Alex Callinicos: Trump’s ‘predatory hegemony’ gives way

Even Trump’s closest allies, like fascist Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, are turning away from him (Photo: WikipediaCommons)

The problem with Donald Trump isn’t that he uses the F-word on social media. It’s that he’s a vile racist brute who has the power of life and death over everyone on the planet.

Take his speech last Wednesday, where he warned Iranians “we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” Leave aside the contemptible insult to a 3,000-year old civilisation, where does that phrase come from?

In 1965, general Curtis LeMay wrote that the United States should bomb North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age” if they didn’t stop fighting Washington’s puppet regime in the South. As air force chief of staff, LeMay had repeatedly sought nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

In the 1968 presidential election LeMay stood as the vice-presidential running mate of the segregationist George Wallace. Republican Richard Nixon won that election. But four years later, he came close to implementing LeMay’s slogan.

To force North Vietnam to accept US terms for ending the war, Nixon ordered hundreds of B-52 bombers to devastate the country’s civilian infrastructure—power plants, factories, hospitals, warehouses, railways, schools. This is exactly what Trump is threatening Iran with.

North Vietnam still refused to make the concessions Nixon demanded. Desperate to get out, he settled for terms the US and North Vietnam had previously agreed on before he tried to renege on them. Soon after, in April 1975, the North Vietnamese army took Saigon, the capital of the South.

The greatest empire in history had been defeated by a determined nationalist movement. That same empire faces another such movement in the Islamic Republic in Iran.

Contrary to Trump’s bluster, there has been no regime change in Tehran. Indeed, the US-Israeli campaign of assassination has entrenched elements even more determined to continue the war against Washington and Tel Aviv.

Iran’s rulers have two great assets. First, large locally‑produced stocks of advanced missiles and drones that the US and Israel have failed to eliminate.

Second, their chokehold on one of the main conduits of the world economy in the Strait of Hormuz. That Iran would use this latter weapon was entirely predictable.

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser under president Barack Obama, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday that he took part in war games where “Iran always closed the Strait of Hormuz.”

But Trump didn’t see this coming. Last Wednesday he said “we don’t need” the Strait of Hormuz. He called on US allies in Europe and East Asia who do to “build up some delayed courage… Go to the strait and just take it.”

This marked an abdication. If you read textbooks on international relations, they include statements like this by Robert Gilpin—“hegemonic powers may be said to supply public goods (security and protection of property rights) in exchange for revenue.”

You can see hegemony as a kind of protection racket through which the militarily and economically dominant power secures the acceptance of weaker states. But for it to work, as anyone who’s seen The Godfather knows, the protection has to be delivered.

One of the main “public goods” is keeping open the sea lanes through which international trade flows. The US took this task over from Britain. When Iran stepped up attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf towards the end of its war with Iraq during the 1980s, the Pentagon intervened to tip the scales against Tehran.

But, under what another international relations scholar, Stephen Walt, calls Trump’s “predatory hegemony”, the US is giving up this role. This reflects the shifting balance of economic and military power. If “just taking” the strait was easy, the Pentagon would have already done it.

Thrashing around, Trump is back to demanding the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. But long-standing US allies don’t trust him anymore. The media talk about how angry Trump is with Nato for not joining the war.

This cuts both ways. Even his closest ally in the European Union, Italy’s fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni, has come against the war and for sanctions on Israel. The tectonic plates of global power really are shifting.