The Return of Anti-Americanism

THE IMAGE OF THE INTELLECTUAL raging against American imperialism in a perfect American accent from the oriental café reinforces the irony of an old resentment. Anti-Americanism is as old as America, a backhanded tribute to an idea originally rooted in freedom but always immersed in the uneven morality of national interest. The evolution of a superpower, its unmatched confidence stretching from the exercise of military strength to the unregulated marketplace, has run parallel to the rising wages of domination. It was not the “enlightened” Europe but the New World that first globalised the right to dream that went on to become the most preferred destination and the most disputed destiny. It still is.

It was the national will to defy international borders in a bout of idealism—the perfect power is duty-bound to restore the order of freedom even if it meant selective protection of rogues—that made anti-Americanism a widely shared sentiment not just in the so-called Third World. What had been lost in the swamps of Vietnam were not just American lives in pursuit of a moral obligation against the odds of geography and the tenacity of national will. Americanism as the ultimate expression of armed idealism, too, was lost, if not entirely.

Anti-Americanism gained legitimacy as an ideological position only during the Cold War, mainly because, across the Iron Curtain, there was a counterargument, an anti-capitalist alternative with its own model of freedom and progress. For the romantics on the left, still swayed by the possibilities of Heaven on Earth, what the Soviet Union promised, when viewed from a safe distance, was a gateway to a world not corrupted by wealth. It took a while for the alternative to unravel itself. What the English writer Timothy Garton Ash called the “Refolution” ( revolution plus reform) of 1989 that culminated in the outbreak of freedom in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet empire did not achieve, in the end, the death of anti-Americanism—or its more evocative synonym, anti-imperialism. The Indian establishment, to take a familiar example, could not resist seeing the world through the discarded lens of the Cold War even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It took an Atal Bihari Vajpayee to bring a cultural shift in our foreign policy by breaking out of the spell of anti-Americanism.

We are now in a world where the headline writers are feasting on puns such as Tax Americana and Trumperialism, all pointing to a disruption of the post-Cold War architecture of power that maintained a balance between the irreversibility of globalism and the supremacy of national interest. With Trump’s America emerging as the axis of chaos, the old assumptions about natural allies and strategic partners are dying under the weight of one man’s idea of greatness. It could still be argued that America winning the culture war as well as the economic war in the aftermath of World War II was historically inevitable considering the very artificiality of the system it was pitted against. There is no certainty that Trump’s weaponisation of trade to make America great again—or “liberate” the American market from globalisation’s unequal advantages—would succeed beyond Trumpism.

A global view built on the principle of make-a-deal-or-be-damned reduces the entire Trump imperium—still a work in progress—to the size of the emperor. The world is being threatened to accept his terms of endangerment or face retribution. What drives this politics of instinctive authoritarianism that refutes facts with contrived complaints—when the data tells a truth incompatible with his own, sack the data chief—and puts subservience above expertise is a belief that, even for the most powerful politician on earth, national destiny is a personal enterprise. The personal in the Trump imperium is a self-serving mythology of the Chosen One, characterised by grievance and vengeance, domination and casual execution of the inconvenient lot. Candidate Trump was powered by the resentment against political elitism; President Trump, a believer in America First, in his mad search for fairness, sees restraint as weakness. What he promises to himself is a unipolar world mindful of American interest. It’s nothing more than an ephemeral imperium’s last sigh.

The overwhelming personal in the imperial presidency of Trump denies the new anti-Americanism an ideological core— for the better. In another time, it was a clash of two cultural systems that made anti-Americanism, even though it had little relevance in civil societies, a lasting rejoinder. The Trade War, unlike the Cold War, is entirely subordinated to one man’s exaggerated self-evaluation. It is an ahistorical rearrangement of the international order, and it will pass. The new wave of anti-Americanism in the wake of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs has only made the nation greater again—beyond America. It’s the beginning of Less Americana.

anti-AmericanismDonald TrumpgeopoliticsLiberation Day tariffspost-Cold Wartrade tariffTrumperialism