It is sometimes easy to forget that what we know now as the United States of America fought a furious war of liberation against its coloniser, the British Empire, to win its freedom. Just 200 years later it was the world’s dominant power economically and militarily. Its money, the dollar, is still the world’s currency, its culture widely envied and its democracy a global template.
But you would have to be blind not to appreciate that the singular dominance of the US is a thing of the past. And as its power deflates, the vacuum it creates is filled, for the moment, by China and its acolytes. In Europe and in the strategically critical Western Pacific tensions have not been higher in nearly 80 years as war and phoney war split the world, largely between democracies and dictatorships. It is not nearly over yet and the US and its allies will not easily be substituted.
Perhaps because it is a democracy, the approach of a close election in the US in November has the hair on the back of the global neck standing straight up. South Africa has a direct and pressing interest in the result.
The US is a huge trading partner and we regularly run a big trade surplus with it and a bigger deficit with China.
At issue in the US now is not so much policy but the cognitive capacity of the two main contenders — President Joe Biden, 81, and former president Donald Trump, 78. Trump, we already know, is an autocrat in the making, unpredictable and often incoherent. He mused recently about being on a sinking electrically-powered boat. “If the boat is sinking,” he told a rally, “water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”
People laugh at Trump, but Biden’s visible mental disintegration in the past few months has been frightening. He is frail, and even more incoherent than Trump.
Defending himself in an interview this month he said: “The fact of the matter is how can you assure you’re going to be out on, you know, on your way to go, you know, work tomorrow. Age, age wasn’t, you know, the idea that I’m too old.”
A narcissist, Trump is also a manifest danger to democracy. In his first term he was held in check by professional aides and advisers, almost all of whom oppose him now
Referring to his vice-president, Kamala Harris, he said the other day that “by the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice-president, first black woman, to serve with a black president [Barack Obama]”.
Biden will be forced out of the race before the Democratic Party convention in Chicago on August 19. Among potential contenders will be Harris and Gavin Newsom, the sharp governor of California. And Trump is beatable. He leads Biden by only a few points in the polls and there is more than enough time for a strong contender to turn things around.
A narcissist, Trump is also a manifest danger to democracy. In his first term he was held in check by professional aides and advisers, many of whom oppose him now.
But new, more ideological advisers have advanced plans for him to create a much stronger, personalised, executive presidency should he come to power in November.
The Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, would welcome a Trump victory, but the Chinese will worry about trade and global destabilisation. And South Africa is ill-prepared for another Trump presidency.
Our foreign policy is hopelessly adrift, no matter how often the government tries to spin it otherwise. Nelson Mandela began in 1994 pursuing, specifically, human rights and democracy. Now his ANC looks for “active non-alignment” and “collective action among progressive forces around the globe” — weasel words from new foreign minister Ronald Lamola earlier this week, designed to mask a significant policy shift that has already occurred.
What “progressive forces”? Seldom democratic you can be sure, and human rights only count when the humans are our friends. We support the Palestinians being bombed by Israel and turn our back on a Ukraine bombed by Russia, our Brics friend. For a little economy like ours, “non-alignment” is going to prove a hopeless place to hide. Either we take sides or come to terms with the fact that, for much of the world, we already have.
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