An unwritten paradox has defined the United States up to this moment. It is the only country loved by most of those who have never set foot on its soil. It is also the one nation most despised by many who have not visited it. Loved and hated in nearly equal measure by people across the world. The return of Donald Trump to the White House is about to change all that for the worse. There is a growing wave of people around the world who are beginning to hate America with passion because of the actions of Mr. Trump. It is not hatred for Americans as a people but for the actions of its new government.
The day after Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from Canada, spontaneous boos greeted the playing of the American national anthem at most sporting venues across Canada. Previously, Canadians used to hail at the Star Spangled Banner. Similarly, hostile street marches in Mexico and other Latin American countries greeted the arrival of planes bringing home deportees from the United States. Most of those Latin Americans who went to America as illegal immigrants went there in quest of the American dream, in search of a better life for themselves and their children in a land that had been historically touted as God’s Own Country, a place of gold and goodness.
Many of them may not even have paid attention to the fine points of migrant documentation as a condition for embracing the good life promised by the lure of America. Now they are being hoarded home in plane loads of unfulfilled cargo and broken dreams. Some are returning home in manncles and leg iron, humiliated for the crime of dreaming. Worse still, even the innocent are being mass branded as criminals and gangsters, carriers of poison in their blood with which they went to poison the perfect American stock.
This is not the moment to dispute the rhetoric of the new old man in the White House. Nor is it a time or even proper to query the right of sovereign states to protect their borders or define their national interests. It is only a moment to contemplate what damage Mr. Trump’s actions are likely to do to the image and conception of America in the minds of the peoples and nations of the world.
Tariffs have been slammed on many significant nations. China, Mexico, Canada. The European union countries have been threatened with tariffs and other hostile acts of American economic nastiness. For instance, a purely domestic land legislation matter in South Africa has been greeted by indecent hectoring and bad language from the White House. South African leadership has responded in kind, indicating that bad manners is not the exclusive preserve of any nation irrespective of its gravity and the reach of its guns.
Plane loads of angry deportees have been delivered to Mexico, Guatemela, Columbia, Venezuela and other Latin American nations. Mr. Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State has travelled round to places like Panama to warn them of the bad days coming. Going round the world with a single message of threats to sovereign nations seems to be the new diplomacy from Washington.
Mr. Trump had earlier pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization thereby shrinking the volume of resources available to the poorer nations of the world for medicine and primary healthcare. Without any notice, the poor of the world have been rudely told to “look out for yourselves”. In the same vein, Mr. Trump, in the pretext to cut the costs of American government, has sent out his new billionaire friend. Elon Musk, to physically shut down the long standing department of USAID –United States Agency for International Development. Its work force of over 10,000 is being reduced to an inhuman 250. An agency established more than 40 years ago by late President John F. Kennedy as a bearer of development assistance for the poorer segments of the world is being shut down without notice or a humane programme. Its American and international work force is being suddenly laid off work while its worldwide stretch of humanitarian programmes is being shut down. The millions of mouths it previously fed will now go without food. The sick that depended on USAID medical outreach to continue living are being left to die slow avoidable deaths. An epidemic of deprivation is being deliberately unleashed on the most vulnerable segments of our global humanity.
For President Kennedy and those who came after him and maintained the tradition of United States assistance to the poor and vulnerable, agencies like USAID were agencies of soft power, instruments for the projection of American power as a force for good and an instrument to help heal a world damaged and injured by the Second World War and the injustice of global inequity. But suddenly, these agencies of good are now being terminated crudely and rudely by a leadership propped up by democracy itself in a place of hope and original goodness.
Add to this potential well of international anti-Americanism, the groundswell of domestic ill will that is already being bred by the tsunami of firings and layoffs in many government departments in America itself- environmental activity departments, the FBI, the military, the DEI departments and those whose employment they facilitated. Not to talk of the hundreds of thousands through the value chain of agricultural and industrial production and those whose employment depended on the work of the illegal immigrants – farm hands, food processors, grocery shop packers and loaders etc.
This groundswell of brewing anti-Americanism is of course in addition to long standing and existing anti-American feelings around the world. In the Muslim word, that negativity towards the United States and its foreign policies and shows of power around the world over time is axiomatic. In Iran and Yemen, in Iraq and Lebanon, in Syria and a good number of the new Middle East states, America is merely tolerated because of its economic aggression and cultural omnipresence.
This fertile ground of anti-Americanism in the Arab world is only being fertilized by recent US policy overtures. Take the latest proposal of Mr. Trump to purge the disputed Gaza strip of its indigenous Palestinian population by relocating them to other Arab countries. This disguised land grab and ethnic cleansing is being greeted globally by the international community as a further deepening of the injustice against the Palestinians. It is also seen as an unjust strengthening of the colonialist oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation.
Even in the best of times, Arab fundamentalist anti-Americanism is both cultural and historically unavoidable. America as an efflorescent outgrowth of Western civilization. It is therefore essentially a Judaeo-Christian manifestation of human civilization. To that extent, it remains antithetical to the values espoused and long cherished and pursued by the contrary Islamic civilization.
Similarly, Chinese anti-Americanism remains a latent force. Chinese do not need to make any special effort to cultivate an anti-American attitude. The Confucian ethos is inherently in competition with the classic Western ethos most lavishly displayed by the United States as a global power. It is a power with a civilizational muscle and undisguised global dominating aspirations. To the Chinese state and public psychology, then, America is and has always been a competing power for world domination.
To the Chinese, anti-Americanism is part and parcel of a long standing global competition. For Mr. Trump to fire up that perennially latent sentiment with a 10% tariff on Chinese imports into the United States is to further weaponize a pre-existing sentiment. This is the reason why the retaliatory tariff regime by Xi Jipoing was greeted with universal applause by a cross section of the Chinese public.
Anti-Americanism in Russia is alive and recent. In the aftermath of the Cold War, successive administrations in Moscow have carried on with the anti-American mindset except for the brief spell under Mikhail Gorbachev which was essentially a transitional regime. Vladimir has no problem with being inherently anti-American. He can operate a pseudo-capitalist economy for purposes of trading with the rest of the world. But in terms of values and global power competition, Russia is unashamedly anti- American and anti Western for reasons of power competition and ideology. An inherently authoritarian ethos on the basis of which Russian power is being groomed cannot but be counter democratic. Even Mr. Trump’s inherently authoritarian manners do not impress the Russians as anything approaching the existenti of the Russian establishment.
To carry his untidy trade war of tariffs to Europe will tempt to export anti-Americanism to an unlikely destination. EWurope’s link to the United States is both ideological and strategic. In terms of global security the United States is joined to Europe at the hips. The trans Atlantic corridor has historcally served as both a cultural and common defense bond. More importantly, the economic link between the US and continental Europe is also a cultural bond. A tariff war may breed anti-Americanism in Europe but will hurt both sides deeply.
For us in Africa, the Trump stampede could be damaging from the poerpective of the little tradethat has been thriving between some African couontries and the United States since the passage of Bill Clinton’s AGOA trade agreement encouraging the export of African goods to the United States. The fear here is that though the volume of trade between the US and
Africa remains negligible, Mr. Trump’s primordial racism might tempt him to want to punish some “s-hole” counties with punitive trade measures.