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Business Times
09-07-2025
- Business
- Business Times
Trump is opening a new chapter in US foreign policy
NEARLY six months into US President Donald Trump's presidency, a Trump Doctrine is coming into view. Contrary to the fears of his critics, and the hopes of some admirers, Trump is no isolationist. And contrary to those who claim Trump is simply a marvel of ad-hoc-ery and inconsistency, there is a distinctive pattern to the policies he has pursued. This Trump Doctrine emphasises using American power aggressively – more aggressively than Trump's immediate predecessors – to reshape key relationships and accrue US advantage in a rivalrous world. In doing so, Trump has blown up any talk about a post-American era. Yet he has also raised troubling questions about whether his administration can wield America's outsized influence effectively and keep it strong. The isolationist label has long followed Trump, but it's never accurately described an idiosyncratic man. Yes, Trump disdains core elements of US globalism, from the international trade system America established to its promotion of democratic values and its defence commitments around the world. Yet Trump has also argued that America should assert itself more forcefully in a cutthroat world. And today, as Trump pursues a capacious view of presidential power at home, he is offering an equally ambitious conception of American power abroad. Trump rails against long, costly nation-building efforts. But he has nonetheless waged two short, sharp Middle Eastern conflicts: one to deter Yemen's Houthis from attacking US forces and Red Sea shipping, the other to roll back the Iranian nuclear program. Several US presidents pledged to use force to keep Tehran from crossing the nuclear threshold; Trump really did it. That's not the policy of a man in thrall to the Republican Party's Tucker Carlson wing. Meanwhile, Trump started trade wars against dozens of countries, in hopes of reshaping the international economy. He deployed diplomatic leverage – and explicit threats of abandonment – to remake the transatlantic bargain by getting European allies to spend much more on defence. Trump also wielded America's innovation power – its role in designing high-end semiconductors – to bring Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into Washington's tech bloc and make them partners in his push for 'AI dominance'. Closer to home, Trump used veiled threats to pry Panama out of China's Belt and Road Initiative. He has demanded territorial concessions from Panama, Denmark and Canada. At the same time, Trump touts his Golden Dome missile shield, meant to protect the homeland and give America greater freedom of action against its foes. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up This isn't standard-issue, post-1945 American internationalism: It's hard to imagine prior presidents telling allies to yield their land. But neither is it a retreat into Fortress America. And by applying American power in such energetic, omnidirectional fashion, Trump has revealed much about the true state of world affairs. Policy journals brim with articles about American decline and the advent of multipolarity. But Trump, in his inimitable way, has reminded so many countries where power really lies. For example: The strike on Iran demonstrated America's unique global military reach and its ability, together with Israel, to reshape the Middle East while relegating Russia and China – nominally Iran's allies – to the sidelines. Trump's key insight is that the world's sole superpower has more muscle than commonly understood. Yet the Trump Doctrine nonetheless suffers from three big problems. First, its exercise of power is weakened by its dearth of strategy. Trump's trade war got off to a farcical start because he failed to consider how sky-high tariffs might wreck the US economy – a real-time discovery that forced a rapid, humiliating climb-down. A president who privileges the art of the deal over intellectual consistency sometimes pursues contradictory policies: Trump's tariffs against Indo-Pacific allies erode their prosperity and make it harder for them to spend more on defence. Second, a president who sometimes struggles to distinguish friends from enemies sometimes fails to point US power in the right direction. Trump delights in taking aim at US allies. He has been more reluctant to confront Russia, even as Vladimir Putin makes a mockery of Trump's desire for peace in Ukraine – and even though Putin's war economy is increasingly vulnerable to the commercial and financial coercion that Trump so often threatens to employ. Third, the best presidents build US power for the future, but Trump risks depleting it instead. Maybe the One Big Beautiful Bill will juice the economy – or maybe it will lock in structural deficits that constrain defence spending and growth. Slashing foreign aid saves little money but squanders US global influence; the war on universities threatens the research ecosystem that underpins America's economic and military might. Moreover, a policy of tough love towards allies could turn into mutually destructive hostility, and a superpower that regularly coerces its friends could wreck the soft power that lubricates key relationships. Trump revels in using US power, but he doesn't quite understand where it comes from. That's the central irony, and fundamental weakness, of the doctrine guiding his administration today. BLOOMBERG
Indian Express
08-07-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Express View: For India, is BRICS worth it?
The 2025 BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ended over the weekend with a wide-ranging declaration on global and regional issues. But few outside the hapless desk officers in various foreign offices around the world and policy wonks in think tanks would want to pore over the 126-paragraph, 47-page, over-16,000-word declaration. With such familiar phrases as 'multipolar world', 'Global South', 'inclusive', 'sustainable' and 'global governance', it will certainly impress the enthusiasts who see BRICS as a powerful instrument to upend the global order. Many in the West do fear BRICS for the same reason. There is no reason to believe that US President Donald Trump would have had the time to read the long declaration, but he has repeated his earlier claim that BRICS is 'anti-American' and threatened to impose additional tariffs on members of the forum. But the hopes and fears of BRICS engineering a global transformation are misplaced. For, the forum is riddled with several contradictions of its own and its grasp has always been larger than its reach. As irony would have it, if anyone is trying to build a 'post-American order', it is Trump. In less than six months, he has overturned many traditional assumptions about US global policies and is seeking to radically overhaul the international system that Washington built after World War II and that was modified by it at the turn of the 1990s. Consider, for example, the BRICS talk about reforming the Bretton Woods system; Trump is doing precisely that by pressing for change at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The BRICS call to save the World Trade Organisation is a sad (and hypocritical) cry in the wilderness with Trump well on his way to demolishing the rule-maker for world commerce. Even more damaging is that leading members of BRICS have been queuing up in Washington to negotiate bilateral deals with Trump holding a gun to their heads. They are not saving the WTO but protecting their own national trade with America by looking for bilateral deals. China has cut a limited deal. Vietnam, another communist country, announced a trade deal of its own. India hopes that its intensive trade negotiations with Trump's Washington in the past few months will bear fruit this week. Equally far-fetched is the idea that members of BRICS can submerge their bilateral differences to collectively blunt American dominance. For India, the economic and security challenges presented by China are much bigger than those posed by American hegemony. Two BRICS states — Saudi Arabia and the UAE — are as worried as Israel and the US about the nuclear weapons programme of a third member, Iran. But here is the rub. Trump's actions to overhaul the global economic, financial, and security order have produced great global churn. The Rio declaration has no answers, only hot air, in response to the Trump challenge. The circumstances that persuaded India to found BRICS and promote it for three decades are no longer present. Yet the political groupthink in Delhi is so entrenched that no questions are asked about the virtue of India investing so much political and diplomatic capital in a forum that does little to serve the country's current interests. With India taking over the chair of BRICS, the time to ask those questions is now.
Miami Herald
08-06-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
London's ‘Little America' is no more. What's taking its place?
From the Eagle Bar on the top floor of the new Chancery Rosewood Hotel in Mayfair, the views across London are unobstructed, save for a gilded aluminum eagle, its wings spread wide, which crowns the midcentury modern building that once housed the U.S. Embassy to the United Kingdom. The Americans pulled up stakes in 2018, relocating the embassy to a giant fortified cube on the south bank of the Thames. They left behind the eagle, along with a collection of monuments and memorials in the adjoining Grosvenor Square — relics of what was once an American citadel in its ancestral land. John Adams lived on the square. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had his wartime office there. A statue of Franklin Roosevelt gazes across the patchy lawn. Diplomats threw star-spangled election night parties, while hopeful travelers lined up outside for visas. During the Vietnam War, protesters clashed with police under the trees. Now, Grosvenor Square is being recast for a post-American age. The Chancery plans to open to guests in early September, its Persian Gulf owners having converted the Brutalist landmark, designed by Eero Saarinen, into a Rosewood luxury hotel, with junior suites starting at 1,400 pounds (nearly $1,900) a night. The square, which lies in front of the hotel and has a different owner, is closing this week for a 13-month refurbishment. The project will add lush plantings that celebrate biodiversity and link the 6-acre expanse, which has fallen into a state of neglect, more closely to its 18th-century Georgian roots. The owner, Grosvenor Property, insists it is preserving the legacy of a place once known as 'Little America.' But Grosvenor Square attests to how much the world has changed, not least since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Start with the fact that the embassy was bought by investors from Qatar, whose government recently gave the Trump administration a Boeing 747 as a replacement for Air Force One. 'If you're trying to attract people, if you're trying make money, highlighting America's prominence is not the way to do it,' said Leslie Vinjamuri, the director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, a research group in London. 'It's a good time to take a step back, to play it down a bit.' Ties between Britain and the United States ebb and flow, she noted, in a 'special relationship' that is neither as serene nor as harried as often portrayed. A new global crisis could swiftly bring these old allies back together. But Trump's acrimonious dealings with Europe have indisputably changed the mood. 'There is just a sense of pulling apart between the U.K. and the U.S.,' said Vinjamuri, who will leave London this month to become CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Trump, who has a soft spot for the royal family and other totems of imperial Britain, complained bitterly about the sale of the embassy. He blamed it, wrongly, on his predecessor President Barack Obama. (The decision was made during the George W. Bush administration because of security concerns.) 'We had the best site in all of London,' Trump said in 2018. The new location, in a redeveloped industrial section of London known as Nine Elms, was 'lousy,' he said, spurning an invitation to a ribbon cutting. Indeed, since the days of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, Grosvenor Square has been synonymous with posh London. The Grosvenor family laid it out in the 1720s to anchor the expansion of its property empire into West London. With grand dimensions and an elegant oval shape, it attracted wealthy residents, who were given keys to their own private Eden in the capital. (It became a public park after World War II.) It also attracted Americans, starting with Adams, who lived on the northeast corner from 1785 to 1788 as America's first envoy to Britain. After Eisenhower quartered himself there, it was nicknamed 'Eisenhower Platz.' The Roosevelt statue was paid for with donations from ordinary Britons as a gesture of gratitude to the United States for its aid in the war. Nothing sealed the American connection like the opening of Saarinen's chancery in 1960, a hulking nine-story building that was the first purpose-built embassy of any country in London. In its early days, it was reviled by some critics as a jarring intrusion on the genteel Georgian symmetry of the square. 'It had this sense of America being big and bold, and in a British context, a sense of 'Wow, how American,'' said Matthew Barzun, the last U.S. ambassador to have an office in the building. Barzun, who witnessed ups and downs in the trans-Atlantic relationship over Syria and Brexit, said the old embassy was designed to be 'light and open and welcoming.' But after the terrorist bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, 'we added more and more fences and bollards,' he said. 'You start out building things to keep people out,' Barzun said, 'but you end up trapping people in.' Converting a diplomatic fortress into a sleek, five-star hotel was a design and engineering test for Qatari Diar, a real estate company backed by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. The Qataris brought in Rosewood, a luxury hotel chain that was started in Dallas and is now owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate. 'Creating warmth was the biggest challenge,' said Michael Bonsor, the hotel's managing director, as he offered a sneak peek. 'You have this juxtaposition of one of the most secure, fortified buildings in London, where Marines used to run around with machine guns. It wasn't the most hospitable building in the world.' Dapper and discreet, Bonsor could have been a diplomat if he hadn't gone into hospitality. He said the hotel would make nods to its past, but would avoid becoming a Cold War-style theme park. In addition to the eagle, which is a protected landmark, the hotel has reinstalled statues of Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan that once flanked the building (the statues are wrapped in tarp to protect them during construction). Inside, the Chancery has retained some of Saarinen's design elements, notably his exposed-concrete ceiling. But prizewinning British architect David Chipperfield has reconfigured the building to add an atrium with cascading chandeliers. Two palatial penthouses are named after Elizabeth and Charles, monarchs not presidents. The hotel said their scale would appeal to guests from the Middle East. Across the street, the proprietors of Grosvenor Square are similarly aware of the tug between past and present. While they will retain the FDR statue, as well as a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they plan to add serpentine paths and extensive plantings to soften the square's stark appearance. 'The austere design, which was important during the Cold War period, has had its day,' said Cordula Zeidler, a heritage and design expert who advised Grosvenor Property. 'Having more plantings is both a Georgian concept and something people want today.' James Raynor, the newly named CEO of Grosvenor, acknowledged the complicated political backdrop to the project. But he said, 'I don't think we should be altering it for the long term on the basis of short-term noise.' In turbulent times, Raynor even holds out hope that the 18th-century square can still serve as a 21st-century bridge. 'Will the park by itself change the diplomatic relationship between the countries?' he said. 'I doubt it. But it will allow us to recognize what the two countries have done for each other.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
NDTV
26-05-2025
- Business
- NDTV
Is Donald Trump Doing The World A Favour By Isolating The United States?
United States President Donald Trump's tariffs against most of the world tanked stock markets, disrupted the U.S. bond market and destabilized the global economy. Trump has economically and politically threatened American allies, shattering the unity of the western world. But Trump's chaos may have inadvertently produced an opportunity to create a better world. Some western commentators argue that the U.S. has been a benevolent superpower. That may have been true for a small group of mostly western states that have benefitted from American domination. But much of the Global South was victimized by American military, economic and political interventions. Losing dominance? The West could be in the midst of losing its dominant position in the global order. This is probably inevitable, but it may not be the tragedy some western commentators assume it to be. In most of the world, there is a desire for a more equitable world order that doesn't feature the moral, racial and cultural double standards of the western-dominated system. A world where American and western power is limited and contained could not only end up being more peaceful but, over time, more prosperous. Without the co-operation of the allies alienated by Trump, it may be harder for the U.S. to initiate conflict around the world as it often has since the end of the Cold War. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, American political scientist Stacie Goddard argues the emerging multipolar, post-American world will be one in which great powers — primarily the U.S., Russia and China — will divide the globe into 'spheres of influence.' The U.S. is seeking to maintain disproportionate power in Asia. Closer to home, neighbours of the U.S. have reason to fear American expansionism. By contrast, even if it has imperialist ambitions, Russia doesn't have the military might to dominate Europe. It's a country of 144 million people with one-sixth the GDP of the European Union. Russia can cause trouble within countries with sizable Russian minorities, but its ability to project power is limited, as demonstrated by its grinding war in Ukraine. China's stance The Chinese have scored a win against Trump's tariffs with a 90-day tariff pause that's being hailed as vindication of China's defiant negotiating strategy. China called Trump's bluff and won as global stocks soared. This has bolstered China's goal to have a sphere of influence. However, Chinese foreign policy is largely non-interventionist and, compared to the U.S., remarkably restrained. China may intimidate its rivals in the South China Sea, Senkaku Islands, and Taiwan, but it does not easily resort to military force. China has not resorted to military force since its war with Vietnam in 1979. China is committed to most of the guiding structures of the current international system and values a stable and mutually beneficial global economic order that enables it to focus on and improve its domestic development. Its export-oriented economic sectors need customers abroad. Unlike the West, China has a vested interest in helping the Global South develop and prosper in order to create those customers. Asian trade alliance? The Chinese are using their resources to promote economic and technological development in the Global South. As China spreads its renewable energy technologies globally, some of the poorest countries may leapfrog carbon-based fuels and go directly to renewable energy to make development affordable and attainable, and to mitigate climate change. In response to Trump's tariffs, China, South Korea and Japan have discussed a renewed free-trade arrangement. President Xi Jinping has toured Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia to encourage a common front against American actions. Asian states are wary of China, but they remain committed to global trade. The U.S. may be retreating from globalization, but the rest of the world is not, though China's manufacturing dominance concerns many states. Emerging international order New institutions may help to manage the evolving world order. The BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — have created the New Development Bank (NDB). China has created the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The United Nations remains the favoured instrument of global diplomacy, even if western states have been accused of undermining its authority and efficacy. The European Union will continue as a major global power in the emerging international order, but on a more even footing with the rest of the world. Europe is reconsidering its trade war with China. In the words of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission: ' The West as we knew it no longer exists.' Western states will undoubtedly continue to try to exercise disproportionate global influence. Canada has suggested that 'like-minded states' form an alliance to promote international trade and institutions that remain dominated by western interests. This idea seems designed to continue marginalizing the Global South in the international decision-making process. Most Global South states are not high-functioning liberal democracies. Many struggle with the legacies of colonialism while managing an international system dominated by the West that keeps them subservient. Others have created governments that fit their particular circumstances, cultures and levels of development. But many weaker countries generally share a commitment to international law that is seemingly stronger than the West. They need a stable, predictable, fairly applied set of global rules more than stronger nations. Ironically, the decline of the U.S. may facilitate a much more genuine and legitimate rules-based international order. America's loosening grip Readjusting the world economy away from the U.S. to a more diverse, evenly distributed economic model will be difficult and disruptive. Nonetheless, loosening the American grip on global power is an essential first step towards achieving a more just and balanced international order. For putting this process in motion, the world may owe Trump a measure of thanks. (Author: Shaun Narine, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, St. Thomas University (Canada)
Atlantic
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Crisis of American Leadership Reaches an Empty Desert
In Tiné, a barren desert town in eastern Chad, the first humanitarian crisis of the post-American world is now unfolding. Thousands of people fleeing the civil war in Sudan's Darfur region have recently arrived there after enduring long journeys in relentless, 100-degree heat. Many have nothing—they report being beaten, robbed, or raped along the way—and almost nothing awaits them in Tiné. Due in part to the Trump administration's devastating cuts to foreign aid, only a skeleton staff of international humanitarian workers are on hand to receive them. There are shortages of food, water, medicine, and shelter in Tiné, and few resources to move people anywhere else. Several months ago, I was reporting in Sudan with the photographer Lynsey Addario. She recently returned to the region and spent several days photographing and speaking with some of the people who are streaming into Tiné. According to aid workers on the ground, more than 30,000 people have arrived there since regional fighting intensified in mid-April, and more than 3,500 are now arriving every day. The photos below capture the desperation of people with nowhere to go, the absence of infrastructure to help them, the desolation of the empty desert. Most of the people in Tiné and nearby towns are coming from Zamzam, a famine-stricken camp for displaced people in North Darfur. Aid trucks carrying food have long had difficulty reaching Zamzam, thanks to ongoing violence, bad roads, and the Sudanese government's reluctance to let international organizations operate in areas controlled by its rivals. Over the past few weeks, the Rapid Support Forces, the militia that is the Sudanese army's main antagonist, raised the stakes further. The RSF tightened its siege of El-Fasher, the largest city in North Darfur, and began shelling Zamzam itself. The core of the RSF consists of Arabic-speaking nomads, once known as the Janjaweed, who have long been in conflict with the non-Arab farmers in this part of Sudan. Their lethal rivalry is not a religious dispute—both sides are overwhelmingly Muslim—and the ethnic differences are blurry. Nevertheless, refugees in Tiné say RSF soldiers are interrogating people escaping from Zamzam and El-Fasher, and murdering men who look 'African' instead of 'Arab,' who speak the wrong language or who come from the wrong tribe. 'If your language is Arabic, they will let you go,' a woman named Fatima Suleiman recounted. Those who did not speak it, she said, were murdered on the spot. Her dark-skinned son, Ahmed, a student who knows some English, was spared because he speaks Arabic too, though his friends were not as fortunate. He watched them get gunned down. In theory, the Trump administration still supports emergency humanitarian aid. But in practice, the cuts to logistics and personnel, the abrupt changes to payments, and the associated chaos have hampered all of the international humanitarian organizations working in Tiné and everywhere else. The Chadian Red Cross lacks transport for the wounded. The World Food Program's supplies are unreliable because support systems have been cut. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is cutting staff due to budget constraints. Jean-Paul Habamungu Samvura, who represents UNHCR in eastern Chad, said that in his 20-year career, he could not recall refugees ever being offered so little. 'Our big donor is the U.S.,' Samvura said. But in February, UNHCR was instructed to alter its services. 'Things we are used to seeing as lifesaving activity, like providing shelter, are no longer considered lifesaving activity,' he explained. That leaves his team with an unsolvable problem: 'Where to put people at least to give them a bit of shading.' Some of his staff have been told that their jobs will end as soon as June, but the crisis will not end in June. Local Sudanese groups, part of a mutual-aid movement called Emergency Response Rooms, are collecting donations from overseas and have begun offering meals to refugees, as they do all over Sudan. But if the number of displaced people continues to grow as the scale of the disaster expands, these volunteers will also need more resources, if only to ensure that everyone in Tiné eats a meal every day. Eyewitnesses report people dying of thirst on the way to Tiné, and malnourished children arriving among the refugees. This is a dramatic moment in a devastating war. More people have been displaced by violence in Sudan than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Statements about Sudan are regularly made at the UN and in other international forums. And yet the people in these photographs seem to have been abandoned in an empty landscape. As the United States withdraws and international institutions decay, their ordeal may be a harbinger of what is to come.
