|
Only one of the United States’ two major political parties still holds unreserved commitment to the norms of liberal democracy, and that’s the one that just lost the US presidential election badly. But there’s already been quite enough commentary on how dark a shadow Donald Trump’s return to the presidency casts over US democracy, except to note the solidarity outside America with those in the United States who refuse to go along with what Trump represents and who will oppose his corruption and sabotage of their country’s institutions.
On what Trump’s re-election ‘says about America’, we repeat: the electoral triumph of Trump’s xenophobic populism doesn’t make the United States extraordinary or exceptional — it makes it sadly all too normal. Trump’s win confirms that Western analysts need to get used to understanding US politics using frameworks that they are more used to applying to politics in the Global South: democratic backsliding (and how to resist it), oligarchy, crony capitalism and regime hybridity.
The damage won’t be limited to the United States.
Trump’s hard-wired disdain for multilateralism and inability to comprehend the very idea of positive-sum international economic games make him a terrible problem for the world as it confronts challenges that can only be addressed through multilateral cooperation — and which would benefit from constructive US engagement.
The manifest dangers to the WTO posed by Trumpian mercantilism are all too obvious, but the threat he poses on the climate front, for instance, is strangely underappreciated given the literally existential stakes in that issue. Trump’s plans to unleash a fossil-fuel boom in the United States and US withdrawal not only from the Paris climate agreement but the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which underpins global climate cooperation, put potentially incredible strain on the global effort to combat climate change.
The integrity of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is likewise something under threat as growing doubts in South Korea, and to a lesser extent in Japan, about US security guarantees strengthen the perceived case for developing nuclear weapons.
Two incisive analyses of what our region and the world need to do in response to the return of Trump are our feature articles for this week. In the first, Susan Thornton writes that Trump’s return to the White House ‘affirms a fundamental shift in America’s relationship with the world. In contrast to other empires, which tended to fall apart slowly over an extended period, Americans themselves have decided they no longer want to bear the burdens and distractions of global hegemony.’
Yet in the short term, Thornton anticipates that Trump’s approach to the world will be a mix of isolationism and adventurism that reflects the varied instincts of the trade warriors — and actual warriors — who populate the pro-Trump international policy and national security world. ‘Asian partners should steer clear of whiplash from the collision between Trump’s transactionalism and his national security team’s fever dreams,’ Thornton advises.
Multilateral cooperation and burden-sharing are out the window in Washington. As Adam Posen writes in the second of our lead articles, the challenge for the governments of the region is to not fall for some of the perverse incentives that will arise from the new global trade landscape created by Trump’s tariff plans. In Posen’s analysis, ‘[a]ll else being equal, Trump’s tariff increases could yield an economic gain for East Asia in the short term’ as US exports ‘become increasingly uncompetitive, while offshoring would continue to flow into the region’.
But ‘East Asia needs to band together and resist the temptation to play the game that Trump instigates with Xi’ and avoid responding to a new US–China trade war by pursuing their narrow individual advantage. The long-term interests of most of the region’s economies are better served by a doubling down on multilateral regionalism that ‘emphasise[s] institutional processes and openness’ with a view to ‘creating its own open markets tied to the rest of the world, both inherently and as an attractive alternative to China and the United States.’
A second Trump term will unquestionably do most damage to the international trading system and international institutions. Trump’s second term team won’t need to find its feet in implementing protectionist measures and firing up a new trade war with China. US leadership of the multilateral trade order has been the guiding light for over 70 years. That leadership was vacated decisively in Trump’s first term and the Biden administration made no attempt to re-establish it. The rest of the world is going to have to work together to preserve that order in the face of its biggest challenge — from Trump and the United States itself.
In practical terms, that means there is no time to waste in elevating the functions of the home-grown regional architecture for economic and political cooperation — RCEP, the CPTPP and the ASEAN-based dialogue and cooperation platforms all have a role to play in securing common stances across the region on trade, climate, and the management of security tensions.
The alternative would be devastating loss of regional income and heightened concomitant risks of political instability.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.