04 Jan Opinion – Trump and the Tower of Babel
By,
Pelegrín Castillo Semán, contributor
The Trump administration, responding to the powerful mandate it received from the majority of the American people, is reviewing and dismantling the international order of globalization that was conceived and promoted by the U.S. and Western establishment after the fall of the USSR and the socialist bloc.
That globalist order, a higher stage of imperialism, revolved around a utopian vision of supply chains and markets perfectly integrated on a planetary scale; multilateralism, with its systems of rules shaped by soft power; the multiculturalism of a world without borders, in permanent flux; and ominous transhumanism, supported by the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. All of this unfolded under U.S. hegemony, within a complex and high-risk relationship with China as the world’s great factory, which British historian Niall Ferguson would call Chimerica.
Global elites, especially Western ones, were in fact building their modern Tower of Babel. Soon, a series of powerful events demonstrated to them that globalism, the latest ideological virus, was doomed to failure; that this imposing tower would ultimately collapse in a spectacular fashion; and that nations, cultures, religions, and traditional family and social structures would resist and frustrate projects aimed at erasing them, diluting them, dissolving them, or reconstructing them at will.
The patriotic Tea Party movement prepared the cultural environment in the United States in which a disruptive formula of great-power nationalism could take root, as powerful as that embodied by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, a trend that was reinforced after his return to power, following the sophisticated and effective coup that was carried out against him by the deep state and globalists between late 2019 and early 2020.
It is evident that the United States is in a phase of retrenchment and reconsolidation in the Americas, in an orderly, negotiated, and gradual manner, so as not to repeat the experience of its abrupt withdrawal from the world after World War I and the abandonment of the League of Nations. Instead, with the spirit of Yalta, it is promoting the emergence of a new international order based on a balance of power and coordination among first-division great powers, in alliance with regional powers.
The great challenge, as Henry Kissinger explained in World Order, will be to adjust the interests and visions of the dominant superpowers at the margins of the regions and to “prevent wars from arising between regions.”
The National Security Council policy document and the extensive press conference by Secretary of State Marco Rubio are very clear and eloquent in describing these trends. In Latin America, leadership must understand the importance of this enormous geopolitical shift and take advantage of it properly, contributing to the resurgence of a period of Pan-American relations grounded in stronger foundations of security, freedom, prosperity, and shared democracy.
“Our America and the America that is not ours,” in Martí’s words, need each other as never before and, if they were to set aside ideological prejudices and historical resentments, could give rise to the space of civilization with the greatest potential in the entire world, capable of establishing its balance.
Of course, this will require a new Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), which includes confronting the threat posed by the empire of transnational organized crime in its various expressions, so empowered within the Global Criminal Economy (Napoleoni), as well as the powerful complement of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA 2.0), which takes into account major asymmetries, especially with the Greater Caribbean region, which is at once the “soft underbelly” of the United States, that is, its most vulnerable and easily penetrated zone.
In the same vein, what began with the Tobar Doctrine in 1907 and would later be concretized in the Lima Democratic Charter will only remain valid to a large extent if the United States is capable of building relations with nations and their peoples, and not with their modern enclaves, their backward oligarchies, or their complacent sectors. The nations of Latin America and their ruling classes, in turn, face the great challenge of overcoming their greatest historical test: integrating inwardly, through genuine national projects that rest on bodies of citizens and not on messianic leaderships or redemptive caudillos.
The latter is key to resolving at its root the problem of mass migrations, driven from their countries of origin by the numerous collapses of states. The National Security Consensus policy document, released by the White House, seems to be aware of these challenges, as it calls on the nations of the continent and the world to defend their inalienable rights and legitimate vital interests. In the Americas, there is a major advantage: a more homogeneous cultural base than anywhere else in the world.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Miami Strategic Intelligence Institute (MSI²).