HOW could 74.5 million Republican voters in the US have got it right, and the rest of the world got it wrong?
Nothing in recent history can match Donald Trump’s dramatic re-entry into the White House. Adolf Hitler’s success in the federal German elections of 1933 offers a pale parallel. Hitler’s impact though was local, European, until it exploded across the globe. Trump’s effect is ab initio international, with domestic undertones such as immigration and jobs.
Hitler never disguised his intentions. They were apparent in his incendiary manifesto Mein Kampf, published in 1925-26. (It sold 5.2m copies.) Hitler had written: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning.” He declared that it was “the sacred mission of the German people … to assemble and preserve the most valuable racial elements … and raise them to the dominant position.”
Trump, too, has made no secret of his abrasive nationalism. America First. America uber alles. Trump claims that he has never read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. His first wife Ivana reportedly told her attorney that “Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a bedside cabinet.”
Our relationship with the US has slipped down many notches.
Trump may not have owned or read Mein Kampf. He has — as if by osmosis — absorbed its vitriolic xenophobia. In December 2023, at a campaign rally in Iowa, he asserted that “illegal immigrants inside the US are poisoning and destroying the blood of America”. (Iowa voted loyally for Trump in 2016, 2020, and in 2024.)
Hitler, once in power, consolidated his authority by legislating the Enabling Act, which gave him dictatorial powers. Trump has secured the White House, a majority in the Senate, and expects a majority in the House of Representatives. If he appoints two more judges to the US Supreme Court (he put three in during his first term), he will have a majority of five to four there as well. Such unbridled power should come with self-restraint.
Almost a century ago, in 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru (elected president of the Indian National Congress for a third time) wrote an anonymous essay warning himself against the dangers of cultism.
Published under the pseudonym Chanakya, Nehru cautioned his public persona: “Men like Jawaharlal, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in democracy. He calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart, and logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person.”
He continued: “A little twist and Jawaharlal might turn a dictator sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy. He might still use the language and slogans of democracy and socialism, but we all know how fascism has fattened on this language and then cast it away as useless lumber.”
Such brave self-analysis was cremated with Nehru. Modern elected autocrats, once in power, regard voters as “useless lumber”, firewood to be used only to stoke the next election.
Leaders most beholden to the United States — Great Britain’s Keir Starmer, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky — were quick off the block to congratulate president-elect Trump. Our message of congratulations was not amongst Trump’s top 20.
We need to admit that our relationship with the United States has slipped down many notches. That happened when the US re-hyphenated us, replacing Indo-Pak with Af-Pak. With Afghanistan off the US radar, we have little relevance on our own.
There was a time when the Shah’s Iran was used as the conduit for America’s policies in the region. Today, that role has been subcontracted to Saudi Arabia. Only a fly on the wall will know what was discussed between our COAS (whose tenure has been extended by three years) and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, meeting so soon after Trump’s re-election.
Outsiders see Pakistan as a multi-headed gorgon, with many power centres. As Dr Henry Kissinger once famously asked: “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” Who does PM Narendra Modi call if he wants to parley with Pakistan over Jammu & Kashmir, or the Indus Waters Treaty, or to discuss cross-border pollution? The Sharifs, and if so, which? The establishment, and if so, with whom and how?
We should not expect equivalence with India. It has over $650 billion in foreign exchange reserves. We have $15bn, mainly rotating deposits provided by ‘friendly countries’. A nuclear-tipped peace is our only affordable option.
Our concern, and the world’s, should now be how to handle President Trump. Should his harangues be taken literally, but him seriously? We all have the next four years to find out.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2024
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