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ON Jan 20, the moment Donald Trump — the geriatric comeback kid — took his oath as the 47th US president, the destiny of the world changed. It was as if he had drawn a Tarot card predicting the future.
Trump sees it as the sun: “positivity, success, and vitality”. To other world leaders, the card is the sinister tower, signifying “upheaval, trauma, sudden change, and chaos”.
Trump does not believe in the occult. He believes in a God who saved him from an assassin’s bullet to return to the White House with a miraculous mandate. As a misogynist, he can sport on his belt the coiffured heads of two female opponents — Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. He has the whole world at his feet. If his provocative utterances are to be believed, he intends to play football with it.
To his fellow Americans, regardless of their genealogy, Trump promises America a greatness beyond the envy of his rivals. To hostile foreigners, he offers ‘peace through strength’. That mantra is not new. It has been around for over millennia, since the time of Roman Emperor Hadrian (Pax per virtutem). It is now Trump’s battle cry.
Postwar American leaders have inverted it into ‘peace through war’, most recently in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Today, we are again caught in the middle.
Since the Russian assault on Ukraine in 2022, the US has committed $175 billion to Ukraine’s defence. Not all of it goes into Volodymyr Zelensky’s pockets. The Council on Foreign Relations has disclosed that much of it finances US activities and defence manufacturers in over 70 US cities. American largesse benefits America first.
“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,” the press mogul William Hearst once said. Ukraine provides the war; the US military machine and over 40 Nato-connected countries furnish the weapons.
China foresees war of a different sort with the US. One stab in this direction has been announced by Trump on his first day in office. He revoked a presidential order signed by his predecessor Biden in 2021, decreeing that half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030 should be electric.
Trump is adamant: “The United States will not sabotage our own industries while China pollutes with impunity.” Yet, despite this bombast, Trump has admitted: “I’m for electric cars,” adding the confessional: “I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”
Elon Musk — the richest man in the world — has anointed himself as the First Buddy. His proximity to President Trump is undeniably close. The next few years will tell us who is in whose pocket. Meanwhile, Musk is exultant that Trump has endorsed his ambition to land a man on the planet Mars (coincidentally, the planet of war).
Reaching Mars is not such an impossible boast. In the 1960s, America planned to put a man on the moon by end 1969. The Soviet Union dented this ambition in 1961 by launching its cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space in a Vostok rocket. The Soviets lost out to the US though, when, in July 1969 within the deadline, two American astronauts stepped onto the moon’s surface.
Will Trump bring peace on earth? Which peace deal (Gaza or Ukraine) will secure him the Nobel Peace Prize? (Obama had been in power for less than eight months when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.)
Many countries must be recalibrating their foreign policies to achieve a resonance with Trump’s foreign policy objectives.
Pakistan will need to, soon. It is not enough for the PTI to claim that Trump wants its leader out of jail. Nor for the PPP to rejoice that its leader had reportedly received an invitation to attend Trump’s inauguration.
Historians may recall that, following Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, president Ayub Khan sent Mr Z.A. Bhutto to Washington on a condolence mission. Not satisfied with a perfunctory handshake from the new president Lyndon Johnson, Bhutto asked for a private meeting, claiming he had an important message from Ayub Khan. Johnson, despite his crowded schedule, met Bhutto on Nov 29.
His staff warned him that Bhutto was an “accomplished marathon talker”. Johnson was annoyed that the message Bhutto conveyed was no more than a vapid reiteration of Pakistan’s loyalty to the US. Johnson punished him by castigating Pakistan for its friendship with communist China.
Today, we are again caught in the middle. We were out of favour then and are out of favour now. The Nixon-China romance of the 1970s is a faded Valentine card. We must reconcile ourselves to the new reality. Stronger hands than ours will control our steering wheel.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2025
