The pre-Trump world was no haven of peace and stability
The era of ‘humanitarian’ interventionism wrought chaos and misery. Good riddance.

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Some of President Donald Trump’s typically bombastic foreign-policy pronouncements have sounded a little, well, imperialist. He has breezily suggested turning Canada into America’s 51st state, talked up taking the Panama Canal back under US control and spoken frequently of buying Greenland from Denmark, even going so far as to refuse to rule out military action if his monetary advances are refused.
As always with Trump, it’s unwise to take every statement literally. No doubt he is having a little fun at Canada’s expense with some of his ‘threats’ – he’s even been calling Canada’s outgoing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, ‘governor’. Still, behind the trolling and sabre-rattling there is invariably a serious objective. We know that the new administration wants to force Canada (and Mexico) to crack down on illegal immigration and drug smuggling into the US. His rhetorical aggression is designed to help force Canada to do as he wants.
The same applies to Trump’s threats to take back the Panama Canal, which was built by the US at the start of the 20th century before then president Jimmy Carter signed it away to Panama in 1977. Trump’s aggressive overtures are likely an attempt to reduce the tolls being charged to US ships for using the canal.
Trump seems much more serious about gaining greater control over Greenland. This vast territory bridging the Arctic and Atlantic oceans is becoming increasingly strategically important as sea ice melts and new trade routes open up. Indeed, Trump showed an interest in acquiring Greenland during his first term as president in 2019. This time, he appears to be even more set on the idea.
Trump’s designs on Greenland are particularly concerning. His apparent willingness to forcibly take Greenland off NATO ally Denmark, which still has a large degree of control over what has been a semi-autonomous territory since 2009, is disruptive enough. But Team Trump’s near colonial disregard for the wishes of the 57,000 Greenlanders who actually live on and govern the territory reeks of anti-democratic disdain.
So Trump’s foreign-policy postures are certainly worth interrogating and criticising. But that’s not what liberal-elite pundits and politicos have been doing. They’ve been catastrophising and demonising. They’ve been warning of global chaos. They’ve been conjuring Trump up as the Destroyer of Worlds.
Admittedly, the tone is more resigned than it was when Trump first assumed the presidency in 2016. Back then, establishment commentators were telling us that unless he was stopped, Trump would take us to the ‘brink of nuclear war’. Nevertheless, any semblance of analysis has once again given way to doom-laden hyperbole.
The Economist claims, that under Trump, the US will abandon any commitment ‘to settled borders and universal values’, because apparently he is only interested in ‘amassing and exploiting power’. A leading human-rights NGO warns of an approaching ‘geopolitical nightmare’. Two academics writing in the Independent assert that Trump poses a ‘global risk’, and will ‘advance a selfish, short-sighted foreign policy… [that] is divisive and profoundly ill-suited to our interconnected world’. The Atlantic warns simply: ‘Brace for foreign-policy chaos’. On and on it goes. Trump 2.0, goes the chorus, will tear the world asunder.
There is an absurd assumption underpinning much of this – namely, that before the Trump presidencies, the foreign policy of the US and its allies was a stablising, pacifying force in the world. That the pre-Trump era was one of the US defending ‘settled borders’ and making the world, in the words of The Economist, ‘more stable and benign by [spreading] democracy’. This is delusional, to put it mildly. Trump’s critics are mourning the loss of a world that didn’t exist. Lamenting the passing of a ‘rules-based’ or ‘liberal-international’ order that was only ever honoured in the breach.
In truth, the post-Cold War era was neither stable nor ordered. Rather it was dominated by America’s newfound position as the world’s sole superpower – a position it and its allies used to pursue the self-righteous creed of ‘liberal’ or ‘humanitarian’ interventionism. Developed in the 1990s during NATO’s involvement in the conflicts then tearing Yugoslavia apart, this approach to foreign policy was given its most striking formulation in Tony Blair’s speech to the Chicago Economic Club in 1999. There he outlined ‘the circumstances in which [Western powers] should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’.
It was an approach that appeared ‘ethical’. It gave Western leaders, who, by then, were disorientated by the end of the Cold War, a new sense of mission and purpose. But the real-world consequences were barbaric. ‘Settled borders’ were arbitrarily violated, and whole countries were reduced to stages on which Western leaders could perform and demonstrate their virtue to domestic audiences.
Those now angsty over a possible foreign-policy turn under Trump seem to have blanked out the past three decades. They certainly appear to have forgotten the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, launched initially on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and then justified in terms of ‘regime change’ and ‘democracy promotion’. Over the course of eight long years, Western intervention plunged Iraq into civil war, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, destabilised the entire Middle East and unleashed jihadist insurgencies that persist to this day.
They also appear to have forgotten then US president Barack Obama’s fateful decision to impose a no-fly zone over Libya in 2011. Cheered on by Western liberals at the time as a righteous blow against Libya’s tin-pot dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, it led to Gaddafi’s fall and the collapse of the Libyan state. It left a lawless, ungoverned space in which a violent, largely Salafist militancy flourished, alongside gun-running, drug-trafficking and people smuggling. The collapse of Libya at the hands of a do-gooding America would then fuel disorder and war among Libya’s southern neighbours, from southern Mauritania on the Atlantic coast to Sudan in the east.
Bookending the interventions in Iraq, Libya and others, was the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Lasting two decades, it cost the lives of over 100,000 Afghans and nearly 3,500 coalition troops. After the US’s disastrous withdrawal in 2021, Kabul quickly fell back under the control of the Taliban, the very Islamist movement the West once claimed it was freeing the Afghans from.
This was the reality of US foreign policy before Trump. Not the calm global governance and rules-based international order of anti-Trump myth. But a series of disastrous neocolonial attempts to right failed states, to nation-build in faraway lands and to impose democracy via the barrel of a gun. Entire countries were ruined, regions plunged into turmoil and peoples displaced, fuelling a migrant crisis the disastrous consequences of which are still playing out today. All so as to burnish the self-image of Western political elites and their media cheerleaders.
There is already plenty to oppose about America’s foreign policy under Trump. But the fact that it marks a shift from the preening, narcissistic barbarism of the era of humanitarian intervention is not one of them. From Afghanistan to Libya, it was an unmitigated disaster. We still live with its devastating legacy today.
Tim Black is a spiked columnist.
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