Method to the madness: understanding Trump’s foreign policy

What is the connection between the current conflicts, from Iran to Venezuela to Ukraine? And does Trump’s seemingly erratic foreign policy have a method — or is chaos the method?

Transcript of a speech I gave on January 29 in Berlin at the launch event for Global Geopolitics, a new academic journal covering international relations, power structures and global strategic developments. The event was led by Prof. Efe Can Gürcan, editor-in-chief of the magazine, and was organised in cooperation with the Eurasian Society.

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I’d start by saying that the current geopolitical tensions and shifts that we are witnessing are clearly not a crisis like others the world has experienced over the past century or centuries. We’re living through what is arguably the greatest geopolitical transition in human history. What we are witnessing is effectively the end of 500 years of Western economic political, and military global hegemony, which for the past thirty years following the Cold War has manifested itself in the form of absolute and unchallenged US-Western global hegemony. That world is clearly over, and I think the mega-trends concerning multipolarity are quite clear to all of us. So I won’t get too much into detail about that.

I think that, all things being equal, the likely trajectory of the global rebalancing of power would be fairly easy to predict. We would continue to see the rise of the non-Western world and the relative weakening of the power and global influence of the US and the wider Western bloc. This mega-trend would not be a problem for the average Western citizen. Quality of life is not connected to the relative global power of a country. Life in, say, Austria, is better than life in the US by every metric, even though Austria’s GDP is a fraction of America’s. Of course, one cannot deny that in the early post-war decades, the spoils of empire clearly trickled down to average Western citizens in many ways. But that hasn’t been the case for a long time now.

Especially if we look at the US, it’s obvious that for a long time the spoils of empire have been accruing essentially only to the very top of the social and economic pyramid — to the oligarchy. Nowadays I would argue that it’s almost exclusively Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and the corporatocracy that benefit from the US’s endless wars and the dollar-centric system. Ordinary Americans have not benefited from it for a long time. In fact, I would say that the average American would only benefit from the US’s transformation into a “normal” country — indeed, this would be the precondition for the democratisation of the US.

Luckily for us Western citizens, China doesn’t want to replace the US as a global dominus. It subscribes to a genuinely non-hegemonic worldview, and there are centuries of Chinese practice and literature to confirm that. So this is good news — though not for the US and Western oligarchy more broadly. They would definitely lose out from a decline of US and Western hegemony. And this brings us to the major problem we face today: the US and broader Western elites’ unwillingness to accept this transition to multipolarity — for the aforementioned material reasons, but also for entrenched ideological reasons, for a deeply ingrained supremacist worldview that is, I believe, literally making them go crazy in the clinical sense of the word. This is particularly apparent here in Europe.

From their point of view, multipolarity — or even simply non-Western development — is viewed as an existential threat, reframed as a security threat. We see this constantly in the way they talk about it. And from the perspective of their own narrow class interests, that’s not entirely wrong. Much of the chaos and violence we’re witnessing in the world today boils down to this.

So, I prefaced my talk by saying “all things being equal, the mega-trend is quite easy to predict” — but what does “all things equal” even mean in the current context, especially when the change is global and involves constant feedback loops? This is why the future is so hard to predict. We live in a world where we can’t really predict anything, not even the trajectory of these mega-trends, because what we see is the US and Western powers doing everything they can to slow down, stall and if possible reverse this transition to multipolarity — despite what leaders like Mark Carney might now be saying in public.

Up until Trump, the strategy was quite clear: direct military containment of mainly Russia and China, which is of course what led to the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine. Under Trump, the empire is changing its tactics — it’s adapting. Even talking of strategy in Trump’s case might seem like an exaggeration, because his actions often appear totally erratic. And to some extent that’s true. But I also think it’s partly by design. Chaos, in Trump’s mind, seems to be part of the strategy itself — to keep other countries permanently second-guessing his next move. There’s a constant contradiction between rhetoric and action; he often says multiple contradictory things at the same time.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Trump, but I think this is partly a deliberate strategy of engineered permanent chaos and destabilisation. It’s not much of a strategy, but I think that’s roughly what they’re aiming for. The goal, from my point of view, is clearly to slow down multipolarity, to slow this transition. So — to use a technical term — “messing things up” is kind of part of the strategy.

If we analyse Trump’s actions, a certain coherence does emerge — there is a logic. He’s not attacking random countries; he’s attacking weak links in the adversary’s system. Some people went through the latest US National Security Strategy and rather optimistically concluded that Trump was embracing multipolarity, given that he was stepping back from direct engagement with China — and obviously he’s engaged in negotiations with Russia. But I think this is merely a tactical shift. The US establishment knows it doesn’t currently have the means to engage militarily with China. But the aim remains to slow China’s rise by targeting the weak links in the China-led system: Venezuela, Iran — these are all Chinese allies — and of course Russia.

There is an even more coherent strategy visible if we look a bit deeper, at the full range of countries Trump is targeting. I would include European countries in that list — not just because of Greenland, but because of the long-term push to entrench Europe’s dependence on American gas, substituting its reliance on Russian gas with a complete dependence on American supply. This has been a long-standing US strategic aim, now fully achieved. And we can see a pattern: these focal points all have to do with energy.

We understand that the wars of the early 21st century were all about energy — but there’s now a tendency to think energy is no longer a major driver of US foreign policy, despite Trump being quite explicit about it: “We’re just going to go and take Venezuela’s oil”.

And it’s not just Venezuela. Much of the entire US post-war foreign policy was about controlling oil markets — physically and financially. That wasn’t only about procuring oil for the US itself, though that was part of it; perhaps even more importantly, it was about bolstering dollar hegemony through the petrodollar system, and about controlling other countries by controlling the physical and financial choke points of the oil market. This allowed the US to cut countries off from the bloodline of the modern economy through sanctions and other means.

In recent years, this system has begun unravelling. Countries outside US control — Venezuela, Iran, Russia — have been increasingly supplying the world with oil and gas outside American diktats, and doing so increasingly outside the dollar-centric financial system. In doing so, they have also fuelled China’s meteoric rise. This represents a threat to US hegemony on several levels: it weakens dollar hegemony, but perhaps even more importantly, it deprives the US of the ability to use energy as a tool of economic and political coercion — which is what it has always done.

So I think that in the minds of US planners, well before Trump, a decision was made to re-establish control over the physical and financial flows of energy — which today means not only oil but also gas and other resources. If we look at the various US attacks and US-led or instigated conflicts — Venezuela, Iran, the proxy war in Ukraine, the push to decouple Europe from Russian gas, which I think was one of the goals of the Ukraine proxy war all along — we see a common thread: re-establishing control over energy flows. In this sense, official adversaries are targets, but so-called allies are targets too. Europe is a target in this strategy, and we can see how Trump is explicitly weaponising Europe’s dependence on American energy exports to achieve political ends.

To conclude: the big question is whether this strategy will work. I don’t know. So far the US has been quite successful. Getting Europe to do a complete reversal in its energy policy — from cheap, reliable gas from a neighbouring country to much more expensive, less reliable and politically weaponisable gas from America — is a remarkable achievement for a country supposedly defined by erraticism and lack of strategy. And then there’s the kidnapping of Maduro and effective seizure of Venezuela’s oil, and the threats against Iran [note: this talk was given before the start of the attack].

I’ll conclude by noting that I often see a great deal of complacency in pro-multipolarity circles — the assumption that the mega-trend is ultimately unstoppable, that there’s nothing the US can really do beyond slowing it down slightly. I take a less deterministic view. Because if we’re talking about a new international order — whether you want to call it multipolar or polycentric — by definition it requires some level of order. Therefore, simply by engineering permanent disorder and destabilisation, the US and its vassals can create serious problems for the BRICS, and indeed already are. So I’m not convinced that China’s approach of avoiding confrontation with the US at all costs will necessarily pay off in the long run. But I suppose time will tell.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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