Trumpian America’s Unwitting Christmas Gift to Global South

Photo courtesy of Tyla

“Every cloud has a silver lining,” wrote English poet-philosopher and leading 17th century civil servant John Milton in one of his lesser known plays. While Milton is best known for his theological-allegorical epic poem Paradise Lost, this phrase about silver lining has become part of commonly used idiom adopted by many cultures across the world.

This Christmas do the hundreds of millions of victims of a currently rampant Western geopolitical hegemonism worldwide see any hint of a let up of this hegemonism – a hegemonism that engenders devastating wars and even genocide from Palestine and most of West Asia to Sudan, Congo, Somalia and now Venezuela?

In today’s world, as Christmas is celebrated, there seems to be more and more people across the planet who seek a silver lining, even a modicum of brightness, for the dark clouds of hardship, catastrophe and sorrow that envelope them. Sri Lankans, too, have been stricken by our latest natural disaster of a cyclone that in terms of windspeed (the normal feature of a cyclone) was of average scale but in terms of rainfall was world record-setting and has wreaked havoc on land and water and economy.

If Sri Lankans this Christmas season must look hard for brightness in their lives other than tinsel and fireworks, it does not take much to imagine how hard people in other parts of the planet, stricken on far larger and longer lasting scales, must seek or just fantasize about brightness in their lives.

Illegal migrant children in the US, separated from their parents by icy officialdom, have quick access by US charities. Victims of US-Israeli bombing in Iran, Lebanon and Yemen have their own governments and international agencies accessible to them.

Food deprived war refugees in Sudan, Congo and Somalia do not have much government to care for them. At least the international agencies are allowed access to those displaced millions exposed to desert dust or tropical forest insects and disease. The Rohingya in Bangladesh are in relative luxury courtesy the well facilitated UN agencies.

But the people of Palestine are a special case of distinct horror this festive season.

Some 400 Gazans have been killed by continued Israeli war since the current “ceasefire” was declared to the world by Israel and the US, with supportive fanfare by the West and some Arab monarchy allies, barely two months ago. Over 60,000 Gazans have been killed in the West-backed Israeli military offensive since the current, large scale operation began in October 2023.

In the light of the continued Israeli war the global community, especially the Global South, also sees that the Gazan government led by the still popular Hamas Movement, is right in openly stating doubts about the veracity of this “ceasefire” claim.

Leaving aside the ongoing bombing by the West-backed Israeli offensive and the daily armed attacks by the West encouraged European Jewish settler gangs, the homeless, shelterless, waterless, toiletless, starving and bleeding Palestinians also suffer the cruellest hardship of all: the deliberate blocking of efforts by the whole range of world aid agencies to provide the entire range of human needs. If the war was a black nightmare for the survivors of ongoing genocide, the “ceasefire” and pending loss of remnant popular self-governance must surely be a continuing darkness.

Western power bloc           

It is this same combination of the European Union and powers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation that has been operating thus in West Asia and also in many other parts of the world. Direct colonial conquest, societal dislocation and harsh economic extraction for over half a millennium (at least) across most of the planet has been, after de-colonisation, succeeded by a further continuation of that same political-ideological dominance and economic exploitation.

Immense human effort by the former colonised has seen some beginnings of social and economic recovery. A Global South emerges with its own incipient powerful states and geopolitical networks, despite the continuing bludgeoning by that same Western power bloc. But the Global South is a long way yet from ridding itself of the yoke of Western geopolitical dominance.

The US alone operates more than 750 military bases and military outposts across the world with the most being in Europe, East Asia, West Asia and Africa. No other country has anything more than 10 military bases (if at all) outside their national territories. These countries comprise mainly a few other European powers (former colonial powers), Russia, China and India, adding up to about 10 states in all.

The Western power bloc that has functioned in this coordinated manner since the end of World War 2 is the successor to the same bloc of European colonial powers, now combining with their new offspring of white dominated states of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A few similar white dominated Latin American states may currently function as allies but their loyalty to the West will remain as long as their white ruling elites remain in power.

Capitalist power Japan, carefully nurtured by the West as its proxy in an otherwise de-colonised Asia, also functions as a key ally. Two more Asian capitalist powers, South Korea and Taiwan, are also reluctant allies of the West given their geopolitical predicaments arising from the outcome of World War 2 in their region. As communism expanded across Russian and Chinese-dominated East Asia, South Korea was militarily carved out of the Korean Peninsula by US intervention and Taiwan became the (West protected) remnant of a defeated capitalism in China.

Cracks             

Cracks are already showing in this Western power bloc. The disagreement between Europe and the US over their joint military spending and deployment is one major crack. Secondly, European NATO’s support for Israel’s war in Palestine is waning. The Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted by NATO’s expansion and encirclement of Mocow’s European borders is now the biggest geopolitical split between Europe and NATO’s biggest power, the US.

This weakening of the Western power bloc is coming to a head with the arrival of the new US radical right movement in power in Washington.

The US radical right, long marginalised by the mainstream Republican Party, has emerged as the alternative right. A mix of socio-economic marginalisation of the US working class and the insensitivity of the GOP-Democrat political establishment to that marginalisation gave the alternative right its electoral foothold, a foothold so ably exploited by right wing maverick President Donald Trump.

The first Trump regime was only a precursor which enabled the alternative right to explore the possibilities of power inside the Washington swamp. The second Trump regime shows a more organised alternative right now in full control of the Republican Party and especially the White House.

The Project 2025 master plan devised by hard right think tanks for the systematic governmental take over by the Alt Right is the best example of that maturing and new dominance. The alternative right is now mainstreamed and labelled by many analysts as the US radical right.

NSS 2025                 

Project 2025 was the radical right’s governmental takeover blue print. The radical right White House at the end of November released its global geopolitics blue print: the US National Security Strategy (NSS 2025).

The new NSS, dressed up as the personal vision of President Trump (imitating Hitlerism), is seen as a major geopolitical pivot by Washington.

The NSS formally shifts the US from a posture of global dominance to one of hemispheric exclusivism. The Western Hemisphere is for the US alone, the NSS declares. No external power will be allowed in and any such power already making an entry (China) will be blocked by discouraging states within the hemisphere from hosting such alien powers.

European analysts have noted the clear exclusion of Europe from this hemisphere and are calling the NSS as a divorce between the US and the EU. The language of the strategy’s supposed author, President Trump, in referring to Europe is seen as disparaging and even racist. Some analysts say that the NSS is more hostile to Europe than it is to Russia and even China.

The NSS bemoans what it says is the loss of Europe’s civilisational identity. It also criticises what it says is the suppression of similar European radical right wing movements by some European governments.

The NSS announces the revival of the notorious Monroe Doctrine in which, in 1823, President James Monroe declared the two American continents as the Western Hemisphere controlled by Washington. It fairly explicitly threatens direct US politico-militarist dominance of the Western Hemisphere. The NSS also discusses China in some detail but focuses on economic rivalry and avoids possibility of military rivalry. The radical right is not interested in world domination and the NSS says so explicitly.

According to the NSS, Washington will no longer invest militarily in West Asia, too. However, current US moves in Palestine belie such a posture. It is natural that such official documents are part fact and part disinformation and propaganda.

Retreat

But the principal thrust of the NSS is America’s historic retreat from the centuries old colonial and neo-colonial unified Western geopolitics of global dominance. Has that Euro-colonial and post-colonial hegemony over humankind begun losing its centuries long civilisational and economic intra bloc coordination that empowers it as the rapacious, destructive, planetary hegemon?

The NSS 2025, created by that same radical right movement in charge of Washington under the bumbling, decadently opportunist, political impresario President Trump, now explicitly lays down to the whole world the leading hegemon’s geopolitical withdrawal from that lead role in the Western power bloc.

This retreat, announced by Washington, surely signals some relenting of Western imperialism’s current hold on global life. Not that Washington’s direct victims in the NSS’s Western Hemisphere will immediately enjoy any relenting. At least the intended victims of attempted US control of the Western Hemisphere are unlikely to have the EU group rushing to militarily help Washington’s aggression against Venezuela or other states of that hemisphere.

Is this historic new official US geopolitical strategy a silver lining among the many dark clouds now engulfing our planet? For all those oppressed by such Western geopolitics, especially the billions of the Global South, this hint of a relaxing of power bloc coordinated war, economic exploitation and racist cultural dominance must seem like an Christmas gift to suffering humanity.