Porter’s Pensées

The thing that might finally turn his transatlantic fans against Trump – the rest of us are against him anyway – is his contemptuous dismissal of the contributions of European armed forces to America’s wars in recent years.

‘The problem with NATO’, he says, ‘is that, we’ll be there for them 100%, but I’m not sure that they be there for us. If we gave them the call, “Gentlemen, we are being attacked. We’re under attack by such and such a nation”. I know them all very well, I’m not sure that they’d be there. I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they’d be there for us. They’re not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you.’ (He meant Greenland, of course.) And again: ‘They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that, and they did; they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines’. That got even the Tory press in Britain wild: the implied slur on their brave boys in khaki, more than 450 of whom were killed helping American forces in Afghanistan after 9/11. (A disproportionate number of Danish soldiers – among the first to answer ‘the call’ – also died.) That was felt to be disrespectful, as well as ignorant, especially coming from a notorious ‘draft-dodger’ (those ‘bone spurs’); and was too much Trumpery even for Trump’s leading British supporter Nigel Farage to let slide. (https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/trump-supporter-nigel-farage-says-president-wrong-to-launch-unfair-attack-on-uk-over-afghan-war/ar-AA1UPhng). The British Right is usually very pro-the military, so it’s dangerous for anyone to criticise the soldiery, except perhaps on the grounds that there aren’t enough of them. So Trump scored a spectacular own goal here; in Europe, anyway.

Are other own goals coming? One would think that the recent ICE attacks on terrified immigrant families granted refuge in churches in Texas and elsewhere (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-church-raids-arrests-lawsuit-b2798388.html), as well as ICE agents’ murders of an innocent mother and a nurse in Minnesota just the other day, might provoke the ‘Christian’ Right against this kind of (at least proto-) Fascism. Nothing else – petitions, the courts, huge demonstrations, foreign opinion – seems to be making much impact so far. I still have some hope for the part of America (50%?) that I’ve long admired. But that is rapidly seeping away.

If you could choose, which national leader would you rather have?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSEycl66RFk; or

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8CRet18ThQ.

Both speeches – Trump’s and Carney’s – were delivered to the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, only yesterday.

Is there any chance that rather than America’s annexing Canada as its 51^st State, Canada might consider taking on America as its 11^th province? Then Americans could get decent healthcare; and might even be persuaded to rejoin the British Commonwealth.

Reading the papers today, everything is ‘Trump’. It’s difficult to get away from him; even Prince Harry (in Britain) and the Epstein files can’t compete. I imagine he’s loving this – even the bad publicity he generates, however much he complains of it; you’ll know how he revels in large numbers, often exaggerated, for example of attendees at his inaugurations, TV viewing figures for his shows, and probably facebook ‘likes’. If only for this reason he’s likely to dominate the accounts of our present times in the history books my successors will write, becoming one of the ‘great men’ of world history, and in all probability with an ‘Age’ named after him. For liberals it must be excruciating, for such a flawed and undeserving personality to set his mark so indelibly on events. Most of us will resile at the idea of Trump being put in the same distinguished category as Lincoln, Churchill, Napoleon and even Thatcher, in the books our children will read.

People are asking – on an LBC phone-in programme this morning, for example – why this is so. Why is it that this deeply flawed character should dominate American and world politics just now, as he clearly does? For those of us historians who – as I’ve said before – are uncomfortable with the old idea of history’s being led by ‘great’ – or at least remarkable – ‘men’ (and a few women); and who further resile against the idea of idiots taking on this role, our whole intellectual world seems to be falling apart. It makes history appear more accidental than we would like to think; dependent on individuals – what used to be called ‘heroes’ – arising to guide or change events, rather than significant ‘underlying causes’. And if we are democrats we should believe that individuals shouldn’t have this kind of power over events in any case, with institutions like parliaments, congresses, elections, separation of powers, the rule of law and ordinary human decency restraining individual excesses. As of course they are failing to do in Trump’s case; which is one reason for America’s problems currently. (The American Constitution could do with a few more ‘Amendments’ when all this is over.)

But there’s more to it than this: an interpretation that could perhaps reconcile the ‘great man theory’ with more general and impersonal explanations of historical events. It’s easy to see Trump’s policies arising from his personal views, and even his character weaknesses, with narcissism being the ‘weakness’ that is usually cited, followed by ignorance, stupidity, disregard of the truth, and sociopathy. But what lies behind this? Looking back into his early biography, we find a ghastly crooked property-developer father, an absent mother, problematical siblings, education at a military school instead of college, a louche teen-age life (‘grab them by their pussies’), immersion in the least respectable field of capitalism, a well-attested habit of lying, and a long history of bankruptcies, all this protected by his family wealth, and by Russian private or state bankers; leaving him able to ‘win’ in life in spite of being a ‘loser’ morally. These weren’t just personal failings, it seems to me, but societal ones: typical perhaps of a certain class in America at this time – the one described in Ayn Rand’s novels – whose whole ‘Art of the Deal’ was founded on cheating, propaganda, and ‘gamesmanship’. ‘Facts’, for example, were only valuable to Trump insofar as they were useful, and so could be manipulated to suit his aims. He could well genuinely believe his own egregious lies, which will make it easier for him to utter them. ‘Facts’ are simply tools in the great game of life; which Trump has proved himself adept at.

The Chicago Professor John Paul Rollert has written that Trump sees capitalism not as an economic system but ‘as a morality play’, whose rules supersede every other ethical system, and so should govern all aspects of life. Which is what for me links him to the rise of capitalism; one of those ‘underlying causes’ that historians like me prefer to see at the root of things, and the latest stages of which he could be said to exemplify. Brought up with no other moral compass than the ‘laws’ of capitalist accumulation, he perfectly represents the ‘stage’ that American capitalism has reached today. So we don’t need his oddities and idiocies to make the ‘Age of Trump’ just a blip in the course of history. They’re part of the essential fabric; explicable in general as well as in individual and exceptional terms. Trumpism is what you get when you allow capitalism to dominate your society, and to pursue its natural path unhindered.

If you doubt his madness, incidentally, replay the speech he gave to the World Economic Forum in Davos today; essentially a recycled political campaign speech, with all his customary boasting, stupidity and lies. I imagine his audience – of leading business people and politicians – saw through it. But with the power he’s wielding just now, they probably won’t like to say.

Everyone now knows what they maybe didn’t know a week ago, about Greenland, and Trump’s designs on it.

They may however wonder why tiny Denmark presently has (partial) control over this vast but sparsely populated island. The Danish connection goes back to the early 18^th century; but before then to Viking times (many of the Vikings were from what today is called Denmark), when Eric the Red rediscovered the country on a sea voyage westwards from Iceland; and even before him to the Inuits who had come down from the North American continent centuries before. (But don’t entirely trust me on this early stuff. It is after all – resorting to the professional historian’s hoary old excuse – ‘not my period’.) The Inuits still comprise the great majority of Greenland’s 60,000-plus population, with the Danes mainly living on the coasts. In 1979 Greenland became formally part of Denmark, as an autonomous territory, or colony, within the Danish kingdom; and with the latter subsidizing it to the tune of 50% of its national income. Which makes one wonder why Denmark is so keen to keep it.

American interest in the island is supposed to derive from the latter’s perceived strategic value, just across the North Pole from Russia. It was in response to this that Denmark and the USA concluded a treaty between them in 1951, granting America more or less everything she wanted, or could reasonably demand, in respect of military bases and mining rights. That’s what makes it even more difficult to understand why Trump should now want to own the place; let alone to take it by military force, as he has threatened to do.

It may have something to do with the sheer size of Greenland; or at least as it’s depicted on those Mercator-projection world maps. What a boost that would be to his ego: to have added so much territory to the USA; with no doubt Canada (the ‘fifty-first state’) to follow. (That of course is unlikely: Canadians I’ve met generally define themselves in apposition to the USA.) In this regard Trump seems to have a very old-fashioned – even imperial – idea of international relations: which he shares incidentally with Putin; seeing the diplomatic game in terms of defeating and absorbing rivals, with the ‘winners’ being those who landed up with the biggest empires at the end. It also has much to do with the economic gains that conquest can bring, turning that 50% debit into to a credit figure on America’s financial account. That of course is how a property developer would see it. And a property developer is what Trump has always been, from his days as a (largely failed) real estate capitalist, whose values and methods have dominated his outlook ever since. Why should he own what he could have without owning it? – He gave us his answer to this in an interview recently: it’s because renters have less interest in keeping their properties safe. Morality, international rules, and the wishes of non-owning inhabitants have no place in this proprietary view of diplomacy. America holds all the cards, he thinks, and so can do what it wants.

Anti-Trump commentators often attribute this to his personal character: his amorality, greed, narcissism, insecurity, lying, small-mindedness, ‘madness’ even, and all the other traits that make up this deeply unpleasant man. If I were more persuaded of the ‘great man’ – or ‘evil man’ – interpretation of history, I might agree. But the interesting thing about Trump is that his personal characteristics also reflect features of general US history which are just as likely to have brought his country to this pass, as does anything more personal about ‘him’. I’ve touched on this in previous posts: the national traditions of slavery, aggression, racism, ignorance, proto-fascism and cruelty which are as threaded into the otherwise democratic, liberal and idealistic story we used to be told of the ‘Great Experiment’ from its earliest days; and are now personified by the president. And – to be more controversial – all these enduring national characteristics stem au fonde from the underlying American story: which is the untrammelled development of capitalism over the last two centuries, reaching its apogee at the present day.

Of course this affects the wider world too. Trump’s use of tariffs as his main weapon against those countries that don’t support his Greenland policy is an original – but of course typically Trumpian – weapon, and surely one that only a capitalist would think of. (The Art of the Deal is all played with money.) Amour propre also comes into it. Disappointed at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he only recently wrote to the Norwegian Prime Minister to say that he would be imposing 10-25% tariffs on Norway as a punishment. (Also, that he wasn’t interested in peace any more.) This is a dangerous psychopathic bully; leading a nation half of which could be diagnosed the same way.  

Swedes of course are firmly behind the Danes on this. We are only a few kilometres from Denmark after all. And much of southern Sweden, like most of eastern England, used to be ruled from Copenhagen, as Greenland is today. More to the point, however, Sweden is far more wedded to internationalism – the sanctity of treaties, rules-based diplomacy, national democracy, peace – than Trump seems to be. And we’re now in NATO, supposingly representing these values; and so would be fighting against another NATO ally if Trump invaded. Partly for these reasons, we Swedes and demi-Swedes simply wouldn’t trust him with Greenland. Would anybody?

This worries me. What if Trump is proved right? What if his tariffs are successful in bringing manufacturing back to America; if he is instrumental in bringing peace to Ukraine, Gaza and South America; if he builds his luxury condos on the Mediterranean coast; if all the expelled Palestinians are genuinely happier living in Jordan; if the Greenlanders truly welcome American tutelage; if US-imposed regime change really is the best way to unseat despots; if the liberal international order is a piece of wokeish irrelevance, and might, not right, is the only thing that matters in diplomacy: – in other words, if things are simpler than liberal intellectuals presently make out, and so he succeeds in ‘making America great’ again in all kinds of ways? What then for us, his fiercest critics?

We would still of course be stuck with his awful personality: the narcissism, stupidity, malice, small-mindedness, racism, bullying, lying, incipient fascism and all the rest – which make him difficult to like as a man or a leader; but which we might then have to admit could have contributed to some of this success.

Which is why I guess most of us don’t want him to succeed.

That was Donald Rumsfeld’s proud claim at the height of the Iraq war in 2003. Of course it’s untrue. The Americans have always ‘done’ empire, from their very first days as a Republic, and throughout their periods of supposed ‘isolationism’, right up until what I imagine future historians will call ‘The Age of Trump’. (What a boost to his amour propre! To have an age named after him! Far more flattering than even a ‘Tower’. And Trump craves flattery…)

I’ve actually written a book about earlier US imperialism: Empire and Superempire, if you’re interested. But that only goes up to 2006. I wonder whether Yale UP would be open to issuing a new edition, with an additional chapter taking the story up to last month’s invasion of Venezuela, tomorrow’s (query?) attack on Iran, and the next day’s annexation of Greenland? These obviously qualify as ‘imperialism’, by any definition of ‘empire’ you want to use; except perhaps those that require a literal ‘Emperor’ to be at its head. Venezuela was attacked with armed force, involving scores of casualties, the abduction of its President and his wife, the seizure of its oil assets, and with Trump’s stated intention being to ‘rule’ the country afterwards. That’s imperialism, no question. The motives behind it, both overt and hidden, genuine and cynical, also closely mirror Britain’s in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Stopping drugs reminds us of the Chinese ‘Opium Wars’; ‘national strategic interests’ take us to the South African war; reforming corrupt governments was what many of Britain’s incursions into Africa and India were supposed to do; grabbing valuable natural resources was what underlay most of Britain’s African adventures; together with extending ‘free’ markets – her major excuse. If anything this latest phase of American imperialism is more overtly imperialistic than most earlier examples, with Trump’s open ambition being to seize more territory (usually that came accidentally), including the vast snowfields of neighbouring Greenland; and his very old-fashioned belief, apparently, that ‘greatness’ – ‘Make America Great Again’ – can be measured in sheer geographical size.

All this appears to be taking us back to the nineteenth century, when most ‘great’ Powers craved territorial expansion; as the three ‘greatest’ Powers in the world today – China, Russia and the USA – are doing now: China contra Taiwan, Russia seeking Ukraine, and the USA looking greedily at Greenland (for starters). The United Nations of course was supposed to put a stop to this, replacing imperial ambition and the rule of ‘might’ with a ‘new world order’, by which territorial disputes would be peacefully settled by negotiation under an international ‘rule of a law’, which all nations would respect. Trump however clearly has no truck with this internationalist and even ‘woke’ idea; maybe because it doesn’t function in the property market – of ‘deals’ over building land – whose simpler, more Hobbesian ethics clearly dominate his view of foreign relations too. So we are regressing. ‘My man’ JA Hobson, a pioneer of both anti-imperialist and internationalist theory (my first book was about him), must be turning in his grave. 

Has anybody else come across this unusual short story by EM Forster, originally published in a university magazine in 1909? I think it’s Forster’s only foray into science fiction: a dystopian story set in a world where the middle classes live underground, their every want serviced by ‘The Machine’; until it breaks down, and they’re left to their own devices. The heroine (an obese woman) has to crawl to the surface, where she comes across the plebs who have been keeping the machine running for all these years, but no longer. I’ve forgotten what the outcome is.

You can see the contemporary social and political message behind this little fable (Forster was quite left-wing); but I’ve been experiencing it more literally over the past week or so. My internet connection has broken down. I can no longer receive or send emails, and was parted from my blogsite, until I found a devious way around that half an hour ago: hence this post, which I hope gets through. Apple have a ‘genius desk’ in another suburb of Stockholm, but the snow is so thick here that it’s difficult, even dangerous, to drive there. I’ve phoned everywhere else – in Britain as well as Sweden; but with no joy.

Hence my silence on the major event of the last few days, Trump’s invasion of Venezuela; which as the author of a book on historical American ‘imperialism’ I might be expected to have a view on, but haven’t been able to communicate it until now. I need one of the plebs – young men and women, schooled in these mysteries – to come down and help me. Otherwise I feel like the fat woman in the story.

I’ve been trawling through history – or as much of it as I know – to find if there has ever been a madder, more stupid and more corrupt national leader anywhere in the world, than Trump. Any ideas? (Most other fascist leaders have been brighter; and Caligula’s horse probably wasn’t corrupt enough.)

Clearly Americans are going to have to take a long hard look at their beloved Constitution, and at their electoral practises, when this is all over. If it ever is.

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (dramatic version) is a sell-out again this year at the Folkoperan in Stockholm, performed in English and with the text interspersed with English carols. We took Kajsa’s family to it this afternoon – my Christmas present to them. Bodil (5 years old) had to leave when the really scary ghosts came on, but otherwise it went down well. Apparently it was Dickens, plus Price Albert, who more or less invented the English Christmas – the ‘Merry’ version of it, anyway. And it doesn’t need to be overly religious. What it’s celebrating runs deeper and more pagan-ish than that.

This version included that grand old socialist carol, ‘It’s the rich that gets the pleasure, it’s the poor that gets the blame’. I’m sure Dickens would approve. He was a Conservative, of course, but that was before effective political socialism in Britain, and when Conservatives were the ones protesting the Liberal ‘free market’, from a paternalist point of view. I might have been a Tory in Dickens’s time.

He’s at it again: using Sweden as an object lesson in the dangers of foreign immigration. ‘So, Sweden was known as the safest country in Europe, one of the safest countries in the world. Now it’s known as a very unsafe — well, pretty unsafe country. It’s not even believable.’ That was Trump on Monday. (See https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/trump-om-sverige-ett-helt-nytt-land.)

He’s done this before; that is, picked on Sweden out of all the European countries to back up his right-wing views (https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/march/sweden-who-would-believe-this-sweden). He’s right that it’s ‘not even believable’ – because it’s not true. I’ve lived in Sweden, on and off, for the past thirty years, and have always felt safe here. I felt immeasurably less safe when I lived in the USA. All the evidence points to this – relative crime rates, for example. Trump’s is a belief – if he really does believe it – founded on fakery; probably what he sees on Fox News. Sweden is targeted by the likes of Trump because it’s (relatively) liberal and social-democratic; and so according to his prejudices shouldn’t work. London is the same, which he is why he’s continually insulting its Moslem Mayor. His only European exception is Hungary, whose semi-Fascist premier he says he gets on well with. He sees the rest of the continent as ‘weak’, about to embrace Sharia law, and in terminal decline.

Today I’ve been following the Nobel Prize celebrations on TV. It’s a big thing in Sweden, almost as big as the Eurovision Song Contest, and probably in Norway too. (Norway of course awards the Peace Prize.) SVT carried an interview beforehand with an American ex-Nobel laureate, who said that she loved coming to a country where they celebrate Science and Peace; as, she implied, Trump doesn’t. (Does the fact that Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of the far-right and pro-Trump Sweden Democrats, refused to attend, have anything to do with this? Too ‘woke’?) Yesterday there was a documentary on TV about ABBA, where Benny was asked why, with all his riches, he preferred to live in Sweden, which has (or had) an upper tax rate of 85%; to which he replied that he was entirely comfortable with this, in view of the social benefits that higher taxes brought. Whatever you may think of Mama Mia, this is surely another good reason to support them.