A CIVILIZATIONAL FOCUS

The narratives of American decline have international implications and tangible consequences for America’s preferred modes of engagement and perception of threats. In key speeches both domestically and interna-tionally, Trump has highlighted the concept of “civilisation” as opposed to much more traditional terms such as human rights, democracy and freedom (White House 2017f; 2017i). Trump’s vision is one of prosperous and secure civilised regions surrounded by enemies, which will ulti-mately seek access to American territory thereby challenging its culture and endangering its prosperity. The civilised world is the last stronghold against these “barbaric” elements of chaos (Kaplan 1994). Trump often uses language that suggests signs of contagious hazards – corruption, political violence, drugs et cetera – that threaten to spread to the US from the outside (White House 2017b; 2017h). On the Trumpian world map, international borders and lines of communication from air and sea to cy-berspace represent possible vectors for the spread of dangerous “cultural pollution”. For Trump, liberal ideas and institutions represent the wrong types of “cure” for America’s present ills. Primarily, America’s resources need to be used for the defence of the homeland and the “civilised world”

as Trump defines it (White House 2017a; 2017b; 2017i).

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Trump’s vision for America’s global engagement and domestic regen-eration bears similarities with Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”

framework (Rachman 2017; Walt 2017a). In Huntington’s (1993; 2002) view, the international politics of the post-Cold War world would not be dominated by economic conflict or a battle between competing grand ideologies. Instead, cultural identity would become increasingly salient, and future conflicts in international politics would take place on the “fault lines” between cultural entities called civilisations.4 For Huntington, the most precarious of civilizational divides was between the non-Muslim and the Muslim worlds (Huntington 2002, 255).

Some of the advisors President Trump nominated at the beginning of his term, including now-ousted chief strategist Stephen Bannon, senior policy advisor Stephen Miller and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton, subscribe to this civilizational worldview and frame “rad-ical Islamic terrorism” as an existential threat to the United States (Anton 2017; Smith 2017). Trump’s inauguration speech, reportedly written in part by Bannon, evoked the notion of a civilised world locked in conflict with “radical Islamic terrorism, which we [America with Trump at the helm] will eradicate completely from the face of the earth” (White House, 2017b). In this vein, the task of the new administration is to act as a van-guard in the inter-civilizational battle between the Judeo-Christian West and the “others”. These others include “Islamist extremists” and Iran (White House 2017j), but the category has proven sufficiently fluid also to include other “rogue” regimes such as Cuba, North Korea and even Venezuela (White House 2017k).

The Trump administration began putting its civilizational sentiments into practice in the form of an executive order issued on January 27, 2017, banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries for a period of 90 days (White House 2017l). The order faced legal challenges and was duly frozen by a US district judge in the state of Washington, a verdict upheld by the US Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit (Ford 2017). A revised order in March sought to rectify some of the most troubling aspects of the orig-inal, exempting permanent US residents and visa-holders, and dropping the reference to the preferential treatment of religious minorities (Thrush 2017). The Supreme Court allowed parts of this revised ban to go into effect in June (Shear and Liptak 2017). However, the Court cancelled oral arguments on the temporary ban, as the administration rolled out a new version that sets different degrees of restriction on travel and immigration into the United States for citizens of Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela (White House 2017m; Shear et al. 2017).

4 In his later book, Huntington distinguished between eight such civilisations: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, Latin American and, with a caveat, African (Huntington 2002, 45-47).

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The Supreme Court allowed this new ban to take effect on December 4, 2017, despite on-going legal challenges (Liptak 2017).

The clash-of-civilisations worldview of the Trump administration is not limited to the battle against terrorism and rogue states, however.

In fact, there is a strong domestic-politics aspect in the Huntingtonian thesis, according to which immigration is a source of potential decay in the political community. Of particular concern for Huntington (2002, 304-305) were immigrants “from other civilizations who reject assimi-lation and continue to adhere to and propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home societies”, a danger intensified by modern forms of communication. As immigrants retain their links to their countries and communities of origin, people from different civilisations come to represent a potential source of decay in America’s collective identity (Huntington 1997; 2002, 306; 2004). In the worst case, such an erosion of the American creed could ultimately lead the US to rescind its leadership role as the vanguard of Western civilisation. In the inter-civilizational battle, this scenario would precipitate an inevitable decline in the United States as well as in Western civilisation in general (Aysha 2003).

Trump’s election campaign approximated these Huntingtonian views, especially in its inflammatory immigration rhetoric. Although the Pres-ident’s tone has admittedly softened since his infamous comments de-picting Mexican immigrants as sexual assaulters (TIME 2015), he has re-tained the substantive edge of his attack on immigration in key speeches by framing it as an internal security threat (White House 2017b; New York Times 2017a). He has, for example, issued two executive orders to strengthen border controls and issue penalties to “sanctuary cities” un-willing to aid the federal government in the deportation of illegal aliens (White House 2017n; White House 2017o). Candidate Trump also pledged to erect a wall along the Mexican border, a promise that he still insists on honouring as President, although he has been forced to put his plans on hold in the face of congressional unwillingness to fund the project (White House 2017h; Hulse 2017a; Becker and Cornwell 2017). Trump has also targeted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme launched by the Obama administration, which has protected the children of undocumented immigrants from deportation. After Trump’s decision to end the programme, Congress was given six months to come up with an agreement on the fate of some 800,000 “Dreamers” enrolled in it (Shear and Hirschfeld Davies 2017).

Yet, Trump’s offensive is taking place as estimates show a winding down of illegal immigration to the United States, especially via the South-ern border. In fact, according to Pew Research Center, since 2009 the

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number of Mexican immigrants leaving the US has exceeded the number of new entrants (Passel and Cohn 2016; Gonzalez-Barbera and Krogstad 2017).