Winston Churchill famously said, “Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” In that vein, Donald Trump is aerogel, wrapped in contradictions, packaged in business deals. In 2019, aerogel beat glass to hold the Guinness World Records as the world’s most transparent material. It is solid, but mostly air, an obvious contradiction.
It is almost disarming how transparent Trump is about his prejudices, peeves, methods and goals. He publicly threatens to capture Denmark’s Greenland. He plans to turn war-shattered Gaza into a luxury Mediterranean Riviera. He forces Ukraine into signing a critical minerals mining deal. He covets the Nobel Prize. Only he can bring peace to warring nations, only he can talk to Azerbaijan’s leader. In the Trumpian world, “yes we can” becomes “only I can”. All this we know because Trump says so.
The US National Security Strategy, NSS, a “Trump Doctrine” enshrining “America First”, is a transparent testament to his contradictions, intentions and obsessions with business deals. Land, tariffs, war, peace, projection of US power are all opportunities for real estate, infrastructure and media projects. Ethics specialists cry “conflicts of interest”. Trump is unfazed.
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The doctrine includes robust economic measures and crackdowns against migration and drug smuggling. The NSS rejects America’s “ill-fated global domination” but then contradicts itself, asserting the imperative for “economic, financial, technological, energy and military dominance”. The US will enforce “American preeminence in the western hemisphere”. The hegemon will convert the hemisphere into an “attractive market for American commerce and investment”, eject foreign competitors, and, if necessary, militarily access “strategically important locations”.
It is baffling how Trump fails to see his contradictions when they are projected globally, 24x7. He accepts FIFA’s made-up peace prize when his attempts to achieve peace in Ukraine flops and when he unilaterally turns the Venezuelan coast into a battle-zone. Trump claims the US is attacking the tiny, Venezuelan “narco” speedboats in “self-defence”. The US armada, gathered off Venezuela’s coast ready to attack, includes the world’s biggest warship, the USS Gerald Ford, helicopter and aircraft carriers, attack vessels, fighter jets, drones, spy planes, nuclear submarines, guided-missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships capable of landing thousands of troops. But Trump releases narco-king and ex-president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, from a 45-year US prison sentence. Venezuela is not even a drug conduit, experts say. Trump plots regime change in Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. His doctrine flexes power over law, duress over diplomacy, hyperbole over dispassionate analysis.
Trump never loses an opportunity to praise himself or insult Joe Biden and Europe. In the NSS, Trump boasts “no administration in history has achieved so dramatic a turnaround in so short a time”. Turnaround to some, U-turn to others. The NSS rebukes Biden’s “deadly failures” and Europe’s impending “civilisational erasure because of uncontrolled migration”. The NSS disparages Europe’s “economic decline”, “regulatory suffocation”, “loss of national identities”, “lack of confidence”, “censorship” and “suppression of political opposition”.
In a shocking assertion of internal interference, the NSS threatens the US will “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” (support far-right groups). The doctrine deepens European insecurity. Denmark, loyal US ally and NATO member, now publicly identifies the US as a “potential security threat”.
Coercion, conflicts of interest and contradictions underpin the Trump doctrine. It disregards morality, geopolitics, psychology, history. Says economist Jeffrey Sachs, “A great power that frightens its allies, coerces its neighbours, and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.”
It happened to Athens 2,500 years ago. More recently, it happened to the Soviet Union.
Pratap is an author and journalist.