CHRIS TIANIT Y, HUMANIT Y AND THE NEW NATIONALISM
with Russia of the 1980s, the US of the 2010s is feeling overburdened by its role as the guardian of the West and leader of the Free World. It was this fatigue that made President Trump’ s “America first” campaign successful. One pillar of his argument is that the US is being taken advantage of by a free-riding Europe, and it explains several of Trump’s arguments. It explains why Trump feels that America is dealt with “unfairly” in trade, and he has argued that other countries have the upper hand with, for example, “German cars pour into the country as water” or why he wants European states to pay for the US’ military presence on their soil. The new American nationalism is increasingly driving the US into isolation. It could have been more fitting for Trump to have campaigned for America alone. It would be to turn back the clock to American policy prior to the Second World War. In 2019 a new competition is beginning between the nations, which is starting to break-down the international mechanisms of cooperation. At the end of the second decade, economic wars and cyberattacks happen in peacetime, and political narratives are shifting back towards a survival of the fittest, which, for the time being, remains the US. No one would have imagined this state of affairs at the beginning of the century. A result of this new nationalism is that the transnational organisations of humankind that were built to guarantee peace, such as the United Nations or the European Union, are to be destroyed. Trump, for example, has made it known that he is not a fan of the UN. As Trump complained in April 2017, “The United States, just one of 193 countries in the U.N., pays for 22 percent of the budget and almost 30 percent of the United Nations peacekeeping, which is unfair.”11 Under Trump, the US has left the UN’s 2015 Paris Agreement to combat climate
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