The empire dilemma of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump

One of the biggest strategic mistakes of US President Donald Trump when he was in the White House was entropy.

As physicists explain, closed systems always tend toward disease. In more general political terms: Since the public agenda of feasible issues is limited, it opens up space for all domestic issues that have never been resolved if the government eliminates foreign policy from the main focus of concern.

Trump’s top priority is isolationism: shutting the country down to immigrants, imposing tariffs on imports, leaving NATO, and telling Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping Ji Pingping, North Korea’s top leader Kim Jong Un and others that can do whatever they want.

The consequences of the global withdrawal are internal conflicts in immigration, race and police brutality, climate, gender and gender, religion, family and education, public health, gun control, voting rights, and more. Of course, Trump’s racism and incompetence and imbalance in the institutional system have exacerbated the unrest, but strategic errors are obvious.

For a powerful force like the United States, the most successful example of a good government is Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. Historian Michael Rostovtzeff said the “real belly” is not between the emperor and the Senate (because the emperor has the upper hand), but between the central government and the provinces and cities. The government should have two priorities: the central government should focus on public finance, defense, and foreign policy (as opposed to what Trump did), while many smaller-scale affairs should be widely distributed to territorial departments: provinces or in the case of the United States, countries and cities.

In some ways, this is the government model used by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. They focused on World War II and the Cold War while refusing to interfere in states’ internal affairs and providing enough room for the private economy. One of the costs is the territorial division of social policies, including the survival of segregation in some southern states.

Again, this is a model of the Second Cold War against the Soviet Union initiated by Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. Victories in the U.S. game created a relatively short world hegemony, and the final victory was the Persian Gulf War in 1990. President Bill Clinton continued to implement decentralization policies until the end of the century, at the expense of social policies at the expense of welfare and family issues.

The main risk of this approach is that it can create imperial overload in the long run. Eisenhower had warned this in 1961, when he condemned the excessive power of the military industrial complex in his farewell speech. His successor, John F. Kennedy, launched a major turnaround: He began evacuating troops from Vietnam, trying to stop the CIA’s covert operations in Cuba and other countries, and reached several agreements with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear bombs, but he did not allow further steps. Immediately, protest movements began to emerge on civil rights and forced young people to recruit wars of aggression in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Foreign military failures caused political failures at home: none of them completed two terms, including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

The cycle began again following the Al Qaeda terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The Presidential Administration of George W. Bush has fought a series of “preventive” wars, including an illusory “global terrorism war”, which may inspire patriotism that can calm internal tensions. But while the military is now composed of volunteers and professional soldiers rather than conscripts, the United States has suffered a series of humiliating military failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

Trump’s challenge is a reaction to all these expensive failures. But his entropy isolationism opened up space for expressing widespread internal dissatisfaction and various demands and protests, high political polarization between the two parties and the blockade between the presidency and Congress.

These repetitive cycles in American politics show a permanent dilemma: If the empire had a positive foreign policy, it would gain a certain international dominance, but could also outweigh military failures and financial deterioration. Instead, isolationism prevails, which can save national defense, but internal obstacles and chaos.

The way out of trouble may be correcting the abdomen. Yes, foreign policy and defense must be prioritized, yes, but not many active wars. It needs to maintain and expand the number of its allies, which can help reduce deficits and failures and promote international cooperation, open trade and peace. Meanwhile, internal decentralization on controversial issues, such as some “wake up” issues, may reduce national polarization.

Trump learned nothing from his experience. If she becomes president, Vice President Harris will have to carefully reflect and plan before the action.

(Author’s blog First published this article. )

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of fair observers.