The power of Trump

Following the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, US President Donald Trump has a stronger hand ahead of his summit with China’s President Xi Jinping in April. He has found a relatively effortless way to resolve the Venezuela issue, which has been a source of global concern for over a decade.

Now he has a chokehold on perhaps $10-20 bn in Chinese credit to Venezuela. He has new leverage over global oil prices and new military confidence projections in Asia (seehere). These could be mighty bargaining chips for haggling with China, which holds a quasi-monopoly on rare-earth elements.

Protests in Iran are growing in number and intensity. While the Ayatollah’s regime may resist the pressure, it is wobbling, and the resistance is gaining traction. After Venezuela and last year’s bombing of the nuclear sites, Tehran can’t rule out another US surgical intervention to cripple the government and possibly cut a deal with a moderate wing willing to talk business, as the rest of the Caracas government is doing now. Iran is even more strategically important to China, given its oil and the Belt and Road Initiative.

In 1999, in a special English-language issue of the Chinese Journal ofStrategy and Management,Professor Zhang Xiaodong proposed a trade in which the Chinese would cease support for Iran’s Ayatollahs and the US in exchange would abandon support for Taiwan’s independence. Circumstances have changed, and such a trade is no longer feasible. Yet that history underscores the deep connection between Beijing and Tehran.

If China should lose Iran after Venezuela, it would be even more isolated and have a weaker hand with America. If Beijing stepped in to support Tehran now, it could get embroiled in a mess perhaps bigger than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Flipping?

However, things could change again. In the run-up to the summit, the air is thick with growing threats of a US takeover of Greenland, part of the kingdom of Denmark and a member of NATO. If the USA were to move unilaterally on Greenland, its alliances could unravel rapidly. Such a move could prove that the US alliance is no guarantee of American protection against other countries and is not even an assurance against unpredictable US aggression.

Recent US rhetoric seems to reflect a profound misunderstanding of America’s power and force and of the grave consequences for America and the global order.

In the past 80 years, the United States’ strength has been its use of comparatively limited force to achieve its goals. The pure venting of force saps strength; it weakens you almost as much as your adversary. No one emerges from a fight unscathed. People may be exalted, but they are always tired, often bruised and wounded, hurt inside more than outside. There is beauty, but it’s the beauty of a tragedy, as the foundational Western work on war, the Iliad, tells us. War is not a laugh; it’s suffering, and survival or glorious death are the only real rewards one gets.

The power of the Mafia, or of their role model, the old feudal gentry in southern Italy, was not to beat up everybody but to whisper in a soft voice, alluding, leaving the mighty power hanging in the room. Hollywood captured it. InThe Godfather,Marlon Brando never yells a threat.

Macht

The beauty of the Venezuelan action was its surgical, minimal nature, thereby enhancing US might.

Perhaps the best description of power is found inMacht(Power), a book published 51 years ago at the height of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, by Niklas Luhmann.

It is a foundational work in which he defines power not as an attribute of persons or countries, but as a communicative medium within or between political systems, functioning to reduce uncertainty and enable decision-making. A crucial element is that the more you use power, the less you have; the less you use it, the more you have. Therefore, if you want to keep having power, you need to use it sparingly.

It is essentially a way to “constrain the selection space” of others, integrating into a broader societal framework as self-referential. It emerged during a period when the USA and the USSR were posturing against each other, and it provided a comprehensive framework for understanding the reciprocal mechanism. In times of a New Cold War, it could be a useful instrument.

If Trump messes up the alliance and Greenland, all he has achieved in Venezuela and what could happen in Iran could come to nothing. Here are lessons for both China and the US forces, but it’s a communication; it exhausts as it is used.

The mantra should be: find an agreeable solution for Greenland that consolidates alliances rather than breaking them.

This article, originally published by the Appian Institute, is republished with permission.