The Geopolitics of the 'Great Man'

The Wire

2 days ago

The Trump administration is currently attempting to rewrite American history by whitewashing the country's negative legacy and scrubbing out references to anything connected to multiculturalism or diversity.
Gone is Harvey Milk's name from a Navy ship and Bea Arthur's contributions to the Marine Corps from a Pentagon webpage. The administration attempted to remove Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service's digital description of the Underground Railroad. It is gearing up for a showdown with the Smithsonian over its presentation of U.S. history.
Trump is also readying his alternative. For the country's semiquincentennial next year, he is planning to erect a National Garden of American Heroes with sculptures of 250 great individuals from American history.
Purging U.S. government websites and censoring Smithsonian exhibits is not the only, or the most important, way that Trump is whitewashing American history. His pardoning of the January 6 rioters transformed coup plotters, murderers, and right-wing extremists into 'patriots' (while also releasing some very dangerous individuals back into the community). His executive order abolishing birthright citizenship was a bid to rewrite the U.S. constitution. Changing the interpretation of facts is not as satisfying for 'men of action' like Trump as changing the actual facts on the ground.
For decades, historians have moved away from the 'great man' theory of historical analysis to focus on a more diverse array of actors, from less prominent individuals and previously maligned groups to social movements and impersonal forces like the economy and the environment. Trump is pushing back against this trend by insisting that only 'high quality' individuals have been history's movers and shakers.
In truth, Trump only cares about one 'great' individual – himself. He believes that he is the greatest president in U.S. history. With Steve Bannon as his Hegel, Trump styles himself as a Napoleonic embodiment of the spirit of the age – a 'world-soul on horseback.' Never mind that Napoleon trampled the ideals of the French Revolution, launched horrific wars of conquest, and ended up (twice) exiled to an island. He was a nasty piece of work who took big risks. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, even some of Trump's critics have begun to agree with his self-evaluation. In declaring Trump 'great,' but not necessarily good, the founding editor of Politico John Harris argued earlier this year that greatness 'is now simply an objective description about the dimensions of his record.' It's why Time magazine named Trump Person of the Year twice (after winning the 2016 and 2024 elections). A good man like Jimmy Carter contented himself with one term and a post-presidential career of humanitarian service. A 'great man' like Trump lies and cheats his way back into the Oval Office in order to finish the work he started in his first term of destroying American democracy.
Other leaders are engaged in their own effort to remake their countries' history. Russia's Vladimir Putin is resurrecting the idea that the genocidal Stalin was a laudable leader. Hungary's Viktor Orban has attempted to make the fascist Admiral Horthy great again. And the Philippines' Bongbong Marcos is doing his best to untarnish the image of his father, dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
But Trump is doing more than just rewrite America's past and remake America's present. His posture toward history is also his way of approaching geopolitics. He presents himself as the saviour on a white horse who can end the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the standoff with North Korea, and the ongoing crisis with Iran. He is not a fan of diplomacy, unless you mean one-on-one sessions with other 'great men' like Benjamin Netanyahu. As Vice President J.D. Vance recently observed about the prospects for a deal on the war in Ukraine, 'The way to peace is to have a decisive leader sit down and force people to come together.'
And thus the decisive leader will soon sit down in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin in what can only be described as a show of force – toward each other, toward Ukraine, toward Europe. Will anything good, much less great, come of it?
Cornering Putin?
One way of looking at the last couple months of Trump policy is that the president has been doing whatever he can to put Vladimir Putin in his place, with that place being the leadership of a second-rate power, a Venezuela with nukes. During the first six months of his second term, Trump has tried to take the lead in his dance with Putin only to discover that the Russian leader is not a follower. The impertinence of the man!
So, in an extended fit of pique, Trump has set out to punish Putin and Russia. The most prominent sign of this change in attitude from bromance to rupture was Trump's threat to levy a 100 percent tariff on any country that had the temerity to continue importing cheap Russian oil. That, in itself, was a lowballing of the bipartisan congressional threat of a 500 percent tariff. It turned out, in practice, to be even lower, when Trump added only 25 percent to India's tariff rate. In any case, it seemed sufficient to get Putin's attention.
Other efforts to needle Putin included Trump's reconciliation with Volodymr Zelensky, the leader of Ukraine, and the greenlight given to European allies to send their U.S. made weapons systems to Kyiv. Trump even asked Zelensky if Ukraine could use U.S. missiles to target Moscow and St. Petersburg (though he later backed away from that implied threat). Trump then maneuvered Armenia and Azerbaijan to sign a peace deal in Washington that marked a serious reduction of Russian influence in the region, transforming Putin from regional peacemaker to regional bystander.
Proving that he's the only alpha male in the room may be the foremost motivation in Trump's calculations from one minute to the next. But ultimately, the president wants to fulfil a campaign promise (to end the war in 24 hours), extricate the United States from all commitments to Ukraine, and shift full strategic attention to China.
This prime directive of Trump policy seems to have led his envoy to Moscow, Steve Witkoff, to misunderstand a key demand of Putin's. The Russian leader wants to control all four of the provinces that he has formally incorporated into the Russian federation –Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Witkoff apparently thought that Putin was willing to give up on the latter two provinces if Ukraine would cede the remainder of the first two. This appears to be the reason why a 'land swap' was at the heart of the rationale for the Alaska meeting. Given that Ukraine controls only a tiny sliver of Russian territory at this point, talk of a 'land swap' only makes sense in the context of this misundertanding.
But Putin actually said that he wanted Ukrainian forces, not the Russian army, to abandon Zaporizhzhya and Kherson. The Russian leader is not in the mood to compromise, not with his military continuing to gain a bit of territory every day and his political control predicated on the exigencies of a wartime emergency.
With this latest invitation from Trump, Putin has already won before the planes have landed in Alaska. He's heading back to the United States for the first time in a decade, without fear of being delivered to the International Criminal Court. He's secured a one-on-one conversation with Trump, without the pesky Europeans or the obstreperous Zelensky at the table. The secondary sanctions are, except for India, on pause.
Putin has already gotten what he wants. Why should he give up anything more? Don't expect much from this meeting, except for some vague and ambiguous statement that both leaders can claim as victory.
Glad-handing Netanyahu
From time to time, Trump has expressed his irritation at Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu. He skipped visiting Israel on his May trip to the Middle East, a sign of Trump's unhappiness that Netanyahu hadn't agreed to a more permanent ceasefire in Gaza. More recently, Trump has pushed back against Bibi's claims that there's no starvation in Gaza, reportedly even yelling at the Israeli prime minister in a phone call last week.
As a 'great man,' Netanyahu has also acted with decisiveness in changing the facts on the ground. In this case, the policy also happens to be genocidal. That doesn't bother Trump very much. After all, he too proposed turning Gaza into a luxury resort, which would necessitate kicking the two million Palestinians off their land. However, Trump doesn't consider the photos of starving children to be a good look.
And yet, the U.S. president has not opposed Netanyahu's plan to take over Gaza. 'It is going to be pretty much up to Israel,' he said. The president has no problem trying to interfere in Brazilian politics by slapping the country with additional sanctions because it's prosecuting Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro. But when it comes to Israel committing genocide in Gaza – or Nayib Bukele changing the laws in El Salvador so that he can be president for life – Trump is suddenly respectful of sovereignty.
'Great men' don't contradict themselves – they contain multitudes. Trump's reign is one long 'song of myself,' a not-very-lyrical paean to the president's own brilliance and capacity to wrangle other autocrats. The problems arise when those other autocrats refuse to be wrangled.
The Future of 'Greatness'
Trump is taking over Washington, DC under the pretense of combatting crime – in a city where the crime rate is actually going down. He is threatening to assert federal control over other cities, all of them controlled by Democrats.
Consider this a form of territorial acquisition. Putin grabs the Donbas, Netanyahu seizes Gaza, and Trump takes over DC. It's a dubious strategy. Occupations always face spirited opposition from the locals.
The merely good set out to negotiate compromises that improve, however marginally, something broken in society. Their incrementalism often draws fire from those who rightly point out that half-measures are insufficient in dealing with climate change, global poverty, or endemic corruption. But beware of those whose proffered solutions take the world not forward a half-step but a great leap backward. Trump doesn't do compromise. He doesn't have the patience for incrementalism. His real estate projects – ugly hotels, glitzy resorts, water-hogging golf courses – never improve the neighbourhood.
Like Putin and Netanyahu, Trump wants to do big things. They all want to smash the ordinary and use the rubble to build something extraordinary, which usually end up being monumental statues to themselves. Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair…
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. His latest book is Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response.