PRESIDENT TRUMP’S DILEMMA

Ageing Cockney gangsters schooled aspiring pupils with the wisdom ‘never carry a shooter unless you’re prepared to use it’. This meant ‘never make threats unless you have the capacity to carry them out’.

President Trump’s USA is the ageing gangster of the world.

US dominance was both economic and military, and thereby political. It led the west – just as the British Empire once had. It was able to dominate other countries. Will it risk war to ensure continuing western dominance? Has it the capacity to do so?

US economic supremacy was maintained with the dollar as the world’s reserve currency through which global trade was conducted. The dollars credibility was built on US debt. The debt is now unsustainable. The dollar faces collapse.

US military strength was always there to back up economic dominance. It too is now over-stretched.

Extending NATO to ‘contain’ Russia has led to a war that has sapped the economy of Europe and challenged US domination. Russia has out-fought and out-produced the NATO block of which the US is the most powerful component. Trump wants an end to it – but ‘Europe’ does not. Ukraine has lost – but Europe wants to escalate.

This has resulted in a new US strategy. It proposes consolidating a more manageable ‘sphere of influence’ in the western hemisphere with a retreat from Europe. In other parts of the world, it will exercise power through likeminded proxies.

Where are the other most immediate threats to its power?

In the Middle East the US exercised regional dominance through Israel to secure oil. Israel intends to extend its territory to create a ‘Greater Israel’ as the regional superpower and eventually become less reliant on the USA and Europe. Iran is an obstacle to this. Israel aims to engineer ‘regime change’ in Iran but still needs US military support to achieve this. It also needs to crush any challenge to its authority from the indigenous people of the region and has done so with genocidal brutality.

In the Far East, China is determined to reclaim Taiwan which is internationally recognised as part of its territory. To prevent this the US is arming Taiwan to the teeth. This is a recipe for conflict. China has invested very heavily and at scale in sophisticated weaponry. Will this deter Trump?

In Latin America – the USA’s ‘back-yard’ – Chinese and Russian trade is growing. The US blockade of Venezuela is an attempt to deter this. It wants to steal Venezuela’s oil to reassert US dominance in the region. Military intervention is risky but unless it does something, following its retreat from Ukraine, it will be seen increasingly as a ‘paper tiger’ and other countries will begin to defy it.*

The problem for the USA is that if Trump doesn’t respond, US global dominance will weaken. When Empires are in decline they are at their most unpredictable. Will Trump’s threats risk military intervention, and if so, where?

Trump’s threats test the gangster’s wisdom: never make a threat that you can’t back up.

· This article was written prior to the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela