In the world of US foreign policy it is a profound mistake to reduce Trump's initiatives to his ego, to his pathological hatred of Obama, to his casual, 'make it up as you go along' speeches, to putting the EU in the same basket as Russia and China in his apparent inability to define friends from foes. The current US president does inflate his own role and his personal success. But that is inevitable when you have a second term to win and yet your foreign policy has to be a definitive, historic retreat.
US foreign policy, like all capitalist led foreign policy, reduces itself to money (read trade) and war. Since 2000 (and some argue the 1980s) the US economy has been declining relative to key competitors across the globe. Taking 2016 figures as the most defined up to now, the largest global export of goods and services came from the EU (14.6€ trillion.) This compared with imports of 2.5€ trillion. The EU exported 16% of the world's goods and services and imported 15%; China exported 17% of the world's goods and services and imported 12%; the US exported 14% of the world's goods and services and imported 18%. In 2016 the US trade deficit of 796.74$ billion was the fifth successive year where the US had to accept the greatest proportionate debt in world trade.
By their calculation, the United States spends more than the next seven countries combined when it comes to military expenditure. That means it spends more than Russia, China, India, France the UK, South Korea and Japan put together. In 2014, the most recent year available, the United States led the world in military spending at $610 billion, marking 34 percent of the world total. Yet it failed and is continuing to fail in two major Middle East and Asian wars - and was unable to shift the course of a third - in Syria. The failure of its conventional fire-power has put nuclear firmly on the military board in the US. Any future US war-mongering will be both decisive and deadly.
The point of these defining facts for US capitalism is that an entirely new foreign policy was called for - actually long before Trump. Obama, with his 'turn to the Pacific' - (read, the construction of the world's greatest military 'cordon sanitaire' in human history around China) - was a significant sign of the times. Now Trump wants to break up the European block, compete 'nation to nation', break up the Chinese/East-Asian block, make a new alliance, especially with Russia, as the world's second military power and as a vast, backward, militaristic and relatively new-market resource. A US/ Russia pact would be both a leverage against the German-led EU and, Trump hopes, China.
The slide and collapse of the remains of the post-war 'Pax America', in the G7, NATO, the United Nations (and long before, the Bretton Woods agreement, the World Bank and the IMF) is now actively promoted by the US sharks. The militant wing of US capitalism is not getting at the traditional elites in order to benefit the working class, as claimed, it is using them as a political weapon to re-order their social system and re-launch the primacy of the US in much more disordered and chaotic world.
Paradoxically, Trump's initiative has already reinforced two new political and social trends. In the first place Trump has undoubtedly provided a base for the new European and US right that uses racism to build dangerous, nationalist responses which will begin shortly to take on a military edge. But second, the divisions that the new US leadership have made inside the dominant capitalist forces have largely isolated the now old globalising neo-liberal leadership in society. When Hilary Clinton said;
'You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables' she summed up the Liberal elite's view of the working class. And any sense of their possible progressive, internationalist, humane approach collapsed in the bucket. (Blair did something similar in the UK.) The new ruling class divisions are opening up new spaces and opportunities for a working class voice - whose allegiance is now being claimed from all directions but whose sense of independent power and of independent right is growing.
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