The United States has 34 crore people (the size of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar). Americans represent 4 per cent of the global population and they are the biggest beneficiaries of what the US called the rules-based order.
This order, imposed by the US and its European allies after the Second World War, seeks global cooperation through institutions like the United Nations and also the World Trade Organisation. Americans refer to their president, unironically, as the ‘leader of the free world’. America’s per capita income is almost $90,000 according to the one of the institutions of the ‘rules-based order’, the International Monetary Fund. India’s per person income is less than 1/30th, at under $3000. The US economy has surged over the last few decades because its companies have sent their products — like planes, phones and computers — and services — like social media companies — around the world, where they dominate.
Even with the recent downward revision in their jobs numbers, the US is running at what is referred to as full employment, meaning that joblessness is around 4%, which is optimal. This means that from the standpoint of income and jobs, the US is in a very good place, particularly when compared to nations like India, where poverty and joblessness, particularly in the absence of regular, salaried employment, are a serious problem.
And yet the US is unhappy with the world, which it says is ‘ripping it off’, in the words of the US president. He has reversed this theft, as he sees it, by making it more difficult for countries to export their products into the US. America is India’s largest export market, and a 25% tariff on our goods will weaken demand, hurting our exporters. There is no getting around that fact. If the tariffs remain, our interests will be harmed, no matter who ultimately pays the tariff.
There is no meaningful debate inside the US’s democracy of whether the actions taken by president Trump harm the global rules-based order and its friends and allies, to say nothing of poorer nations. What the US has done is tear up the system where tariffs existed but were used under a system of WTO rules and regulations that could be appealed. The US has disregarded that, and weakened the system that for decades has served it well. In doing so it is damaging the rest of the world.
There is a second disregarding of the rules based order and that is the American enabling of the genocide in Gaza. Ever eager to free the world from tyranny and despotism through war, the US has protected Israel while it massacres and starves thousands of Palestinians, and wages illegal war on Iran. The majority of the world’s nations have called for an end to the horror in Gaza, through their vote in the United Nations General Assembly, but the US has used its veto to allow this 21st century holocaust to continues.
Like in the matter of the tariffs, the US is telling the world that it is leaving the rules-based order and prefers to use its strength to extract, and even extort, what it can from the world.
There are a few things that we can take away from these actions. One is that America has set now a precedent. The next nation that becomes powerful will have an example of how to behave with weaker nations, and might is right is as legitimate as rules-based order. There is today quite weak resistance to this from the global south, and the fissures inside BRICS, which we need not go into here, have helped American bullying.
The second is that we should seriously consider what the benefit of our personalised style of diplomacy has been. We have thrown away decades of institutional consensus on matters like Palestine, for a hug with the Israeli leader. All the honours we have bestowed on the US president, whether in rallies here or there, and indeed encouraging Indian-Americans to vote for him, have not produced any benefit or even mercy. Emperors do not listen to anything other than the voice inside their head but this must be said nonetheless.
The last thing that we should consider is what is agitating the US at this point in time. Why is it, given the wealth and power it has and its comfortable economic situation, that the US is going through this spell of madness? The answer is to be found in the rise of the global south and in particular, the rise of China. If things continue as they have been for the last 30 years, in a decade or two the US will for the first time in more than a century, not be the largest economy in the world. This is unacceptable to what is called ‘the west’. It will not be able to continue doing what it has done for centuries in north America, in Australia, in South Africa, or what it is doing today in Palestine.
As the rest of the world grows equal to the west, its ability to control and dominate is slipping. It has given up on the rules based order for this reason, and is resorting to pure might. This is a most dangerous time for the world and, in particular, for those countries which need a few more decades of stability and global cooperation to pull themselves out of poverty.
By Aakar Patel