When Trump Tells the Truth

This article by John Molloy first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.

A QUOTE from an international speech got much traction last week – “It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must…faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. Well, it won’t.”

Who was expressing this recognition of brute force and suggesting the need to oppose it? None other than Mark Carney, current Prime Minister of Canada, who was the Governor of the Bank of England for seven years (2013-2020).

His speech at the World Economic Forum’s Davos annual meeting, seen as a rebuttal of Trump’s specific threat to Greenland and “undermining” of NATO more generally, was presented in many fawning editorials as a brave example of telling truth to power and Carney himself as some Spartacus for High-Net-Worth Individuals. If we look at Carney’s non-office holding career, including working for 13 years at Goldman Sachs (the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”) or even as a beneficiary of the anti-democratic decision that created the newly independent role for the Bank of England, it seems, like its admirers, a bit rich, to present him or his ilk as some bulwark against “might is right” imperialism.

The implication is that Trump’s grotesque persona or the “populism” he encourages is such a profound break on their “world order” that a new approach from them is required. But this response from technocratic capitalists ignores that age-old self-preservation, not democratic accountability, or the empowerment of economic decision making is still at play.

The continuing presence in the public domain of ghouls such as Blair or Brown is a reminder of this fact. They talk of a public mood disconnected from decision making as if they had no part in this long-term dilution of democratic control. “New” labour for example won a landslide in 1997 on a manifesto that did not mention that they would de-nationalise the Bank of England. They carried this out this within twenty-four hours of the election win. Thus, was expanded a succession of neo-liberal politicians in the UK (echoing their counterparts in the EU re the ECB) stating that their hands were tied economically by the “neutral/independent” decisions of their central banks.

The “embarrassment” that Trump represents to these people is that he lacks the intellectual, presentational filter of a glamourous figure that would allow them to easily (though they still try) present him as “the leader of the free world” – a co-equal ally, one that in the British context might allow the pretence that Britain had an “independent” nuclear capability. 

Like the broken clock being right twice a day, even Trump, occasionally, cannot fail to express the reality of who calls the shots. The truth he almost articulates, is that NATO is there to advance and underwrite red in tooth and claw US imperialism. No one described this better than the recently deceased Michael Parenti (https://www.michael-parenti.org/books).

The “parcel of rogues”, the “coalition of the wiling” allies – who happily basked in the US bayonet shaping the world (profiting from: NATO’s eastward expansion as it plundered the state owned industries of the dismantled Soviet Union, destroyed any nation state that attempted to shape its own future and now underwrites a Zionist inspired genocide in Gaza) are now scrambling to adjust to an old truth – that those who can be bought, can be sold just as easily. 

This reality should be the byword for the essential defence of Irish neutrality in the Dail and for calling time on the US military’s use of Shannon airport.