Symbolic but significant
The importance of Charles’s visit to Canada
America’s soft power will probably survive four years of Trump’s presidency, but once trust is lost, it doesn’t easily return. After the invasion of Ukraine, Russia lost much of the soft power it had.
But China is trying to fill any gaps that Trump creates.
According to Xi Jinping, the President of China, the East is surpassing the West.
If Trump thinks he can compete with China while undermining trust among American allies, he is likely to fail.
These are the final lines of the last writing of Joseph Nye, the international relations theorist, published a week after his death. Nye’s words, this harsh and disappointed critic of Trump, resemble a desperate lament.
Like a father who, in his last moments, repeats advice to a disobedient and rebellious child, Nye’s words for Trump are, of course, not heard.
Even if he has heard it, he sees it as a useless legacy, and the reason is clear.
Trump is a symbol and representative, perhaps the leader of a policy and discourse in America that finds no relation to the thoughts and theories of someone like Nye.
Trump is an unconventional politician beyond the Democrat-Republican and even left-right divisions, who doesn’t fit into any of the previous patterns.
His first victory in 2016 not only surprised his Democratic rivals, the media, and political observers, but also forced theorists like Nye to reconsider and reevaluate their ideas.
Perhaps it was Trump’s first four-year experience that prompted Nye to ask in his last book, published at the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency, whether ethics matter.
It seems that Trump’s reckless and unrestrained politics first led Nye to such a question, to the point where, after a lifetime of speaking about the importance of soft power, the necessity of trust, and moral and universal values in international relations, he asks himself, but with a voice as loud as the title of a book, whether ethics matter.
In that book, which examines the records of all presidents after World War II from the perspective of political ethics, he places Trump in the lowest ranks.
Of course, for Trump, such judgments and narratives are not important. It might even be said that for him, it is a kind of credit that critics like Nye consider him to be against or beyond classical standards and values and push his behaviors and words out of the circle of approval.
The point that Nye brings up in his last writing, however, shows that he also assumes Trump’s disregard and even opposition to ideas like soft power as a given and has sufficed with warning about the consequences of this path.
Less than two weeks after the publication of Nye’s last note, clear signs of the collapse of America’s soft power are visible.
The visit of Charles III, the King of Britain, to Canada at the invitation of the new Prime Minister and the opening of its Parliament, which is an unprecedented action for the monarchy and unprecedented for the king, as the former Queen of Britain attended the opening of Canada’s Parliament twice, is one of these signs.
A sign of dissatisfaction from America’s closest ally with Trump’s unilateral speeches, behaviors, and policies, one of whose masterpieces is introducing Canada as the 51st state of America.
Of course, in the political arena, actions like the British King’s trip to open Canada’s Parliament are unlikely to have more than a symbolic message, or as the BBC puts it, a coded message.
Just as Trump’s claim about Canada and even at a lower level about Greenland and Panama is unlikely to have more than a symbolic confrontation and dispute on the international level.
But these symbolic messages and confrontations, from the perspective of analysts like Nye, have long-term impacts and erode part of America’s socio-ethical capital, which has claimed for decades to advance and safeguard fundamental values globally.
The erosion of capital has now reached a point where we not only witness a gap between America, Europe, and identity-seeking countries like France and Germany, but even Britain, as America’s most important ally in the Western world, which even separated from the European Union with Brexit, finds itself in a situation where it is forced to define a kind of boundary and identity in relation to Trump’s America.
Of course, in Trump’s view, the entirety of Europe seems like an old, aristocratic, worn-out, and dysfunctional power that brings nothing to America but costs for security and maintenance.
Trump prefers to engage his time and capital in a showdown with emerging powers like China and India or bringing Russia and even Iran and North Korea to heel, rather than wanting to keep old and identity-based alliances alive.
Alliances that, perhaps not only from a Trumpist perspective but also from other independent and critical viewpoints, are stories that have ended and legacies left from the Cold War era.
When books of stories come to an end, they inevitably close, and when legacies end, familial connections no longer have much meaning and significance.
Trump sees himself as the beginning of this end and, of course, envisions the reconstruction of America’s greatness every day.
It is unclear to what extent his dream aligns with the reality of today’s world.
The American empire has a tough road ahead to remain the world’s leading power.
Just as Britain, as the old empire, was left halfway through this tough journey.
But perhaps from a pragmatic perspective, and apart from theorizing like Nye’s, it is necessary for Trump and his like-minded people to step back a bit and revisit the decline of Britain.
A decline that was at least partly due to the excesses, voluntarism, and unilateralism after the two world wars, especially World War I, which eroded Britain’s capital among other countries in the world so much that in the blink of an eye, there was no longer much trace of the empire.
The same empire where the sun never set and today can at most undertake a symbolic trip to assert its existence.
Trump, the businessman, surely knows that warehouses with tons of goods have been destroyed because mice were not taken seriously.
The warehouse and capital of international trust and credibility are the same. Suddenly, the merchant opens his eyes and finds himself bankrupt.