The world braces itself for the return of Donald Trump to the White House. That is how governments, most of them anyway, observe the resurgence of a politician who should have walked away into the twilight when he lost the presidency to Joe Biden four years ago. Well, nothing – not the criminal charges against him, not the hush money paid to a woman accusing him of sexual advances, not the boxes of classified presidential documents at his Florida home – has prevented him from returning to power.
And that is where the worries come in. If Trump 1.0 was a study in chaos, Trump 2.0 looks about to be a sordid exercise in retribution. Having never been a politician in the conventional sense of the meaning, Trump has treated both his country and the world beyond it as a business enterprise. Business can be ruthless, as one is only too aware. Politicians have scruples, but businessmen like Trump have always given short shrift to scruples. That is where the nightmare, spread out over the next four years, begins to take shape.
A good, perhaps necessary question here relates to Trump’s views of the Commonwealth. No, not the entirety of the organisation, not every country which today is part of the body. But observe Canada, which in recent weeks has been on the president-elect’s radar. His threat of clamping a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada has left politicians and indeed everyone else in Ottawa not merely worried but indignant as well. It was enough to have Justin Trudeau, who will soon be a former prime minister owing to reasons on the domestic front, take what one could safely call the first available flight to Florida and travel down to Mar-a-Lago to meet the once and future President of the United States.
Trudeau, who like his father Pierre Trudeau has been an important cog in the Commonwealth wheel, was not pleased when Trump ventured the idea, not in humour as it turns out, that Canada should be the 51st state of the USA. The Canadian leader had his trademark smile playing on his youthful face, but that he did not warm to Trump’s outlandish idea was palpable. And he certainly did not relish the thought, one which again was a result of Trump’s shooting off his mouth, indeed his dark humour, that he should climb down quite a few steps from his prime ministerial perch to be governor of Canada.
There is little to suggest that Trump will permit Canada to move out of his lens in the coming months. Whoever replaces Trudeau in Ottawa will have a tough job fending off Trump’s tariff-related and other assaults on Canada. Watch out for the chaos that looks about to descend on diplomacy between Washington and Ottawa. Things could get ugly. And that is not all. Donald Trump may have his own notions about NATO, but there is no indication that he has ever been briefed about the Commonwealth. Well, that is okay. But when it is Commonwealth countries which just might draw his attention, good or bad, everyone must watch out.
Consider India, where prime minister Narendra Modi has always considered himself as a good friend of Trump. At least, that was the way things worked between the two men in Trump’s earlier stint in presidential office. Whether the old link is revived or made stronger depends on how the incoming US leader plans to deal with Delhi. In these past four years, India’s priorities as well as perspectives have changed a good deal. How will Trump look at the slide in relations between India and Canada over Delhi’s charges that Ottawa has been home to Khalistani separatist elements waging a propaganda war against Modi’s government?
Given his already pronounced views on Canada, Trump just might warn the powerful men and women in Ottawa to lay off India. Additionally, a revived Trump-Modi link will be a boon for the incoming president in his attempts to keep Xi Jinping’s China in check. The Indians, whose wariness of China dates back to the Delhi-Beijing border war in 1962, will be happy to help.
Move on to that other Commonwealth member-state in South Asia. We speak of Pakistan. Much has been going wrong with politics in Pakistan, whose rather powerless civilian government and an extremely powerful military will be waiting and watching from day one of the renewed Trump presidency. It may well be that Trump will adopt a hard line with the Pakistani establishment over the continued detention of Imran Khan, who has been in prison on questionable charges brought against him at the behest of the army.
Khan, who has been incarcerated for close to a year and a half, obviously was not on good terms with the Biden administration and has always believed that it was Trump’s successor and his people who helped in his overthrow. Given that Trump is ready to throw everything to do with Biden out the window, those who hold authority in Islamabad will be looking nervously behind their shoulders to see how Trump 2.0 will be looking at them on the Imran Khan question.
And, yes, Muhammad Yunus’ interim government in Bangladesh will have reasons for worry as well. Yunus’ much publicised friendship with the Clintons, in fact with the Democrats, has never sat well with Trump. Add to that Trump’s expression of concern, even before he was re-elected to the presidency in November last year, over the persecution of the Hindu religious minority in Bangladesh.
There were people around Yunus who clearly hoped for a Kamala Harris victory at the presidential election. Trump’s triumph put paid to that hope. With a good number of individuals of American-Indian background likely coming into the new Trump administration, there are the pronounced fears that both in relation to the persecution of its Hindu minority and its fraught diplomatic ties with India, Bangladesh will expect little of friendship or warmth from the incoming Republican administration in Washington for the non-elected regime now running the show in Dhaka.
Finally, Donald Trump’s ties with Britain’s Keir Starmer will be a pretty big question mark, at least in the initial stages. The charge by the Trump campaign team before the US election that Labour Party individuals had been campaigning for Kamala Harris in the US is yet a sore point in Mar-a-Lago. And then there is the squall which Elon Musk raised with his public criticism of the British prime minister and one of the Labour ministers. Starmer will not have with Trump the camaraderie which some of his predecessors enjoyed with earlier occupants of the White House. And who knows? With Trump eyeing an acquisition of Greenland, London will be compelled to come out in defence of Denmark on the issue. Much a similar circumstance could arise if Trump leans too hard on Canada over tariffs and other issues.
The next four Trump years will test the world beyond America’s frontiers. For the Commonwealth, its resilience will be tested to the utmost should Donald Trump be tempted to wade into its front yard and provoke a few unwarranted crises within the organisation or among its member-states.
[This article has been written for the Round Table website. Opinions do not reflect the position of the editorial board.]
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