Niklas Ekdal: Everything is about American domestic politics

An entire world grows for explanations for Donald Trump's actions. Why lubricate the most dangerous dictator of our time and most seriously threaten their friends – Ukraine, Canada, Denmark?

Is it negotiating tactics, to win benefits where the bully expects weakness? Or is what Trumpism's dark ideologist Steve Bannon says: Genids to own the news flow and restore the US greatness?

After a few weeks in South America, I see something else. While Europeans hyperventilate, Chileans and Peruvians move on the shoulders. This is a United States that they already know too well.

Much is a matter of perspective. Or spheres of interest, as it was called before the wonderful brackets in time when one dared to dream of globalization, international law and peace.

Europe has lived well Under Pax Americana. Hence the shock when we are drawn into the US extended political suicide, this diplomatic mass shooting. That's probably how you have to perceive it: the noise is really about American domestic politics, everyone else is extras.

The night when the wall fell in 1989 I happened to be in Washington. Fifty years of American efforts had saved Berlin from first Nazism, then Stalinism, and thus our entire continent.

Fireworks and champagne? No, everything was still. Not even the collapse of the Soviet Union gave the United States any further victory, more than that individual academics hallucinated about the end of history.

Nevertheless, half humanity fantasizes about becoming Americans. How many people dream of becoming Russians or Chinese?

The Germans themselves ended Cold the war at the Berlin Wall, without weapons other than graffitis. President Bush the elderly looked most worried. His voters thought about the recession.

Another memory image that I have not been able to release in recent days:

We land in Saudi Arabia in 1991 with a field hospital that is Sweden's contribution to the military charging against Iraq. The equipment has been flown down by a Russian transport plan that paralyzed the entire Arlanda.

The first sleepless night of wing alarms I walk around the place. In an empty hangar, two American pilots play billiards. Like heroes in the action movie « Desert Storm », the righteous war, with Tom Waits and Bob Dylan thundering from the mountain blast.

A perfect illustration of the harsh and soft power that political scientist Joseph Nye explained in his book: “Bound to lead. The Changing Nature of American Power.  » The United States depleted its goodwill with bomb mats in Vietnam and coups as in Chile. But now the honor was about to be restored, the superpower embedded in the UN universal values.

US moment of total Military dominance, and at the same time peak soft power. The second Iraq war, on the other hand, lacked both legitimacy and logic. The result was not only chaos in the Middle East. Borderlessness contributed to Putin's revengeism. The lies helped to bed for Trump. Hard power spoiled soft power.

Trump's mass deportations are a promise of rationed life chances

After lifelong marinating, you are weak for American culture, it must be recognized. The United States remains a lovely miracle on the horizon, whether traveling towards sunset along Route 66 or against the heat along the Highway 51.

« Everything in New Orleans is a good idea, » Bob Dylan writes in his memoirs. The illusion is the point.

The biggest dreams have always been dreamed west. No one has captured their resolution in nothing like John Steinbeck with « the grapes of the wrath ». Perhaps the American nervous breakdown has something to do with this. No stock market records and IT underneath can spoil a west coast of fires, car queues and fentanylöd.

Nevertheless, half are fantasizing humanity about becoming Americans. How many people dream of becoming Russians or Chinese?

Millions of migrants cannot be wrong. Switching as a fruit picker or package sorting on Amazon attracts more than the static alternative. The freedom of money, as opposed to the casualty of feudalism.

Trump's mass deportations are a promise of rationed life chances. A hopeless vision, because it kills the attraction that was the US superpower from the beginning. Similarly with the cynical lightness of security policy.

The president can flow the central zone with shit for a while, but counter -forces will be mobilized. Trump's real targets are US media, universities, courts, authorities. Stubborn enough, the war criminal in Moscow then becomes an ally.

What has opened up is not an abyss between the US and the EU, but a power measurement between freedom and Trumputinism. Then the odds are still promising. Trump received 77 million votes in the 2024 election. Nothing against the number of democratically minded people in the world.

The war in Ukraine was already existential for Europe. Suddenly it is also about saving the waste of an American dream.

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