In his meeting one week ago with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian President Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping called on them to integrate their economies with his and thereby form “an orderly multipolar world.” My initial reaction, as he was chiefly urging them to join him in creating an anti-American (or at least, non-American-centered) bloc, was that he really meant “a bipolar world.” Then I wondered if he’d avoided that word because in Chinese (which, alas, I do not speak), as in English, it might also mean manic-depressive (which at times is a fairly accurate description of international relations, too).
During the Cold War, of course, the world was indeed bipolar, sundered into two rival power blocs, the American-centered “West” and the Soviet-centered “East.” But within roughly a decade after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, the administration of George W. Bush began characterizing diverse hostile regimes as an “axis of evil,” and persuaded a number of traditional Western U.S. allies—chiefly, Tony Blair’s Britain—to join us in our Iraqi War, which, while not officially blessed by NATO, won levels of cooperation from a number of NATO members. And in the past 15 years, as both China and Russia transformed themselves into decidedly more authoritarian regimes, the dichotomy of West vs. East began bubbling up again. With last week’s gathering of presidents in Beijing, it has seemed to some commentators that we’re now officially bipolar again.
But if Xi really did mean “multipolar” rather than “bi,” I think he was on to something. To be sure, in the context of international and U.S.-China relations, “multi” sounds less aggressive than “bi,” which may have been reason enough for his word choice. But “multi” also seems more the mot juste to me than “bi,” not because it’s more diplomatic, or less confusable with “manic-depressive.” Rather, it’s a better description because it takes two to be bipolar, and I don’t think the West comprises a coherent bloc anymore. For all the imperfections and deviations that were part and parcel of the Cold War West, the West was bound together and adhered loosely to the fundamentals of capitalism and democracy, just as the East was rooted, albeit with its own imperfections and deviations, in communism and authoritarianism.
Today, Xi’s hoped-for alliance of China, Russia, and India has less coherence than the East of yore, even if all three suppress Muslim minorities within their borders. Modi’s regime, despite its increasing repression of India’s huge Muslim population, hasn’t adopted anything like the full-throated authoritarianism of the other two mega-nations, and has more of democratic heritage standing in the way of that transition than either Russia or China had.
But it’s the West that we really can’t speak of as a bloc any longer, as its common core of beliefs has been sundered by Donald Trump. Since the start of the Cold War, Europe has enjoyed a much higher level of social democracy and state capitalist enterprises than the U.S., varying by country. The Nordics are more generous than Germany or Switzerland, and all were and remained capitalist, but they all removed certain key sectors—health care, most prominently—from the grasp of private markets, something that America, alas, hasn’t done. Most importantly, all European nations aside from outliers like Hungary have adhered to some basic democratic principles, though some had to be forced to extend full citizenship to minorities, and almost all today are resisting such extensions to their immigrant populations.
It’s the West that we really can’t speak of as a bloc any longer, as its common core of beliefs has been sundered by Donald Trump.
Today, can we speak of a West—that is, a transatlantic democratic-capitalist bloc centered around Europe and the United States—whose nations adhere to democratic principles at home and seek to preserve a community of like-minded democracies beyond their own borders? Not with Donald Trump running the show in D.C. In Trump’s world, every nation-to-nation relationship is transactional; adherence to democracy doesn’t privilege any other nation in Trump’s view, just as preserving democracy at home is nowhere to be found on his to-do list.
It’s not merely that Trump has no ideological commitment to democracy as such. It’s more that he has no commitment to any ideology, to any -ism other than narcissism. If everything is transactional—more specifically, if every policy decision he makes depends on his appearing to emerge the winner from every transaction he engages in, and every other party, the loser—then whatever metrics that any ideology would be guided by are completely irrelevant to Trump.
Consider what many, myself included, have called Trump’s “state capitalism.” I now think I was completely wrong to have done so. Trump had a “golden share” imposed upon Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel so that he could be seen as gaining a controlling, though not monetary, interest in the company. He also required Intel to give the government a 10 percent ownership share as part of his price for allowing Intel’s CEO to remain as CEO, since Trump had been calling for his ouster.
It is unimaginable that Trump would support some other president doing what he has done (save in genuine economic emergencies). Trump excoriated Biden’s industrial policy, which was a market intervention far less drastic and groundbreaking than Trump’s taking de facto control of specific major corporations. It’s not state capitalism that Trump supports; it’s Trump capitalism (as is clear from the Nippon-U.S. Steel merger document, which actually cites Trump by name in explaining who will control what). In that sense, his intervention in newly Nipponized U.S. Steel has less in common with the government’s taking an emergency stake in General Motors when it was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2009, and more in common with Trump’s threats to major law firms that they’d lose the federal government as a client if they continued to employ attorneys who’d been active in actions against Trump, and if they didn’t do pro bono work for Trump’s preferred causes. It has more in common with his threats to universities of ceasing government support for research if they didn’t change their admissions and hiring policies, and even their curricula.
A leader such as Trump has no logically worked-out ideology, only an all-consuming drive to maximize his personal power and wealth. That inclines him toward autocracy and authoritarian rule, and given his own biases and those of the current Republican base, his rule is suffused with racist, sexist, and xenophobic rage, as well as a hatred of the educated elites who looked down on him as a malignant buffoon (which he was, and is) as he sought to maneuver his way through New York’s upper crust. The only metric that matters to Trump is the number of enemies crushed and humiliated, and the extent to which they’re crushed and humiliated. (It’s no accident that that’s also the metric that matters to his most powerful aide, Stephen Miller.)
All the above inclines Trump toward fascism, but fascism is more a means to his true end, which is unchecked power for himself, obtained by crushing all critics and potential critics, than an end in itself. Hitler, by contrast, had the extermination of the Jews as his north star; Trump’s is just the limitless elevation of Trump. That doesn’t make Trump’s fascism any less dangerous, any less a mortal threat to American democracy than it would be if it were a free-standing ideology decoupled from elevation of self. As democracy is an inherent obstacle to Trump’s ascent über alles, then democracy must go.
So, then: the West? Is there a cross-nation ideology that defines it today? So long as Trump remains in power, it isn’t democracy. Trump’s stated admiration for Putin and Xi, specifically, their untrammeled ability to impose their will on their respective nations, is a matter of record; when he opposes them, it’s only because they don’t assent to whatever he is demanding. If Trump were to initiate a war, it wouldn’t be on discernible ideological grounds (though some would have to be fabricated for public consumption). It would be more like the monarch-vs.-monarch wars that preceded the French Revolution.
So, Xi was right. Ours is not a bipolar international order. We’re multipolar, or, if our president has his way and the odds are in his favor, perhaps a rigged Hobbesian scramble of Trump against all.