Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
In the past decade, the U.S.-led geopolitics and trade/tech wars have undermined international cooperation setting the stage for stagnation in global economic prospects. Trump 2.0 will escalate the status quo, weaponizing executive orders in the name of “national security.”
Over half a decade ago, I first warned about these trends, which the international community has subsequently witnessed, including major wars and genocidal atrocities, effectively condoned by democratic institutions. The next half a decade will prove worse.
Here are segments of the original 2018/19 essay.
Executive power and the ‘state of exception’
What looms behind the Trump White House in the early 21st century is a tradition of conservative thought relying on the unitary executive theory in American constitutional law. It deems that the President possesses the power to control the entire executive branch. Its precursors go back to the darkest chapters of the 20th century.
According to the controversial German jurist Carl Schmitt, a onetime supporter of the Nazi Reich, legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign, who can meet the needs of “exceptional times” and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
In the post-Weimar Germany, such ideas contributed to the eclipse of liberal democracy. Following September 11, 2001, similar arguments renewed neoconservative interest in Schmitt and the “state of exception.” In this view, the US response to 9/11 was not unusual because liberal wars are exceptional. Rather, it was a manifestation of ever more violent types of war within the very attempt to fight wars in order to end “war.” Similarly, it is politically expedient to legitimize a trade war and other political battles in the name of “national security,” which allows the sovereign to redefine a new order on the basis of a state of exception.
In this way, a new national security strategy redefines “friends” as ”enemies” and “us” as “victims” who are thus justified to seek justice from our “adversaries” – “them.”
But how could the White House establish such a trade war as a sovereign, when such wars were initially not supported by many Trump constituencies and were opposed by much of the Congress and most Americans?
The lure of Imperial Presidency
Historically, the idea of “Imperial Presidency” in America is hardly new, as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. demonstrated in the Nixon era: “The weight of messianic globalism was indeed proving too much for the American Constitution… In fact, the policy of indiscriminate global intervention, far from strengthening American security, seemed rather to weaken it by involving the United States in remote, costly and mysterious wars.”
The first administration to make explicit reference to the “Unitary Executive” was the Reagan administration. Typically, the practice has evolved since the 1970s, when President Nixon decoupled US dollar from the Bretton Woods gold standard and trade deficits began to rise.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 allowed the George W. Bush administration to make the unitary executive theory a common feature of signing statements, particularly in the execution of national-security decisions, which divided the Capitol Hill and were opposed by most Americans.
In the case of Trump, the need for inflated unitary executive power arose with the Mueller investigation. The latter restricted the president’s strategic maneuverability to operate with the Republican Congress in 2017-18 but permitted actions that required only executive power, typically in tax and trade policy.
Ostensibly moderate administrations, including President Obama’s, have not been an exception to the rule, as evidenced by his multiple decisions to use force without congressional approval. During Obama’s first term in office alone, the US expanded its military presence in Afghanistan and increased drone missile strikes across Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The administration also deployed the military to combat piracy in the Indian Ocean, engaged in a sustained bombing operation in Libya, and deployed US Special Forces in Central Africa.
Big Money and peacetime emergency powers
The uses of executive power are likely to go far beyond the current rivalry for artificial intelligence (AI), as evidenced by President Trump’s efforts to re-define, re-negotiate and reject major US trade deals on the basis of national security. By the same token, foreign investment reviews will be heavily overshadowed by national security considerations.
As postwar multilateralism has been replaced with unilateralism, the White House sees itself in international strategic competition with other great powers, particularly Russia and China, yet old allies – including Europe and Japan – are no longer excluded.
In the course of the past half a century and a series of asset bubbles, a slate of new foreign interventions, the Iraq War debacle and the $22 trillion US sovereign debt, Imperial Presidency has become a target of broader criticism (today, following the proxy wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, that debt exceeds $36.2 trillion).
But why has Imperial Presidency proved so hard to challenge?
The critical factor has been campaign finance and the increasing role of “big money” in American politics. In particular, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down a federal prohibition on independent corporate campaign expenditures, paved the way for corporate power to override democratic power in the White House. At the same time, the ultra-rich have begun to play more active part in politics, with serious consequences for American democracy, as many American political scientists have warned.
In the new status quo, neither the 20th century Third Reich nor the 21st century American Empire is needed for majestic policy mistakes. Imperial Presidency will do – even the sovereign’s executive power may suffice.
These policy plunders have potential to derail even global economic prospects.
