TRUMP AND THE WORLD AHEAD
For good or for ill, President Trump’s policies are bound to have serious global implications
The much-awaited inauguration of Mr Donald Trump as America’s 47th President has taken place with predictable policy wildfires. His inaugural address contained a wide range of far-reaching shock announcements on the new direction of America’s domestic and foreign policy positions. He has since followed with the signing of a slew of Executive Orders, most of which literally overturn long-standing commitments of the United States. Some of these foreign policy measures have serious implications for the wider world. President Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord. In the same breadth, he has pulled the United States out of the World Health Organisation (WHO), ending a commitment that came into being almost at the birth of the United Nations after the Second World War.
Equally significant is the withdrawal of the mandate on electric cars, a policy reversal that has far reaching implications for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and forestall the worst impact of climate change. Along this same line, Trump has also signed an order suspending environmental regulations and speed permits for mining, drilling, pipelines and natural gas export terminals in the United States. While this policy aims at increasing America’s energy independence , increased oil and gas production will impact the global energy supply and oil prices. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Count
ries (OPEC) member states must be ready to take a price knock with unknown consequences for the economies of oil dependent states like Nigeria.
In a confirmation of controversial hints dropped during the campaign, Trump has also renamed the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in addition to restating a determination to re-possess the Panama Canal from the control of Panama. All the posturing by Trump is based on the erroneous impression that we live in a unipolar world in which America calls all the shots. On the contrary, there is a countervailing authoritarian force led by China and Russia with countries like Iran, North Korea, and Hungary in tow. Meanwhile, Trump’s hostile economic policies on tariffs are likely to swell the ranks of dissenting voices among nations poised to oppose the new American hegemony. Clearly, Trump is not likely to have an easy ride in world affairs.
In terms of American domestic policy, by far the most consequential immediate measure is the declaration of an emergency on immigration. Even before the inaugural address was read, immigration task office had stepped up patrols at the US southern borders while raids on illegal immigrants have begun in some states. On the very first day after his inauguration, Trump granted a mass pardon and commutation of the sentences of 1,580 persons convicted and jailed for their involvement in the 6 January 2021 insurrection on the US Capitol. Some of these convicts were involved in heinous acts like vandalism and killing of law enforcement officers, and were serving several jail terms in different parts of the United States. As it is, Trump has blurred the distinction between guilt and innocence in the emergent American world.
The electoral choice of Trump as the 47th president of the United States was made by American voters in exercise of their democratic rights. It may not matter to this domestic audience what the rest of the world gets to harvest from the policies and governance style of their new president. Yet, because America has become a symbol of democracy, Trump’s full meaning will invariably reverberate all over the world. Even in the United States, many reasonable political observers do not necessarily see Trump as a quintessential democratic leader. He is at best an authoritarian conservative with a radical temper. But to his credit, he is now preaching inclusiveness and bowing to a new national culture that salutes the likes of Martin Luther King as an icon of American nationhood.
Based on Trump’s first outing on the job, his second iteration seems very much like moderation and modulation of his initial extremism and excesses. Yet the element of disruption is so central to the Trump political essence that his legacy in US global influence in the next few years is bound to destabilise the world order as we have come to know it.
