Stepping Into The Vacuum, Or Just Stepping Into It?

I’m writing this piece from the premise that Donald Trump will be elected president of the United States again. As much as I’m loath to even think it, much less write it, someone from inside the USA has to articulate the global implications and help prepare people for what will happen when America implodes.

No one will be happier to admit he was wrong if Kamala Harris is the clear winner. But despite the Harris-Walz campaign bringing out the biggest political and celebrity guns in America in recent days, from Michelle Obama to Beyonce, from Springsteen to Barack, and despite Trump doubling down on his fascistic rhetoric about “the enemies within” and the “vermin from 180 countries that have made America into a garbage can,” Kamala is losing ground. How can it be that Americans are about to elect a blatant fascist as president?

In every speech, Harris intones about American patriotism and decency, how “we have so much more in common than what separates us.” But it rings hollow. In a contest between the unfaced darkness in the American people, and the bygone mythology of American goodness and exceptionalism, darkness wins.

However, this is not just a political issue in the United States with which other countries have to adapt along the same old lines. As Andrew Rawnsley, the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer in London, writes, “The fate of Ukraine, the future of NATO, the stability of the global economy, the response to the climate crisis, the cohesion of the democracies in the struggle with an axis of autocracies, all this is on the ballot.”

Yet a prominent New Zealand geopolitical analyst, Geoffrey Miller, writes with apparently unintended understatement, the American “elections are likely to pave the way for an overhaul of US foreign policy, regardless of whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the presidency…[and] New Zealand is already factoring both election outcomes into its calculations.”

That sounds no more feasible than Martin Kettle writing in the Guardian, “Labour’s responsibility extends to the prime minister’s, the party’s and the country’s relations with Trump if he is elected next month.” The assumption is that the diplomatic trains will continue to run on the same old tracks, when in fact Trump’s election will derail the international order.

Nothing will essentially change if Harris is elected. Rational people all over the world will breathe a sigh of relief, and no one except the rare philosopher will question the nation-state system.

If Trump is elected however, not only will the post-World War II international system be history; the cornerstone of the world order for hundreds of years, what’s called the Westphalian system of nation-states, will crumble.

The Westphalian system is defined as “a system of international society comprising sovereign state entities possessing the monopoly of force within their mutually recognized territories.” As such it is not only the modern basis of nationalism and war, but also the reason that effective action on runaway global heating and the decimation of species has been woefully inadequate.

Nations act in their own self-interest; only with rare exceptions do they act in the interest of humankind and the planet as a whole.

The election of Donald Trump, a twice impeached rapist and convicted felon, a man that oozes hatred from every pore of his oleaginous skin, means not only the end of America; it means the end of the post-war international system. Indeed, it means the end of the nation-state itself as the foundation of world order. Unfortunately, that’s why it may be necessary, because short of world war, there must be collapse before there can be the creation of a true order.

My concern is that there will be collapse without the foundation for a new order being poured. That happened with the end of the Cold War. Though the United Stated rode the illusory wave of triumphalism through the 1990’s, the collapse of the Twin Towers, followed by the vengeful slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Bush-Cheney Administration, revealed the truth. It’s taken another generation, but with Trump’s re-election, the final nail will be driven into the fantasy of Pax Americana.

Now, America and NATO’s splintering stand against Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, while actively facilitating Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, feeds into Russia and China’s powerful narrative of “an intolerable double standard.”

So what will fill the vacuum of so-called American leadership in a rules based international order? As one pundit put it recently, “Putin envisages a global anti-western alliance, Xi a post-American, China-led 21st-century new world order.” But why would people trade what’s left of Western democracy for Eastern autocracy?

A global authoritarian axis involving China, Russia and America is possible, although Trump’s economic antipathy toward China, and his repeated intention to slap huge tariffs on products from there and elsewhere, make that hideous prospect unlikely.

What about the United Nations, can global leadership come from that international body? The UN secretary general, António Guterres, certainly has been sounding the alarm, for example citing how global heating is supercharging monster hurricanes, bringing biblical floods, turning forests into tinder boxes and cities into saunas. “We’re playing with fire,” Guterres recently said, “but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.”

However, the UN is a product of and beholden to the nation-states that gave rise to it, especially its most powerful members on the Security Council. The same premise -- that the self-interest of nation-states and their power games is increasingly inadequate to meet the polycrisis of humanity as a whole -- applies to the UN, which is based on the separate sovereignty of nations.

If Harris is elected, the status quo ante in the west of “American leadership” and the alliances that President Biden worked so hard to restore will continue. Trump’s election represents the collapse not only of that dubious interregnum, but also of the international order itself.

That will demand a response at every level, not only politically, but more importantly, spiritually and philosophically. It will mean we won’t be able to muddle through man’s multi-faceted crisis culminating in our time.

At the nadir of man, thinking and feeling human beings with genuinely global worldviews matter now more than ever, and must step into the vacuum.

© Scoop Media