2 weeks Ago
AS global geopolitics evolves at breakneck speed, it is imperative that middle powers like Malaysia find themselves on the right side of history. Were we risking America’s wrath by embracing China’s President Xi Jinping so warmly this last week? Will there be repercussions? In seeking to answer these questions, it is insightful to consider the greater historical context of what America is experiencing today so as to estimate where it will be in the coming years. Perhaps the most striking analogy is to imagine America as an ageing empire that is crumbling under its own weight.
To understand America’s future global influence (or lack thereof), it is important to understand three key interrelated domestic trends – the end of the Cold War, unchecked capitalism, and dysfunctional democracy. Singaporean scholar Kishore Mahbubani recently spoke about how America’s victory in the Cold War gave rise to the kind of hubris where Americans believe that history has demonstrated they are some sort of invincible gods who are always right, and that this will never change. With no competitors to worry about, a certain amount of complacency, obesity, and laziness seems to have crept in.
Having defeated communism and its only true military rival at the time, America henceforth had nothing to distract it from the unchecked pursuit of wealth. Pursuit of wealth is all well and good, but when it morphs into the type of greed that is completely unconstrained, it becomes another type of beast entirely. In the 1970s, America unilaterally turned the world’s financial system on its head, and then started borrowing and printing money to turbocharge the pursuit and concentration of wealth, and finally, the bill is coming due.
The poor have gotten poorer (with less opportunities to break out of that poverty), and the rich have gone well past rich into gravity-bending black holes of concentrated wealth. A simple example is America’s almost fully private healthcare and health insurance industry, whose increasingly predatory and exploitative practices culminated recently with 26-year-old former data engineer Luigi Mangione gunning down a health insurance CEO in broad daylight on the streets of New York – granting him some kind of hero status among many normal Americans. Once the concentration of wealth reached certain levels, it was evident that the rich could simply buy politicians and elections.
Under the guise of “free speech”, the influence of money and lobbyists in American politics became more and more pronounced, giving the rich vastly undue and disproportionate influence. Along this process, the rich decided that to keep each of the two major parties weak and pliant to their bribes, their respective electorates must constantly be instigated into hating each other. Perhaps the oddest end result of this trend is that by 2024, money itself was arguably no longer sufficient to sway the beast of partisanship it had created.
Kamala Harris raised around US$1bil during her 2024 presidential campaign, while Donald Trump raised only about a third that – and still beat her decisively. My reading of this is that the culture of instigation and partisanship over the years has taken on a life of its own – one that can no longer easily be undone by the money which created it. All of these trends culminate in Trump – a man who grew up in a time it was easiest to arrogantly believe America has been and always be greatest; whose businesses perfectly embody the worst predatory and exploitative tendencies of American capitalism; and who has arguably done more than anyone to stir hate and pit Americans against one another.
And now that decades of billionaire manipulation has produced a president like Trump, what does Trump look to as a model for the future. There is an old joke that the first to bring up Nazi Germany in an argument automatically loses. The parallels to what is happening in America to that regime are however truly too great to ignore.
Two recent examples are particularly blatant – mass arrests and deportations; and the attempt to bully universities. The first mirror Adolf Hitler’s key strategy of demonising and persecuting Jews; the second his strategy of completely suppressing and controlling academic institutions. The seemingly arbitrary and ruthless rounding up of people in America, to be deported to El Salvadorian mega-prisons is perhaps one of the most morally abhorrent things happening in America today.
One case was particularly prominent, involving 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia. What was notable in this case was that the nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court voted unanimously that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was illegal. Trump has since essentially ignored this unanimous Supreme Court ruling, suggesting that he has no intention whatsoever of having his actions constrained by any legal considerations or judicial power.
This is exactly the way someone who thinks of himself as some kind of “god emperor” would behave. Trump recently also decided to cut billions in funding to Harvard University, and threatened to ban Harvard from enrolling foreign students – all because Harvard refused to comply with Trump’s instructions to cancel diversity policies and basically snitch on which of their students have been protesting in support of Palestine. I am proud to say that Harvard has refused to comply, and has stood up against Trump’s bullying.
Counterintuitively, it is often graduates of great universities who will be the first to admit that they do not know everything. Experience suggests that people who walk around as if they did know everything, are commonly the stupidest of them all. As a case in point, Vice President JD Vance once quoted Richard Nixon (of all people) in saying: “Professors are the enemy”.
America is facing genuine economic challenges, as a result of decades spent borrowing and printing money, so the rich can get richer. People like Trump and Vance however, are essentially paid to ignore internal causes of America’s crises, and instead try and find ways to blame ‘outsiders’. In their hubris, ignorance, or dishonesty, they believe that they are so strong and indispensable that they can easily bully the rest of the world into paying for their decades of mistakes and greed.
I cannot tell if they simply don’t realise this will never work, or if they don’t actually care that it won’t. Either way, as politicians around the world have by now remarked – yielding to such bullying only puts oneself in an increasingly bad position. Given all the internal turmoil America is likely to face as it wrestles with itself in the months to come, it is better to find alternative solutions, alternative markets, and if need be, alternative world orders – at least until such a time as the best of America triumphs over Trumpism.
Nathaniel Tan hasn’t felt so proud to be 1 of 10,000 men in a while. Go Crimson! He is a strategic communications consultant that can be reached at [email protected].
The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own..
