Trump’s Gorbachev moment: Is US going the USSR way?

The juxtaposition of American president Donald Trump and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and their policies, one in which we have hindsight information and the other in the form of speculation, may surprise many. Despite being set in different social, political, and international milieus, they share certain commonalities concerning issues at hand and their affective environment. Let’s see the present in the light of the past and draw a parallel. History is often helpful to make sense, illuminate the present, and be a guide—even if imperfect—for the future.

Gorbachev took up the presidency of the Soviet Union when it was reeling under economic distress, politically divided internally, and diplomatically overstretched externally. A decade-long war in Afghanistan had sapped the economic vitality of the Soviet Union and dented the normative appeal of its communist system.

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The Soviet obsession to match the US militarily and intense strategic jostling in Eastern Europe resulted in the overstretching of the Soviets. Gorbachev carried out root-and-branch political (glasnost) and economic (perestroika) reforms to escape this grave situation. Gorbachev rolled back the USSR’s international commitments, which eventually led to the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact and ultimately culminated in the demise of the Soviet Empire.

Trump faces an almost identical crisis about the liberal international order America created in the post-World War II. Post-Cold War, US-led neoliberal economic policy and concomitant globalisation caused grotesque inequality in America. Growing economic disparity within the US has fuelled public resentment against globalisation.

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Trump has also campaigned against the loss of blue-collar jobs to less developed Asian countries and a weariness of US foreign interventionism, which have fuelled the rise of populist leaders like Trump. This highlights a growing divide between those who see globalisation as beneficial and those who feel left behind. Economic discontent and the ensuing social and political divide pave the path for Trump’s second term.

Impending Collapse of the American Empire?

The US ‘Empire’ is built on a hub-and-spoke system where the US is the epicentre of an extensive network of formal and informal alliances. Washington offers its allies and partners military protection and economic access to its markets. An empire provides economic benefits to the dominant state, but domination also involves costs in material resources. A state has to bear the cost of military expenditure, provide foreign aid, and incur trade deficits in maintaining an international economic structure. All these investments are not zero-sum; therefore, domination in the built Empire requires the existence of a continuing economic surplus. The American Empire has been under severe stress for more than a decade. It has become increasingly difficult to sustain it, and Trump’s policy noises expedite the liquidation process.

There is an international division of economic labour, and the US is placed on the highest pedestal regarding global value chains and technological leadership. Of late, China and others have climbed up global value chains and challenged the role of the US as a technological leader. China, particularly, challenged Washington in the sunrise industries of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Trump’s current experimentation to make America great again is a response to these domestic problems that resembles the experiment done by Gorbachev. In his worldview, American trade and foreign policy don’t serve the country’s national interest. It needs a complete overhaul.

The WTO, the EU, NATO, and the US international system established in 1945 are also not infallible in Trump’s world.

Trump now questions NATO’s strategy like Gorbachev’s doubts about the necessity of the Warsaw Pact. He believes Europeans and East Asian allies have been mooching off NATO. The rituals and ideas that Washington has developed and defended over the past 70 years are incompatible with Trump’s foreign policy choices. There has been a realisation among the Trump administration that the world is moving towards multipolarity and that US foreign policy is still stuck in unipolar mode.

In an interview with Megyn Kelly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “At the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem,” and he further stressed, “Even Charles Krauthammer, who coined and celebrated the term “unipolar moment”, recognised it was a temporary phenomenon that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

In his view, America is a victim of an ‘imperial overstretch’ where a great power, in its pursuit of military dominance, expands its influence beyond its ability to support it economically, leading to eventual decline.

Shifts in global power dynamics, changing technologies, and the evolving nature of international competition affect the current administration’s trajectory. As Terry Bradshaw said, “All great empires die from within.”

Declining US preeminence prompted it to turn to neo-mercantilist policies to defend its primacy. That’s why Trump launched a trade war against its rival China, as well as against allies Canada, Japan, etc. Unlike Japan, which was dependent on the US for its security and succumbed to American pressure in the 80s, China is militarily independent and capable of withstanding economic pressure. China is poised to create a new globalisation, led by China with state capitalism and vast networks of state-run corporations leading in world trade and managing technological superiority. The heat of this assertive Chinese economic heft could be felt in the erstwhile US-dominated western hemisphere.

India has to tap this opportunity of the failing American Empire on its own strength. India, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has taken it upon itself to rise like a proverbial phoenix. However, many landmarks need to be achieved in terms of socio-economic indicators apart from the fact that it has become the fifth-largest economy in the world. Despite the recent setbacks in the form of repatriation of its citizens from the US under condemnable conditions, it will have to talk it out with the US and find a way forward to the now much-hackneyed ideas of China plus one.

The world is poised for cataclysmic changes in which the international economic order is sought to be rejigged by the Trump-Musk duo in the coming years. India had grabbed this opportunity earlier after the Soviet disintegration and has moved to this economic level where it appears to be a putative major player in global affairs. India must be on board this journey, too!

Conclusion

So far, Trump’s focus is restoring US dominance in the Western hemisphere to reassert the receding Monroe Doctrine in the face of an increased Chinese economic footprint in South and Central America. Under his leadership, America might adopt a mercantilist trade policy and a relatively isolationist foreign policy. This approach goes against the US-led post-World War II international arrangement. It may lead to a restructuring of the international order, where the US will be relegated as a truncated global power at the same level as the USSR was in the 1980s.

Amitabh Singh teaches at the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Ankur is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.