship of a free and strong nation: on an individual and collective level, the winners enjoy an estim and the overcome can only number on contempt. Emotionalism and sovereignty belong to specified strong men as Musk and powers as America.
American historian Jennifer Mittelstadt late recalled that Trump's attitude at the level of abroad policy best reflects this sovereignism, not isolationism. The other of isolationism is interventionism, including imperialism, while the other of sovereignty is multilateralism.
From the position of the second opposition, it does not substance whether a country engages in what happens behind its national and regional borders, but alternatively how it engages: whether it is simply a sovereign entity that settles itself or as a associate of global organisations and long-term alliances based on common obligations. Trump chose the first of these roads. As in national policy, so in global sovereignty of executive will and action is to be ensured against the principles guarded by the expert and judicial authority.
Trump is the most visible symptom of much deeper changes in the way states behave, especially those with regional-hegemonic ambitions, which, since the second half of the erstwhile decade, have been trying to measurement their own interests, turning a blind eye to alliances and institutionalized principles. In this way, since the mediate of the second decade of the 21st century, for example, he behaves Turkey Erdogan, erstwhile she ceased to limit its scope with the commitments made in NATO or Saudi Arabia, which in the autumn of 2022 remained deaf to the requests of its long-standing ally and defender, the US, to increase the stream of oil flowing into planet markets.
This transactional approach, which is directed by individual entities solely to maximise their own benefits, without looking at existing agreements, rules and customs, creates a situation of general uncertainty that is beneficial to players with advanced military and economical strength. Without common trust built by consistent compliance with the rules by as many actors as possible, yet everyone is forced to limit their strategical targets to maximising short-term benefits, allowing stronger growth and bringing the weaker to the bottom. A strategy based on universal adherence to the rules gave everyone a chance to improve their own situation (even if this postulate remained in the ideals sphere and never came true), while the jungle, in which everyone is guarding the tip of their own nose, allows for strong victory, without giving these weak shadows a chance of survival.
To undermine the regulation of rules and laws is most profitable due to the fact that it allows them to confirm and strengthen their monopoly or oligopolist position. This is why it is so hard to realize the alliance of oligarchs with countries under the slogan of deregulation as a continuation of the ultraliberal project. specified alliances do not make marketplace competition, but only increase the privileges of oligarchs.
Competition can only be guaranteed by the rules in force for all, rules that can only be implemented and enforced with the aid of superior authority. At national level, specified authority is an impartial state, at global level, a power of hegemon position or, in an perfect world, a collective authority of the countries united within a transnational organization. A country on the national phase and a supra-national authority at global level guarantees the universal application of the rules and thus builds the assurance of individual actors who know that if they respect these rules, they will not endure losses due to the fact that others violate them.
Overriding power, limiting the strongest, gives hope to improve the position of the weaker, and benefits in the long word besides the former. As a result, it promises, though without a 100% guarantee, everyone to improve the situation.
Between Imperialism and Hegemony
Therefore, contrary to the tendency of the left and the liberal right, to separate political visions according to whether they maximise or minimize the state's intervention in the economy, the question should be asked how, and in whose interests, the state interferes in this economy at all. Following this lead, 2 models of powerful behaviour can be distinguished, which correspond to 2 types of global system.
In a schematic summary, it can be said that over the last 3 centuries this strategy has oscillated between imperialism and hegemony: between the period of fierce power conflict for direct control of territorial or natural resources and the period of supremacy of the only power which, through control of the planet seas, guaranteed compliance with the principles of peaceful cooperation.
Oppositions between the 2 alternate epochs can be opposed to the opposition of the 2 types of powers created by geopolitics at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: the equivalent of imperialistic usage of military force to direct control of another's territory along with its population and resources was the perfect kind of "continental" power (and its empirical prototypes in the form of Germany or Russia), and the equivalent of hegemonistic control of maritime trade routes, which indirectly besides forced another entities, not controlled by the dominant state to comply with its rules, was the perfect kind of "marine" power, the empirical prototype of which was the United Kingdom.
The mercantilistic policy of direct control of the resources and customs protection of the national economy, typical of the early 18th century, led to a series of pan-European wars, ranging from the 7 Years' War (1756–1763) to the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). The United Kingdom came out of the wars as the winner, which thanks to its position as a hegemon on the planet seas managed to warrant Pax Britannica, valid for another 50 years.
In the last 2 decades of the 19th century, alternatively of comparative stableness and peace, there has been intense competition for European powers to take over the uncolonised non-European territories (Scramble for Africa), and erstwhile these were already divided, the powers were at each other's throats in 2 planet wars, which can in fact be considered 1 thirty-one-year war (1914–1945). After a long period of imperialism, the period of U.S. hegemony came, whose supremacy over the capitalist half of the planet with the collapse of the USSR encompassed the full planet.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, elements of mercantylistic imperialism have been increasingly appearing in liberal hegemonism. Initially, this was reflected in how marginalized Venezuelan, Iran and Russia began utilizing their oil and gas resources for political purposes. At the same time, request for crucial metals, specified as copper, nickel, cobalt, and later lithium, began to increase, where exports of countries controlling their extraction began to impose restrictions.
As of 2009, in Western countries, expanding concern began to trigger practically monopolistic control of the extraction and processing of uncommon minerals by China. Especially since China became the world's second largest economy in 2011, and with Xi Jinping's taking over developed a silk way project, consisting of creating a global transport infrastructure, inter alia, by building fresh ports from Pakistan through Greece to Panama. During the past decade, the powers began to search the presence of their troops along strategical maritime communication arteries, as evidenced by the fact that the U.S., French and Chinese have military bases in Djibouti.
Gradually changing course to mercantilism accelerated the covid crisis. During the pandemic, even mainstream realized the risks associated with the dependence of consumer companies on global supply and processing chains outside the control of states. In order to reduce the hazard involved, governments have started to encourage companies to decision their investment back to the country or region they belong to. In response, the global Monetary Fund, as the main guardian of liberal globalisation, has been beating the alarm since 2023 talking about geofragmentation, where optimization, through which the costs and prices of goods fall, replaces deglobalization, the effect of which is precisely the opposite.
Since the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the gradual transformation of the global economical strategy has been accompanied by the weakening of American hegemony, reflecting the expanding political assertiveness of China, Russia's turn towards neo-imperialism and Trump's first presidency from 2017 to 2020. president of the White home Biden for the last 4 years had to tame his attempts to resurrect the dominance of the United States and limit himself to the rhetoric of the global “fight against autocracy”. However, in the face of the continuing collapse of the American power, he was forced to hold the duties imposed by Trump on China, to give back power to the Theocratic Taliban in Afghanistan (2021), to retreat from the open conflict with the autocratic Russia for Ukraine (2022) and to supply ammunition for 15 months to the Israeli government, which with its aid killed tens of thousands of Palestinian women, aged people and children, and destroyed the basic conditions of the Palestinian collective existence in Gaza (one of the normative conditions defining the concept of genocide).
Through a loud gap between the rhetoric of the conflict for democracy and global law and simultaneous concessions towards the openly violating states and governments of Biden contributed to the weakening of the position of the United States, and his words lost credibility. From this perspective, the Trump conservative revolution that we are experiencing is not a extremist turn in the current development, but only a consequence of it. This is best seen in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First, Biden, through an uninterrupted stream of ammunition, allowed Israelis to destruct most of the homes and infrastructure in Gaza, after which Trump stated that Gaza could not be inhabited and proposed a "voluntary" resettlement of Palestinians.
Contrary to Israel's actual support to the demolition of Gaza, which has weakened even more already already a barely smoldering hope for a two-state solution, Biden in his rhetoric continued to evoke this imagination in which the United States was to mediate as a hegemonist power. Trump rejected the function of middleman and announced a plan for the displacement of Palestinians, after which Gaza is to control to U.S. property, which will turn it into the “near east Riviera”. Where Biden attempted to save even the very thought of American hegemony, in a situation where he knew that real hegemony would no longer save, Trump stated that even the thought itself is an outcast and replaced it by a program of American imperialism. His remarks on Gaza, Canada, Greenland or the Panama Canal have clearly undermined the power of global law in the name of US Force Law.
From hypocrisy to consequences
Generally speaking, Trump's conservative revolution is the culmination of changes that have taken place over the last 15 years, erstwhile liberal capitalism of indirect economical power, ensuring the accumulation of profits by hegemonic implementation and enforcement of the rules, has increasingly been displaced and replaced by mercantilistic capitalism by direct military-political control over territories, resources and transport nodes. specified accumulation of profits, in a much more effective way than the liberal alternate allowed, will let the rich to enrich and strengthen power to those who have power, while the mediocre and the powerless will fall to an always deeper bottom. Hegemonic peace will replace the jungle, strong law will replace the law of force.
It's evidently hyperbole. Real systems are always mixed systems. Rather, it is about which of these principles has greater meaning in a given age and how it is interpreted by the dominant discourse. Even in the era of its global-liberal hegemony, America violated global law, e.g. bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 (and then supporting independent Kosovo, which was created just due to illegal American intervention) or occupying Iraq in 2003. However, there were comparatively fewer specified acts, and the general consensus justified them as exceptions to the rule, essential to defend those rules from those who infringe them programmely and systematically. Trump identifies himself with this second group: he wants to dismantle the rule-based order, so that the large fields thus cleared can be established in their size at the expense of tiny ones in a much more transparent and brutal way than in the time of the hegemonic peace.
This is simply a phrase that frees the U.S. abroad policy from the contradictions that have been harassing erstwhile administrations, when, in the name of global law, the U.S. was whipping Putin for the business of Ukraine and applauding the global Criminal Court that he was pursuing him for the war crimes committed, while at the same time spreading a protective umbrella over Netanyahu, which continued to settle illegally occupied territories and criticized the same tribunal for the prosecution of the second for war crimes.
For Biden, this contradiction, inherited by the president from his predecessors, became even more apparent and exacerbated. In his book Hundred Years Rashid Khalidi convincingly explains that all American administrations, who since Jimmy Carter had been acting as a mediator in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, had actually been acting as a lawyer for the stronger side of Israel. Clinton or Biden had to at least pretend to measurement both sides with 1 measure, whereas Trump no longer has to do this: he never claimed that America was going to prosecute the primacy of law and justice over force and compulsion. On the contrary, Trump believes that America is to defend the rights of the strong so that they can make full usage of their advantage over the weaker in their own interests.
In short, Trump has no ambition to bring about justice in which the strong and weak will be treated equally, in accordance with rules beyond the area of self-interest and power disputes. Trump does not recognise the necessity of any specified defence of value, independent of the sphere of facts. From his perspective, there is no difference between what is and what should be: for what is is decided by those who have the power to force them through what they think should be. Since the reality shaped by the acts of the mighty is the only measurement of justice, the weak lose the right to have their interests taken care of erstwhile they fail.
From this perspective, it is not amazing that just after the first authoritative telephone conversation with Putin on 12 February Trump mentioned the request to reconstruct Russia's position in the G7 group and suggested that he might visit Russia and Putin – America. His defence minister then immediately explained to the European defence ministers that the anticipation that Russia would retreat from east Ukraine is "unrealist", as well as that Ukraine would receive safety guarantees from America or the North Atlantic Alliance commanded by it before Putin's next attack.
In the weeks before Americans put coffee on the bench, president Zelenski, according to the mercantilistic transformation of modern capitalism, attempted to encourage the military protection of Ukraine, promising the Americans in return unlimited access to Ukrainian mineral assets. In his speech at the yearly safety conference in Munich, read 3 days after Trump's conversation with Putin, he proudly and firmly assured that he would defy Russian aggression, even with the support of Europe alone, and so appealed for the creation of a European army. However, the day before (without a card) he expressed his hope that Trump Ukraine would help: “I truly number on him [...]. He is simply a strong man, if he chooses our side, if he stands in the mediate and puts force on Putin, he will force him to end the war. It is in his power.” But why would Trump do that erstwhile he assumes that the strong have the right to dictate the conditions on which they will coexist with the weak? If the weaker ones, like Zelenski, cannot request justice by referring to moral principles or global law, they can only hope that the "strong man" will have mercy on them...
Under the law of stronger indifference and indifference to the losers, the Trump administration abolished the sanctions imposed by Biden on settlers in the West Bank who committed force against the occupied Palestinians, it blocked in the UN safety Council a resolution calling for Israel to proceed to cooperate with the Palestinian exile agency (UNRWA) and imposed sanctions on the global Criminal Court and its staff for issuing a warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu and Joawa Galant on charges of crimes they were about to commit against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza in consequence to the Hamas massacre of October 7. At the same time, the Court issued a warrant for the arrest of 2 Palestinian commanders liable for the crime on Israeli civilians. However, there is no place in Trump's planet for a law that measures 1 measurement of the strong and weak, the ally and the enemy, the "good" and the "bad" and the judgement of the conduct of war (ius in bello) regardless of whether it was justified (ius ad bellum). So it is clear from the logic of things that even the global Criminal Court itself does not be in his world.
The Mystery of Czech Trumpism
[The text originally appeared in the Czech Republic, so the author analyses Czech Trumpism and mentions Poland – ed.]
The "Aristocratic" common respect between the greats and contempt for the small ones, presented by Trump, allows us to realize why he invited the Chinese president to his inauguration, why he promised to rehabilitate Putinian Russia, why further insults and intimidations were committed towards Canada, Denmark, Mexico and Panama. The allies who utilized safety under the American protectorate, Trump reminds us that they are small, that they are not equal to him, and against enemies specified as China and Russia, he expresses respect for the large and his equal.
And while it is rather understandable why Trump's return to the White home can give Putin a reason to rejoice and not even Xi Jinping must fear him, the large enthusiasm of many Czech politicians, whether from the ruling camp (Benda, Vonda, Zahradil) or from the opposition (Okamura, Babiš, Konečná) remains a mystery. After all, the Czech national state is 1 of those “little ones” that Trump does not give any warrant of respect and attention. The sympathy of the protrumpian national conservatives in neighbouring Poland can inactive be explained: this is about 4 times the larger country, which in fresh years, due, among others, to the exceptional situation created by the Russian-Ukrainian war, is changing into a power that can talk on behalf of Central Europe, Baltic countries and Scandinavia. However, unlike this aspiring regional hegemon, shaped by the memories of the noble Polish-Lithuanian state in early modern times, it is alternatively hard to imagine that small, plebeic Czechs enter the aristocratic club of those who deserve Trump's attention and recognition.
Therefore, from the position of the interests and safety of medium-sized countries, specified as the Czech Republic, alternatively than being in the space of the power struggle, much greater benefits come from belonging to a transnational structure based on rules, at least in theories treating all members, large and small, on an equal basis. In Trump's world, all we can hope for is the kindness of any protector. The European Union as a transnational community of institutions and rules, despite all its shortcomings and inequalities, inactive offers opportunities for equal treatment and defence of its own interests. But in the jungle, where Trump and his squad want to push the world, we'd gotta start looking again for a power he wants to take us under his wing.
The experience of the German protectorate and later of the years experienced in the Russian sphere of influence taught us how deceptive the situation is, in which there is nothing but to adopt "protection" from 1 of the powers fighting for hegemony in Central Europe. A country like the Czech Republic can only find safe asylum in a transnational structure where common rules restrict the sovereignty of all members so that the larger ones cannot impose their will on the smaller ones without restriction. As Thomas Mann argued, the only way for Germany not to “germanise” Europe is to “Europeanise” Germany and another national states of Europe and subjecting them to rules that at least measurement large and tiny in theory.
The Czechs, who are joining Trump's conservative revolution today, seem to neglect to see that in the planet which will appear as a consequence of it, they will have the Czech subordinate and dependent position, not the national sovereignty which they have promised themselves since that revolution. After the demolition of multilateral institutions and common obligations at any time of future danger, they will only beg for mercy. And empty-handed. At least Ukrainians have their deposits...
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Pavel Barša He's a polytologist.
The article was published on Denik Alarm. From Czech she translated Dorota Blabolil-Obrębska. Shortcuts from the editorial board.
