By RAFAEL R. IORIS*
All pretensions of promoting the supposed American democratic logic around the world have been eliminated.
Nationalism depends on mythologies to exist. In the case of the United States, its founding myth has always been that of its exceptionalism. It is said to be a nation founded on the dream of seeking freedom and, later, democracy; a country so exceptional that, in order to preserve itself, its leaders are forced to promote its model around the world.
And so, although one of the fundamental theses of American foreign policy is George Washington's farewell speech in which he urges his followers to stay away from the world's problems, over the years, the US would gradually but consistently assume an expansionist and interventionist project around the world.
If in its initial expansion throughout the American continent, the USA would make use of the missionary logic of Manifest Destiny, in general, unlike the European neocolonial powers of the late 19th century, where cultural (or civilizing, in the language of the time) superiority was presumed, imperialism Yankee beyond North America, it presented a more decentralized logic and a more mercantile bias.
It is clear that in both cases, eugenic theses about white racial superiority were also fundamental. The expansion of the United States, first in the Caribbean and Central America, then in the rest of the hemisphere, and then throughout the globe, tended, however, to occur more through economic and religious entrepreneurs (pastors and missionaries), whose presence would later require the powerful North American state to come to its defense, more or less explicitly.
It would thus be that, as the country consolidated itself as a great industrial power, the self-proclaimed “land of the free” would come to establish informal imperial arrangements for itself, whether in the form of protectorates or in the customs control of Dollar Diplomacy throughout almost the entire Caribbean and Central America in the first decades of the 20th century. Of course, at times the direct involvement of state coordination would be more evident, as would be the case of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Panama.
But in general, the focus was on supporting the international activities of their companies, something that often required the landing of Marines, but without the stars and stripes flag (Star spangled banner) would come to replace local national symbols once and for all.
By assuming the position of the greatest global military and economic power in the immediate post-World War II period, US imperialism – which had been embarrassed until then and had always camouflaged itself behind the thesis that, unlike European imperialism, foreign interventions were always temporary and well-intentioned – would develop new, more sophisticated and complex ways of exercising its global hegemony. Going beyond what it had previously proposed, but not implemented, with the League of Nations, the US would establish a new way of coordinating its actions around the world through arrangements that were supposedly universal and egalitarian – although always unequal and compromised by the dynamics of the Cold War – that would guarantee (or at least intended to guarantee) that the world’s plans, which were therefore relevant to everyone, required the participation (albeit not equal) of all national states thus constituted.
Even though it was an instrument of North American interests, especially of the economic logic of its liberal capitalism, what would come to be known as the UN System represented something unique, built on the ruins of the greatest conflict of all time, by allowing the notion of national representation with formally isonomic bases to expand to all corners of the planet.
It would thus be that, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, actors from what is now called the Global South were able to come together in a coordinated manner in order to promote theses not previously envisioned by their creators, such as, for example, cooperation for development, technology transfer, and even the search for the promotion of a new global economic order.
And even though such demands never came to fruition, the mere fact that they were even possible to include on the agenda represented something new and potentially transformative. And that is exactly what Donald Trump will now structurally prevent, violently if necessary.
In concrete terms, by eliminating resources for promoting diplomatic actions around the world, promising to recover old or acquire new colonial possessions, breaking agreements and treaties and, especially, promising to solve problems through force and coercion of the strongest, Donald Trump not only turns the way North American hegemony has operated over the last 80 years on its head, but also reestablishes imperial diplomatic standards from the XNUMXth century, where, in good Brazilian Portuguese, “he who can, commands and he who has sense obeys.”
This eliminates all pretensions of promoting the supposed American democratic logic around the world, and reveals the most explicit features of the true Yankee imperial face.
This development is doubly tragic because it reduces the spaces for negotiation and multilateral dialogue at a time when these are more necessary than ever in order to try to deal with the urgency of the climate crisis, as well as growing inequality and political polarization.
That key states, such as Brazil, manage to coordinate efforts with democratic peers in the South in order to contain the spread of the aggressive and arrogant logic expressed by North American neo-fascism, which completely denies the thesis of its civilizing and diplomatic exceptionalism.
*Rafael R. Ioris is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Denver (USA).
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