Short-term attraction of reckless and transactional behaviour cannot sustain the interests of the US long-term. But Trump is brazen in his disregard for ethics

Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have taken a leaf out of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and given his own sarcastic spin and context by stating that England was, “une nation de boutiquiers” (a nation of shopkeepers). While the Napoleonic attribution and intent behind the expression is often disputed, the implied pejoration in a sovereign’s blind commitment to commercial interests over moral considerations is untenable anymore in the civilised and democratic world. Modern nation states vest and repose their sovereignty with commitments and underpinnings of morality to bestow a certain stature, aura and perception that allow the said nation-state and its citizenry to hold their heads  high in popular imagination and belief.

The US like any other nation has strived to conjure images and myths of an infallible and ‘moral nation’ with a heightened sense of right and wrong governing its actions. Historical events and sovereign  actions often betray such simplistic assumptions and posturing, yet the façade of maintaining and abiding by tenets of moral conduct, as much as possible, is necessary to retain civility, respect and order in the global village. As the foremost power in global affairs, the onus of demonstrating an abiding commitment towards morality in all its actions is paramount to sustain its pre-eminence and relevance.

Despite undeniable evidence of controversial interferences, misadventures and immoral conduct in other countries to protect its own selfish interests, the US had steadfastly maintained a public position to the contrary. However, societal pressures due to the easy access of information were making it difficult for the US Government to ‘wrong’, as easily as it was done before — the ultimate disbelief in the existence of weapons of mass destructions (WMDs) in Iraq, supporting allies like Pakistan or questioning the US-support to dictators were changing the public conversations and governmental actions, till the sudden advent of Donald Trump in 2016.

The businessman-turned-President, Donald Trump, has since demolished all pretences of decency, decorum and sobriety by brazenly equating his Presidential tasks to his supposed business acumen, thereby, knowingly sacrificing the ‘high-ground’ of sovereign morality for transactional benefits. Even though the actual play of ‘American morality’ in the international affairs was always a stretch, it remained a standard feature in the aspirations of the American polity.

The reality of American actions notwithstanding, a very large majority of American people truly believe that the US consistently acted in consonance with its moral principles. So while the rest of the world (especially in the Third World countries of Africa, Latin America, Middle East and Asia) would militate against the double-standards and double-speak of the US, the domestic constituents in the US would readily accept the narrative of ‘American morality’ as couched in the liberal maxims like pro-democracy, anti-imperialism or ‘progress’. 

The ‘packaging’ of American actions and footprint across the globe was done with due concern and deliberation, so as to ensure a morally justifiable line of advancing a societal concern or security concern (eg George Bush’s reliance on the supposed ‘security threats’ to the US from the Iraqi WMDs).

Today no such predication of US policies to any moral concerns (or even ‘packaging’) is displayed by the flippant Trump, as he remains indifferent to the notions of  propriety, with utter disbelief that others could be motivated by any moral considerations. Even his own fellow-Republicans are horrified by his disdain for moral conventions as Senator Ted Cruz called him “utterly amoral”, Mitt Romney qualified “dishonesty is Trump’s hallmark” and Senator Marco Rubio called him “a con man.”

Meanwhile, Trump remains contemptuous of all people who invoke ‘morality’ to differ with him, by calling them ‘grandstanders’. In his own book, The Art of the Deal, Trump describes his self-aggrandisement style as ‘truthful hyperbole’ where “I play to people’s fantasies”. This braggadocio combined with the inherited riches of the real-estate business hid his spectacular failures in the other forays like airlines, football teams, casinos, et al, which also resulted with an infamous brush with bankruptcy and the deployment of questionable ethics to wriggle out of the same. Even the landmark ‘anonymous’ op-ed in the Washington Post alluded to this special trait: “The root of the problem is the President’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making. …”

Trump’s amorality of name-calling even extends to diminishing institutional independence, and recently the Chief Justice John Roberts (incidentally a Republican nominee and a so-called ‘conservative’ judge within the four to five ‘conservative’ tilt) was forced to state, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.” Expectedly within three hours, an inelegant tweet from Trump that insisted on ‘Obama judges’ was retorted. No one is spared from the angst, ire and what Barack Obama calls the ‘manufactured outrage’ of Donald Trump, not even his own party men or the ostensible allies of the US.

The most unashamed display of the remorselessly-transactional behaviour over any portents of morality were in full display in the snuffing of the Khashoggi murder case. In an extraordinary move, Trump has finally stood by the Saudis overruling his own intelligence agency — instead, Trump has alluded to $110 billion worth of military sales and $340 billion of other investments at stake, and then exhibited his limitations of philosophical profundities by musing ‘the world is a very dangerous place’.

He shifted from suggesting initially that this case was the ‘worst cover-up ever’ to sending a ‘thank you’ note to Saudis for lowering the oil prices. The public intellectual, scholar and dissenter, Noam Chomsky, laments about the times, “moral depravity defines US politics.” The short-term attraction of reckless, inelegant and transactional behaviour that cannot sustain the long-term interests of the US is completely lost on Donald Trump, as morality becomes irrelevant for him in an increasingly judgmental and aware world.

(The writer, a military veteran, is a former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)