When President Trump took a phone call from the leader of Taiwan in December and asserted that the United States might no longer be bound by the “One China” policy, his defenders hailed it as a show of strength — the latest delicate issue on which Mr. Trump was willing to challenge decades of diplomatic orthodoxy.
On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump fell back into line. In a call with President Xi Jinping of China, he pledged fealty to One China, a 44-year-old policy under which the United States recognized a single Chinese government in Beijing and severed its diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Mr. Trump has also tacked to the center on Israel. After presenting himself as a stalwart defender of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who would buck the pressure campaign against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Mr. Trump warned Israelis this week that he did not believe that “going ahead with these settlements is a good thing for peace.”
And on Iran, where Mr. Trump threatened as a candidate to rip up the nuclear deal struck by President Barack Obama, advisers to the new president told the European Union’s top foreign policy official, Federica Mogherini, that the United States would fully carry out the agreement.
As Mr. Trump begins to shape his foreign policy, he is proving to be less of a radical than either his campaign statements or his tempestuous early phone calls with foreign leaders would suggest. On Friday, as he welcomed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan to the White House, Mr. Trump characterized America’s alliance with Japan as a “cornerstone of peace and stability.” Those time-tested words bore little resemblance to his threats during the campaign to mothball the partnership.
“Every president discovers that it looks different from the perspective of the Oval Office than it did on the campaign trail,” said Martin S. Indyk, the executive vice president of the Brookings Institution. “The fact that President Trump is proving flexible on some key foreign policy issues suggests he’s less ideologically driven than his early moves would imply.” [New York Times]
Comment:
America is an ideological state that follows a fixed thought and method defined by its secular Capitalist ideology. America’s political, executive and administrative institutional thinking have been deeply shaped by this thought and method. Furthermore, as a great power, indeed the present superpower, America has developed detailed plans in its foreign policy, arrived at from the application of its thought and method to the basic reality in each country and region of the world as well as to the international order in general. Schools of thought do exist in American thinking. But these schools all follow the same secular Capitalist thought and method and are bound by the same reality, and are thus generally unable to move outside of established planning. At the most they can vary the means and styles employed in order to implement this planning. So one administration uses multilateralism in its foreign policy and another uses unilateralism. One employs interventionism to wage military wars while another invokes protectionism to wage economic wars. But despite these variations, American foreign policy has formed a continuous unbroken narrative since America emerged as the predominant superpower at the end of World War II.
Donald Trump came to the presidency of the United States without any previous experience in political office or indeed in politics generally. His ascent was a consequence of a series of mistakes by the Democratic and Republican political establishments as well as the surge of the ‘far right’ in American politics in response to the resurgence of Islam and the numerous failures of the Capitalist system evidenced by military defeats in Muslims lands and the financial and economic crises at home. Nevertheless, the American system is quite capable of absorbing even a Donald Trump and employing him for the furthering of its goals and objectives. Those elements of Trump’s rhetoric that are of value to the American political establishment will be pressed into service, such as his strongly anti-Islamic stance while other elements will be curtailed, such as his missteps with established American partners and allies in Europe, Japan, Australia, and Mexico; and his amateur roughness in the rebalancing of China and Russia, or Iran and Saudi Arabia will be matured and refined.
Therefore, those that wish to understand American policy should focus less on Trump’s mercurial personality and instead study the ideology that underpins Western civilisation. This is an ideology that attempts to entice with the atheistic slogans of freedom and democracy but actually carries within it the evil of mercantile exploitation and imperialism. In fact, mercantilism and colonialism precede the Capitalist ideology, initiated by the Christian kings of Europe after the failure of their crusades, having now tasted worldly treasure and wealth. These kings tacitly nurtured irreligious thinkers as an antidote to Church control but when atheist materialist thought began to power political revolutions, the shaken Western establishment easily compromised its Christianity, declared secularism and adopted the slogans of freedom and democracy from its dangerous revolutionary opponents. The true loyalty of this establishment is neither to religion nor to atheism but only to the rapacious increase of its wealth and power by any means necessary. The political thoughts of freedom and democracy, grafted onto a secular utilitarian outlook, provided the ideological cohesion that enabled the West to rise to dominate the entire world, returning to the lands of the crusades not as Christian knights but as Capitalist imperialists; further, they enabled the creation of an agent political class in Muslim lands that remains loyal to its Western masters and that oppresses and exploits the Muslim Ummah and its resources at their behest.
Muslims must not make the mistake of considering only Donald Trump to be their enemy. He is the pawn of a political establishment that is driven by the secular Western Capitalist ideology. It is this ideology that must be defeated; an ideology that not only powers the West but also has made deep inroads into the present Muslim ruling class and Muslim society in general. It is the secular Capitalist ideology that has displaced Islam from life’s affairs; the revival of Muslims is only possible if this abominable falsehood is fully exposed and Islam returns to the centre of Muslims’ lives through the re-establishment of the righteous Khilafah State on the method of Prophethood.
Faiq Najah