Portside

To understand Trump’s political style, it’s important to understand that it’s grounded in the norms of pro-wrestling. It’s beyond fact-checking or reason, but it resonates

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Those seeking global justice and decolonization don’t choose the circumstances in which they make history, and are made by it. That’s why it’s critically important to understand the deeper historical shifts revealed in the turmoil of the new political order in the United States, and how those shifts have redefined the obstacles, the terms of engagement, and both the limits and strategic opportunities for advance in every theater and dimension of that struggle.

It may be hard to see amid the manic daily dramas, but the Trump moment reflects an almost two-decade historical shift that negates old assumptions, but offers new possibilities. What it does make clear is that the United States as the world has known it for the past 70 years is no more; it’s an altogether different America domestically and internationally.

President Donald Trump has contemptuously trashed core principles, norms and certainties of U.S. hegemony in force since the Cold War — whether in relation to NATO allies in Europe, or in the soft-power humanitarian programs of USAID. Most U.S. allies are reeling in bewilderment, having failed to detect the slow-moving tectonic shifts reshaping the ground beneath their feet. Understanding both the challenges and possibilities presented by those shifts is critically important, not for scholarly reasons but in order to be effective.

The United States has been the fulcrum of the power relations that have defined the struggle over Palestine, and the wider global struggle for justice, over the past 70 years. That’s why it’s critically important to grasp the long-term trends underway in the U.S. relationship with the world, and consider the consequences for the pursuit of Palestinian freedom.

Is the second Donald Trump presidency a dramatic U-turn, or the maturation of a longer process? The change of style is unmistakable, as Trump makes clear by his ritual public humiliation of long-time allies and proxies on all fronts. On Palestine, he is willing to say the quiet part out loud; dispensing with the empty mantras about a “two-state solution” to sanctify U.S. enabling of Israel’s ever-expanding occupation and war crimes. But Trump hasn’t changed the substance of U.S. engagement with Israel and the Palestinians; he’s simply admitted what should have long been obvious: U.S. actions over the past two decades make clear that it long ago abandoned the goal of reversing Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, or of any meaningful political solution. There is simply no evidence-based case to expect the U.S. will ever take any meaningful action to restrain, much less reverse the apartheid settler-colonization whose qualitative and quantitative expansion it has enabled.

Why?

Because the U.S. has no strategic incentive to spend (domestic) political capital on Palestine.

The Biden team ritually mumbled “two-state” catechisms while making the U.S. the logistics hub, military and diplomatic shield and p.r. firm for Israel’s genocide. Why would Trump bother with the catechisms? In his first-term endorsement of Israel’s claim on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and its West Bank settlements, he was simply calling time on the post Cold War fable that the U.S. would act to reverse Israel’s illegal acquisition of territory by force. (Biden, btw, declined to reverse those moves, even embracing the delusional belief that normalizing ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel would somehow end the struggle for Palestinian liberation.)

Trump may have ended the hollow pretense, but even Obama and Biden had, by their actions, quietly mocked those stakeholders still clinging to an anachronistic expectation that Washington would, at some point, restrain Israel and produce a palatable neocolonial outcome.

The convulsive physical discomfort visible on the face of Jordan’s King Abdullah during his White House press availability with Trump underscored how terrifying it has been for allies perched on fragile Made-in-the-USA political plinths to contemplate the closure of the post-Cold War period. The U.S. may have seen some strategic value in at least being seen to be enforcing a political solution on Israel when regional goodwill towards a U.S. presence hypothetically added a layer of protection to the tens of thousands of U.S. troops deployed throughout the region. But any such incentive, limited though it was, evaporated with the calamitous collapse of its “New Middle East” project in Iraq and the rapid draw-down of U.S. troop presence in the region. Israel has, for the past quarter century or longer, been more of a domestic political issue rather than a strategic concern in Washington, and no U.S. government over that period has seen any compelling national interest in overriding considerable domestic political resistance to any pressure on Israel.

Instead, the bipartisan enabling of Israel running amok over the past 18 months is what can be expected from Washington for the foreseeable future.

On Ukraine, his style may be brutal, but Trump is enforcing a reality check (that Biden, stuck in Cold War fantasies, had evaded) – Europeans are not prepared to die defending Ukraine’s sovereignty, and nor are Americans. That’s what NATO membership would require; and that’s what expelling Russia from all Ukrainian territory would require. It’s not going to happen. Trump is simply stating the obvious regarding the terms on which that war will end. When it does, Ukraine – a hot mess of economic catastrophe, possibly of violent nationalist retribution and quite possibly the renewed export of refugees – will be Europe’s problem, not America’s.

Behind the Wrestlemania

But while he rode to power surfing waves of popular discontent on a vessel built out of the jester idioms of pro-wrestling, Trump is a deadly serious operator out to remake American power. His actions leave no room for doubt that the assumptions of the Cold War and Post-Cold War eras no longer apply. How, then, to understand the dynamics of the new historical moment we’re in? What possibilities and challenges does the post-Post Cold War put before all who seek a better world — a project necessarily at odds with the prevailing forms of Western dominance?

The Struggle for Palestine in Global History: The Cold War Era

Europe’s colonial powers exhausted by war could not long hold on to their “possessions” in Africa and Asia in the face of national liberation struggles, resulting in the emergence of a Third World comprising nation states that had thrown off the colonial yoke (but not its legacy of impoverishment) seeking to act autonomously of the Cold War powers.

It was the shifting balances of power within that schema that shaped and partially transformed the U.N. and its multilateral institutions. Although the U.S. remained by far the strongest military and economic power, its ability to deploy that power was checked by the military capabilities of the Soviet bloc. And the Third World countries, united in spirit in the Non-Aligned Movement, began to push for a reordering of global affairs (before being bogged down by the grim reality that what Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah called “flag independence” won by these countries did not translate into sovereign control of their economies)

The Cold War put Israel and its neighboring Arab states on the chessboard of the imperial Great Game, alliances shifting over the years. (Israel did not become the USA’s monogamous bestie in the region until after the 1967 war, and even then, Washington needed to move the likes of Egypt, Syria and Iraq out of the Soviet camp.) But the Palestinians hardly featured on that board. The Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt epitomized a U.S. Cold War win — moving Egypt into the U.S. camp by orchestrating Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory in exchange for peace between the two countries, entirely bypassing any meaningful engagement with the Palestinian question.

Still, the emergence of autonomous Palestinian national resistance outside of the control of Arab states coincided with the growing influence of the Third World bloc, aligning the Palestinians with national liberation struggles across the globe, and in particular, opening up spaces of national recognition in the U.N. (Remember, before the 1970s, all U.N. resolutions concerning Palestine never once named the Palestinians; they had only referred somewhat amorphously to the Arab states.) In November 1974, the U.N. General Assembly recognized the PLO as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”, according it observer status: That was a huge and enduring diplomatic victory, which later translated into the “State of Palestine” seat still held by the PLO. And it was noted at the time that the resolution, which had relied almost entirely on the Third and Second World member states, signaled a growing influence of what today we call the Global South on the international stage.

Two years later, the U.N. General Assembly declared Zionism “a form of racism” — but if that resolution reflected a Cold War balance of votes in the Assembly (72 in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstentions), the 1991 vote to rescind it reflected the new, unipolar moment of U.S. hegemony (111 in favor, 25 against, 30 abstentions/non-votes). When Saddam Hussein misread the intentions of his U.S. backers and invaded Kuwait, he was militarily ejected by a U.N.-authorized coalition that included nine Arab states as well as Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines and Senegal.

The ‘End of History’…

The passing of the Cold War’s proxy logic and the ascendancy of the Davos order also spurred concerted efforts to stabilize a number of longstanding regional conflicts and insurgencies:

A wave of attempts at negotiating political solutions swept South Africa, Ireland, East Timor, Aceh, Central America and the Middle East.

And then there was the question of Palestine, whose place on the post-Cold War global agenda had been ensured not by the exiled PLO (dangerously isolated by its support for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait) but by the First Intifada’s sustained mass uprising across the West Bank and Gaza. Regardless of the parlous state of the PLO in exile, popular resistance on the ground made the apartheid occupation seem untenable — and a potential threat to U.S. hegemony in the Arab region, and even to the domestic security of U.S.-aligned states.

… and the Oslo Terminus

The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority, an interim administrative and security body that would relieve the occupying power of the burden of policing and governing the cities of the West Bank and Gaza, while Israel and the PLO negotiated a final-status agreement to be completed by May 1999. But if Oslo began with Rabin fearing what the GHW Bush-era Washington would require of Israel, within three years he was replaced by Netanyahu, whose far keener understanding of the dynamics shaping the U.S. role: Netanyahu’s memorable “America is a thing that can easily be moved” reflected an awareness that U.S. Israel policy was being shaped more by domestic politics rather than by grand strategy. (That’s because, political rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, the end of the Cold War had also nixed Israel’s already limited value as a strategic asset to the U.S.) And domestic politics was a terrain on which the lobbying power of AIPAC and the growing power of an Evangelical Christianity whose embrace of Zionist maximalism gave Israel an overwhelming advantage.

Our purpose here is not to parse the reasons for the failure of Oslo to produce the advertised outcome. Suffice to say that even in its best case scenario, it relied on the U.S. to provide the pressure to drive Israeli compliance. The shock of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the events they triggered effectively ended U.S. engagement in anything beyond performative gestures on the Palestine file — Netanyahu acknowledged in a 2008 speech how beneficial the attacks had been in shifting U.S. political opinion in Israel’s favor.

The End of the “End of History”

The U.S. defeat in Iraq was the last gasp of Pax Americana; Obama was explicit in retrenching the U.S. footprint in the region, encouraging a ‘rebalance’ that would include agreements with Iran and encouraging regional security self-sufficiency amid a U.S. ‘pivot to Asia’.

He launched his presidency with a 2009 Cairo speech that loftily proclaimed America’s obligation to seek justice for the Palestinians – but there was literally never any action behind the empty poetics (a hallmark of Obama’s presidency) because by that point, the U.S. had already moved on. Obama saw no value in committing domestic-political capital to shaping the outcome of a conflict in whose resolution the U.S. no longer held any compelling strategic stake. U.S. forces were reducing their exposure in the region, more reliant on small special forces operations and drone-strikes. And in the name of “offshoring” U.S. involvement in the region, Obama negotiated a nuclear pact with Iran and sent Israel more military aid than any predecessor, shrugging at Israel expanding its settlements and bombing Gaza. His goal was to stabilize the region’s status quo and minimize the risk of the U.S. being drawn into further entanglements.

Pax Americana, globally, was being downsized, and Washington had effectively retired the Middle East referee’s whistle it had claimed in the 1990s; the U.S. no longer had any strategic incentive to apply pressure to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands.

The Palestinian leadership that had placed all its eggs in the American basket, working with Israel’s occupation forces to suppress resistance in the vain hope that collaboration with the occupier would eventually earn flag independence, instead found itself abandoned to its fate, increasingly discredited and despised in the eyes of its own people; ritually humiliated by the Israelis; its leader Mahmoud Abbas reduced to a kind of soft-toy Quisling.

Oct 7 may have buried any residual illusions from the Oslo frame, but less obvious, is the deeper historical shift: The historical era of unipolar U.S. hegemony that birthed Oslo had ended years earlier. Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of the decline of American hegemony — the ability to lead others by convincing them that U.S. interests are the common interest — and he is simply resetting the terms on which America’s considerable coercive power will be exercised. There will be no going back, not because of Trump’s preferences, but because he reflects a tectonic shift that has been under way for many years.

Obama’s strategic retrenchment in the Mideast presaged Trump’s more comprehensive dismantling of the Cold War state. We might say that Biden had slept through history if that characterization didn’t sound as if it were special pleading in mitigation on the genocide-enabling case he should answer at the Hague. Americans today no longer imagine their national community around the Cold War consensus, or any consensus at all. (Republican Cold Warriors today find their natural political home across the aisle, as “Cheney Democrats”.)

Multiple factors at work in the U.S. political economy explain these shifts, and the fracturing of the media landscape (the very precondition for imagining nationhood) is worth noting: The onset of the Cold War coincided with the arrival of a television set in most American households, allowing three networks to narrate a national consensus. The neoliberal ‘90s saw the big-three being eclipsed by the entertainment vehicle that is cable news, allowing viewers a degree of customization of their information universes. Within a decade, even the cable universe was being eclipsed by the mushrooming of diverse Internet and social media platforms, fragmenting any prospect of sustaining a common American identity. Political splits in America are no longer about policy differences; they reflect different imagined realities. The Cold War-liberal America that plotzes over Trump throwing Ukraine under the bus is not even deemed properly American by tens of millions of Americans ready to believe that planes crash because of diversity in employment practices in air-traffic control.

There simply is no information infrastructure on which any kind of consensus across America’s sprawling citizenry could be rebuilt. For the foreseeable future, the U.S. will remain politically unstable, unable to anchor and calm its own national system, much less a global one.

The rug has been pulled out from under regional and international players whose inaction in the face of genocide is, whether they admit it or not, guided by expectations of a Pax Americana eventually restraining Israel. The referee left the field years ago, and the Israelis are free to set the East ablaze, even supplied with the requisite incendiaries—though they and their Arab neighbors will have to live in the flames. Still, it’s hard to envisage any of them acting at variance with the U.S. (as was taboo during the Pax Americana era) to restrain Israel?

What, then, to expect from a post-hegemonic U.S. superpower?

The U.S. will now do whatever its power (rather than law or legitimacy) allows to enrich its billionaires, and to coerce compliance when that enrichment is threatened, e.g. by de-dollarization talk, or in order to seek coveted resources (the Panama Canal or Greenland). But Trump’s post-global America has no incentive to pursue geopolitical outcomes in settings that don’t meaningfully threaten its mercantilist project. And as his “you don’t have any cards” outburst at Zelensky made clear, this is an America that will dictate terms to all who lack the power to resist its diktat.

During the Cold War and also in the neoliberal post-Cold War, the U.S. prioritized global hegemony -- the ability to impose its will on other countries without using or threatening coercion, but by establishing an ideological commonsense in which Washington’s interests are imagined as the common good. It was willing to invest a little in generating goodwill, courting hearts and minds in the Global South by funding projects that aid the poorest and most vulnerable. Trump sees no value in such investment.

Whether in response to America’s failure to militarily impose its will on Iraq and Afghanistan, the failings of its financialized global economic order, and the growing multipolarity created by the emergence power centers independent of the post-Cold War Pax Americana, the waning of U.S. hegemony has been accelerating, and increasingly obvious. The brutal contempt for Palestinian life reflected in U.S. arms and impunity guaranteed for Israel’s genocide is echoed in slashing USAID programs that have provided life support to African HIV patients. The goodwill such programs may generate isn’t worth shrinking his tax cut for billionaires, in Trump’s mind. His America must be feared, not loved.

It would be beyond foolish to act in expectation that America’s Post-Cold War consensus will somehow magically be restored — Trump is not just a bad dream or an anomaly. And the neoliberal Western political-economy consensus (represented by the Democrats and their centrist peers elsewhere) is unraveling across a wide front.

Trump has recognized the decline of U.S. hegemony and the “liberal world order” through which it was expressed. In its place he substitutes self-interested coercion — he has no hope of convincing most of the world that U.S. control over Greenland or the Panama canal is in their interest — just as the U.S. can’t convince most of the world that enabling Israel’s genocide is for the greater good. No matter; the issue is power, not rules or fairness or legitimacy.

He has taken a chain saw to the key institutions of U.S. imperial power projection — the military and the intelligence and security system. Trump’s choices to lead those key agencies are clearly tasked with disrupting their continuity and reshaping them to his domestic political needs. His overall approach to government portends a sustained and damaging ransacking of those institutions — weakening their internal cohesion and morale, deliberately blunting their effectiveness as tools of global hegemony, and turning their focus to narrow nationalist goals.

He wants his military deployed on America’s southern border to repel a migrant “invasion” which looms large in the MAGA imagination, not shoring up NATO’s eastern flank. Ugly demagoguery directed against migrants was a winning card in 2024, and Trump has promised to follow through on his promises to deport millions of undocumented migrants. He has certainly appointed key officials who will pursue that mission with ideological zeal, and there are signs that he has more reason to feel far more confident in his ability to blow away institutional restraints – whether from the courts, the legislature or the security establishment – to enacting his promise.

Trump has already brought tremendous disruption to domestic governance, wreaking economic havoc that will have growing, tangible negative effects for most of his voters. His anti-migrant witch hunts will potentially ignite both economic shock and political and social turmoil in many American towns and cities. And Trump has declared his intention to use the military or military adjacent forces (e.g. national guard) for this campaign. And, as predicted, he has unleashed increasingly fascist restrictions on protest action in support of Palestine — red meat to his domestic political base, which includes plenty of deep-pocketed Israel-firsters.

While it may be comforting to imagine a backlash that would restore the old order in a matter of two election cycles, that vastly overestimates the democratic power of the U.S. electorate, and also, it assumes the existence of a credible popular opposition — which doesn’t exist; the Democratic Party has been fundamentally lacking in a vision or socio-economic program for the country since Bill Clinton parked it in the raclette dens of Davos in the 1990s, making it a McKinsey party of management consultants.

The U.S.-China relationship will be approached from a competitive mercantilist perspective in which China is eating a deindustrialized America’s lunch, rather than the regime-change/democracy one Democrats would prefer. Trump’s talk of American “greatness” is of an America unencumbered by foreign entanglements, laws, rules and agreements — not the Atlanticist “indispensable nation” fantasy. Does he care about who rules Taiwan or how Hong Kong is governed?

The Global South in a Post-American Century

Trump may be inadvertently accelerating a decolonization 2.0 moment — and Israel, as its primary dependent, may be the biggest loser. Israel can’t exist without the United States, but the Global South and even Europe are being forced to learn that the world will have to chart a future without the United States. In more ways than one, Israel is on the wrong side of history.

The post-Cold War saw the fate of Palestine assigned, by the international system, to the U.S. – which failed to resolve it. The post-Post Cold War recenters the fate of Palestine in a wider rebellion for a more just world order. And that’s a struggle that is gaining momentum on a widening front, from Palestine to climate change and more. So, while Palestine may no longer matter to America, America’s ability to define the global agenda is steadily weakening.

By cutting most of the Global South adrift from longstanding systems of dependence, the U.S. may in fact make it easier for some of those countries to take stronger stands against Israel, no longer cowed by the threat of its greatest enabler withdrawing his patronage because, well, it’s not leverage if he’s already done that.

Consider the South Africa case: Trump’s nonsensical “white genocide” charges are red meat for his base; everyone knows the reason the U.S. wants to punish South Africa is because of its efforts to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice, and perhaps as a warning against BRICS challenging U.S. financial domination. The form of the sanction, however — ending USAID funding, which hurt HIV treatments and other public health schemes; and declining to review the preferential trade agreement AGOA — falls within the generalized austerity imposed on all foreign aid and preferential trade restrictions. So, there’s no amount of self-abasement South Africa’s leaders could perform to reverse them. Even shutting down the ICJ case would not restore those measures; the U.S. has abandoned any need for legitimacy, and it’s priority today is funding a massive tax cut for its billionaire class. Sending home a South African ambassador is a WWE move designed to please the base. What it does make clear is the U.S. offers no path of dignity or sanity through diplomatic engagement with the U.S. – their role in the wrestlemania show is that of cartoon villains to be ritually humiliated by the Hulk Hogan character even if they surrender.

Perhaps, hewing to the grand historical timeline on which we constructed this argument, it’s worth considering that the abandonment of Cold War/Post-Cold War certainties by the U.S. also equates to a kind of de-Decolonization. The assumptions regarding justice, fairness and equality in the postwar global system (hollow as they may have been) have been demolished, setting the U.S. in an openly adversarial relationship with most of humanity.

It's long been obvious that Palestinian rights will have to be achieved despite the U.S. not with its help. Now, it is more clear than ever that the U.S. has doubled down on a predatory colonial approach to the rest of the world. None in the Global South or even among Western powers can hide from the reality that the U.S. has no intention of bringing any kind of durable stability to the Middle East – aligning brittle Arab autocracies with Israel isn’t going to do that, but Trump is essentially signaling indifference, making no pretenses about the fact that he’s leaving it to Israel to decide the fate of Palestine.

Would Trump back Israel expanding settlement of illegally occupied land? Probably; Biden and Obama effectively turned a bind eye. Will the prospect of normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia restrain Israel? Could Israel give the Saudis what they need to seal such a deal? Not clear, and what incentive does Riyadh have to help Israel out of the hole it has dug for itself in Gaza?

The end of the U.S. hegemonic project does, however, offer an opportunity, precisely because it shuts down the vain hope of Washington and its partners and satraps ever delivering any kind of sustainable political solution in Palestine, much less freedom.

Israel is in a state of deep crisis, that has some seeing the Zionist project as on its last legs. I’d agree that the Zionist project in its 20th century incarnation is largely done. But it succeeded in creating a nuclear-armed and dangerous nation state and a permanent national community to sustain it – so, even if the Western-oriented Ashkenazi “liberal” Jewish elites have been marginalized, and many more of them will leave for Europe or the U.S. in the coming years than will immigrate, panicking over the net-inflow/outflow of Jews to and from Israel may be largely a remnant of 20^th century Zionism. Those who emigrate will leave behind a belligerent berserker state, nurtured in the plush cushioning of U.S.-guaranteed impunity and guided by a sense of manifest destiny with scant regard for global legitimacy (outside of its American patron, which has shown a deep, bipartisan alignment with the settler-colonial project).

Think Jabotinsky on a cocaine bender.

That said, his stash is not infinite — his dealer is looking a little unhinged, perhaps getting a little high on his own supply. Even in the short term, Israel may struggle to muster the manpower to sustain the open-ended wars it is courting. In the longer term, the global order that has sustained Israel is drawing to a close; it’s a moment both extremely dangerous and also quite promising in its fluidity.

More widely, across the Global South, governments now suffering the whiplash withdrawal of U.S. dependence mechanisms, and confronted with the reality of being forced to make their way by forging new relationships, alliance and pathways to pursue their needs in a post-American world, it’s a moment fraught with both peril and possibility.

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