We really should care about the potential return of Donald Trump.
Yesterday, Fulton County jail refused to cut the former president slack and lined him up for a mugshot – just like all the others facing criminal charges in this Georgia centre.
He had surrendered on charges that heillegally schemed to overturn the 2020 presidential election in that state.
The image was up on CNN for most of yesterday afternoon (NZT), while analysts debated Trump’s prospects: what impact would his arrest on racketeering and conspiracy charges have on the ‘24 presidential election? And more.
All this in the wake of the first Republican candidate debate the prior day, where a cacophony of Trump supporters bellowed support for him, irrespective of the shame he has brought on American democracy.
Like him or loathe him – and New Zealanders tend to the latter - Trump has been a major disruptor.
He threatens to be so again if he does break out of the shackles of the US legal system, turns Houdini next year and is re-elected United States president.
He’s been a disruptor to the US political process, where as a rank outsider he won the Republican nomination and presidency in 2016 and then turned his fire on that same process when he refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s favour.
But also through disrupting the “rules of the game” (the so-called international order), which Trump achieved through a major revolution: reindustrialising the United States via his “Make America Great Again” campaign, challenging international norms – the appellate structure for the World Trade Organisation, the United Nations, World Health Organisation and more, and waging economic war on China.
As Politico noted in 2021, many Americans will rememberDonald Trump’s presidency as a four-year-long storm of tweets, rallies and on-air rants that ended in a mob riot and a historic second impeachment. But there was more to the Trump presidency than attention-hogging political drama and conflict; often unnoticed, Trump and his administration actually did succeed in changing some of the ways in which Washington works.
Politico instanced how he refocused strategy on great power competition, observing that the Trump administration had made one of the most decisive defence policy shifts of the last generation, reorienting the American military to confront the rising and increasingly aggressive powers of Russia and China.
Donald Trump's mugshot, taken after he surrendered to Georgia police. Photo / Fulton County Sheriff's Office
That strategy rewired the US Defense Department’s vast bureaucracy away from a focus on fighting insurgents and terrorists in the Middle East, towards a long-term strategic competition with China and Russia. As a result, the military is changing how it trains personnel, which technologies it buys, and the geographical areas of the world where it prioritises its forces, said Politico.
Those strategic shifts continue to influence policy today, where the Biden administration has focused on security as the key driver for future policy.
It informs why Biden’s advisers have New Zealand in their sights when it comes to promoting this country’s inclusion in Aukus II – the proposed technological side of the new submarine alliance the US has formed with Australia and the UK.
What is remarkable is that, if anything, Biden has taken much of the Trump economic agenda further – far further - and bedded it in.
As Paul Kelly – a columnist and former editor-in-chief of The Australian - noted recently, “America is now remaking the world, yet again. Australia is on notice. We need to be super alert.”
As does New Zealand.
I’m not sure that New Zealand businesspeople pay sufficient attention to the global currents. Geopolitics is now a regular board agenda item for many New Zealand companies.
But we still place considerable confidence in the skills we have mastered through competing in open global markets. As “industrialisation” – aka the return of preferences, subsidies and barriers against outside competition (unless with so-called friendlies) - becomes the new norm, how will our companies respond?
There is the re-emergence of trading blocs. And the so-called “West” versus the “Global South” is a major shapeshifting episode.
Yesterday, the Brics group of large emerging economies – China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa - announced that from the beginning of next year, Saudi Arabia, Eygpt, Argentina, UAE, Ethiopia and Iran will join their alliance.
It is a clear move to reshape the global world order, which was itself shaped by the US in the post-World War II period.
It is too early to tell how successful the Brics members will ultimately be. Some are autocracies. Others democracies.
But it is a major new line in the sand.
As New Zealand’s top trade negotiator, Vangelis Vitalis, has repeatedly observed, the “golden weather is over”.
If Trump returns, expect that weather to be even more stormy.
