ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: Global leadership as messianism comes with a price tag

In the language of religion, messianism tells of the coming of a saviour to, well, save a particular group of people. In the language of politics, messianism has less of a religious ring, but retains the belief in the arrival (or the presence) of a saviour.

In secular terms we therefore pay attention to proclamations that the “international role” of the US has always, at least since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, been “messianic,” as Henry Kissinger once wrote.

This “messianism” remains at the core of US foreign policy and has been handed down, mutatis mutandis, to successive presidencies over the past 100 years. In this respect the guiding principles of the country’s grand strategy of power, dominance and control, to discipline and punish divergents, has not changed.

The US Quadrennial Defence Review (published by the Pentagon) was explicit, in 1997, that it had to continue ensuring its “allies and friends” do not adopt “more divergent” policies and postures. For a flavour of the discipline and punishment consider that there are tens of countries on Washington’s list of divergents (embargoed countries; prohibited countries; targeted sanctions countries, and enforcement of “UN arms embargoed countries”), a list of “red flags” that proscribe economic relations with countries, and a process of “decertification” of countries that do not collaborate with the US.

The most significant more contemporary adaptation of the grand strategy, at least the most visible change, was Donald Trump’s crudely transactional basis for American international co-operation and multilateral collaboration. While Trump has made it clear over the past eight years or so that he places “America first” — which has also been interpreted as a turn to economic nationalism and protectionism — one reading shows that he has simply put a price on American leadership.

Trump’s cash-for-protection statements to Nato allies was: give us more money and we will lead and participate in multilateral relations. Addressing a campaign rally in South Carolina in February Trump recalled telling a Nato ally: “I’ve been saying, ‘look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect, OK?'"  

This “payment for protection” and overseas wars is not unusual, it has simply been normalised. For instance, on May 11 1992 the US general accounting office reported receiving about $48bn funds from foreign governments and individuals towards Washington’s costs of operations in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. This included $5bn “in-kind” donations from countries around the world, notably Japan. 

Expressing his gratitude for Japanese money, Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, said in his memoir: “Had it not been for the Japanese, Desert Shield would have gone broke in August [1991].” 

This paying for protection (of the liberal international order) was not always through direct cash. For example, the Europeans in Nato were quite smart in simply saying they would not trade with the Canadian government of Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s if there was no military assistance. “No tanks, no trade,” was the refrain from, especially, Germany. Helmut Schmidt, chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, is on record advising that if Canada wanted trade with Europe, “Trudeau [had] to ‘pull up Canada’s military socks’.”

The colloquialism has always had it that “freedom is not free”. Now, with another Trump presidency looming, sentiment is growing in the US and abroad that only he can “save the free world,” as Con Coughlin, defence & foreign affairs editor of the Daily Telegraph in the UK, wrote in December.

While the US has presented itself as indispensable over the past 100 years, and that may even be true, the idea of “the free world” has lost the lustre it was awarded during the Cold War. In 2015 conservative commentator Mark Levin described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the true “leader of the free world”. Also in 2015, Time Magazine referred to German chancellor Angela Merkel as leader of the free world.

Commenting on the differences between the first inauguration of Barack Obama and that of Trump in January 2017, Dan Pfeiffer, a long-standing adviser to Obama, told The New York Times that “after you ... take the oath of office in front of an adoring crowd, you walk into that building [the White House] and you are in charge of the free world”. 

Nonetheless, as the US recedes gradually from being the rule-maker to being a rule-taker in the world (anxiety over the decline of the US is premature), and fear is spread about any next global leadership (without any evidence of actual malice), it is not inconceivable that the price of global messianism may increase in the coming years.

This may be explained by supply-demand considerations; by power-relations; by powers of persuasion through diplomatic channels; by manufacturing consent about impending crises, and by strengthening military presence and power around the world as a means of protection. 

Writing in The New Yorker on April 3 2016, Steve Coll, former dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, warned of a shift in US foreign relations that looks less like a Pax Americana than it does a “transactional protection racket”.

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.