In US President Donald Trump’s world, we are living in a twilight zone that grows stranger and more confusing with each passing day.
The rationale Trump relentlessly uses to paint the world as America’s exploiter has spawned a new narrative that oddly portrays the world as villain, and the US, as victim of diabolical exploitation.
With this narrative being freely deployed in Trump’s world, doing business with the US has become a jumbled mess.
Whatever Trump’s talking point is, no president that came before him had argued this position or believed the US was being cheated or taken advantage of. This is distinctively Trump’s narrative.
So is there validity in Trump’s claims that “America has been taken advantage of by cheaters and “pillaged by foreigners”? Or is this simply his way of legitimising a tariff war on the world?
- Sign up for Aliran's free daily email updates or weekly newsletters or both
- Make a one-off donation to Persatuan Aliran Kesedaran Negara (ALIRAN), Maybank a/c 507246118995 or CIMB a/c 8004240948
- Make a pledge or schedule an auto donation to Aliran every month or every quarter
- Become an Aliran member
If Trump’s claims are true, then the US will be on the right side of history.
But the facts suggest otherwise. It is not the world that has treated the US badly, but rather the reverse.
As with many of Trump’s narratives, this one cannot survive the test of reality and truthfulness.
It can be easily debunked by looking at two crucial policy documents formulated by the US State Department and Council of Foreign Relations shortly after World War Two.
These two documents spelt out the very purpose and direction of new US policies in the post-war world.
The first document is Policy Planning Study 23 (PPS 23), written by George Kennan for the State Department in 1948. PPS 23 concluded:
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth and only 6.3% of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.
Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…
To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives… We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standard, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealist slogans, the better.
[This extended paraphrase is from meeting notes and is cited in works like Walter LaFeber’s America, Russia, and the Cold War.]
The second document, National Security Council Report 68, was written by Paul Nitze two years later in 1950, developing the hardline views of then-US Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
This NSC 68 called for a “roll-back strategy” that would “foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system”.
Scholar Noam Chomsky has argued (in On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures, 1987) that:
The policies recommended by NSC 68 would require ‘sacrifice and discipline’ in the US…(meaning) huge military expenditure and cutbacks on social services. It would also be necessary to overcome the ‘excess of tolerance’ that allows too much domestic dissent.
Chomsky wrote (in World Orders Old and New, 1994) that even before the end of the war:
…the study groups of the State Department and the Council of Foreign Relations (heavily influenced by US business groups) developed plans for the post-war world in terms of what they called the ‘Grand Area,’ which was to be subordinated to the needs of the America economy (Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, 1994, based on State Department records).
The “Grand Area” refers to the ‘Third World’ (as it was referred to then), meaning Southeast Asia, West Asia, Africa and Latin America.
As Chomsky observed (in Deterring Democracy, 1991):
US policies in the Third World are easy to understand. (The US) consistently opposes democracy if its results can’t be controlled. The problem with real democracies is that they’re likely to fall prey to the heresy that governments should respond to the needs of their own population, instead of those of US investors.
Research by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London on the Inter-American system, published in 1963, was summarised by author Willliam Blum (in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995) as concluding that:
While the US pays lip service to democracy the real commitment is to (US) private, capitalist enterprise. When the rights of the investors are threatened, democracy has to go; if these rights are safeguarded, killers and torturers will do just fine.
In the end, the US has no permanent friends, but permanent interests of the American business community.
Henry Kissinger’s aphorism that to be a “friend of the US is fatal” (as cited by author William Blum in Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, 2000) fits well with Trump’s behavioural approach.
There is no better way of demystifying the whole essence of the American politicians’ way of dealing with the world, than to read the words of then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles telling then-President Dwight Eisenhower how to keep Latin America in line: “You have to pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them,” as recorded in Blum’s book Killing Hope.
In sum, it is not the whole world exploiting the US, but the unflinching pursuance of these two policies, PPS 23 and NSC 68, that has plunged the US into a vortex of endless wars and ultimately bled the country dry.
For a comprehensive overview of these themes presented in a single volume, see Noam Chomsky, How the World Works, (Penguin Books, 2011).
AGENDA RAKYAT - Lima perkara utama
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
