Petulant and humiliated Trump is now more dangerous for the world than ever - The Independent

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Donald Trump will face impeachment along with members of his administration. His family and friends will come under intense scrutiny during potential investigations into alleged corruption.

But now that the Republican Party has lost control of Congress, the US president will be more dangerous abroad to distract from problems at home.

Constitutional theory should suggest the opposite is true. Democrat control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate should mean that the worst excesses of Trump’s regime will be curbed.

Congress controls the federal budget; it can, in theory, force spending on the executive. Nominations for jobs in the executive need Congressional approval.

But Trump and his people know all this; they have planned how to continue to prosecute their agenda in the face of such opposition, and creating chaos externally is a brilliant distraction from domestic pressure. Emergencies will be created to get Trump more power.

Meanwhile, even when he had a pliant Congress with Republican majorities in both houses, he ignored their powers. His coup is almost entirely complete.

He ignored the obligation to have Congress approve a vast array of diplomatic appointments. The military and intelligence community has been eviscerated and purged of most senior officers of independent thought.

According to recent reporting by The Washington Post, there are about 359 federal jobs needing approval in the Senate that are unfilled.

He’s launched a war on Iran without Congressional authorisation and pretended it had finished, when it had not, to meet a 60-day deadline to seek authorisation. He can carry on doing that indefinitely.

He will drag the US into conflicts elsewhere because Congressional efforts to impeach him or hold him back would be undermined when American men and women are in harm’s way. To survive, he will put them there.

And on top of that, he has acted in the interests of Russia, not the United States, in every matter of relevant foreign and military policy.

The next two years are going to be among the most dangerous for America’s traditional allies in many decades.

Trump will swerve from being a menace to America’s allies to an outright enemy; from Cuba to Taiwan and Iran to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he will prioritise only the interests of Vladimir Putin and the enrichment of his own country (and family).

We know this because that is how he has behaved since he returned to the White House only last year.

So Ukraine will face a truly terrible time. Taiwan needs to prepare for the moment when China looks set to invade with a nod from Trump, who will abandon the island in favour of Xi Jinping.

Cubans need to prepare for a Venezuelan-style American assault, the removal of their president and the rapid colonisation of their present and future economy. That is what has happened in Caracas, and that is what is likely to happen in Havana.

Iran’s neighbours across the Arabian (or Persian) Gulf have already been warned that Trump plans to launch a major attack against the country. He promised not to do so before the midterms.

Now peevish, he will assume that it has been Iran’s survival that caused the spike in fossil fuel prices and will very soon launch operations against Tehran to try to wipe out the regime. He will use his executive powers and the limited capacity of Congress to hold presidents with no regard for constitutional conventions to punish Iran for the midterm results.

Trump’s will has been thwarted, and his administration has been humiliated by Iran’s defiant resilience. A regime that has sponsored terrorist organisations around the world, caused widespread instability, has appeared to want to get a nuclear weapon and is run by men who believe that the Islamic mahdi will soon reveal himself in the End of Times has humbled America and is even seen with sympathy now as a plucky underdog. Trump will want to shoot that animal.

Taiwan produces about 90 per cent of the world’s semiconductor chips that drive all of its high technology. Trump has maintained “strategic ambiguity” that other presidents have adopted on whether they would order the US to defend Taiwan against (an ever more aggressive) China, which lays claim to the island nation.

He has encouraged US producers to try to catch up on chip manufacturing and said that Taiwan should contribute more to the costs of defence.

He told Bloomberg: “I think Taiwan should pay us for defence. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.” Taiwan has been waiting for Trump to approve an arms sale package, which it will pay for, of $14bn.

Trump is jealous of the power that an authoritarian like Xi enjoys. He wants to copy that, not curtail it.

But it is Ukraine and Europe, among America’s Nato allies, that Trump’s agenda will be most keenly felt now that he is a “lame duck” constitutionally barred from another term.

In every aspect of his foreign policy, and many aspects of his domestic approach too, Trump has acted as if he works directly for the Kremlin. It is certain that he will continue on that path. Even when this is against the interests of his own country. He has ignored Russia’s intelligence and technical weapons support of Iran, which has led to American deaths in the Gulf. That is a sign of where his interests lie.

Ukraine has survived the cuts in America’s funding of its defence. Joe Biden spent about $130bn on weapons for Kyiv. Trump stopped that; he has allowed Europe to buy arms from the US for Ukraine – but threatened to cut that off too. His close associate Elon Musk has publicly admitted that he has interfered with the Ukrainian weapons systems that rely on his Starlink terminals.

This has meant Ukrainians have been killed because the terminals are used to control defensive missiles. It also means that long-range and front-line offensive operations have been hamstrung. Musk and Trump have therefore sabotaged the defence of Ukraine.

Trump has demanded that Ukraine cease attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure. He has done so because Kyiv has been effective in undermining Putin’s war effort and imposing fuel shortages on Russians at home – a real cost of the war to them.

Trump has lifted some sanctions on Russia to allow Putin to export diesel.

Earlier this month, he waived a sanctions package that imposed 100 per cent tariffs on purchasers of Russian oil and gas, 500 per cent tariffs on Russian goods, and his negotiating teams are reported to be in discussions to allow American companies to ignore global sanctions against Moscow and get back into business in Russia.

He will veto efforts to help Ukraine more. If a two-thirds majority in both houses overrode his veto, since he runs the executive branch, he’ll just not execute their will. There’s nothing to make him do what democratically elected houses rule that he should.

Britain, the EU, Germany, France. Italy, Spain, the Baltic states, Poland and all the Scandinavian states, plus Canada, have said that Russia is already prosecuting a hybrid war against the West. There are serious concerns that this will escalate further and come close to outright war.

Trump doesn’t believe or accept this. He has, however, undermined Nato by threatening to invade Canada and Denmark (in Greenland). He doesn’t need to take his country out of Nato to undermine it. He just needs to pull US troops out of Europe, or Nato’s command structures, to cripple the organisation to the enormous satisfaction of Putin.

What better distractions can there be than helping to cause more chaos in the ranks of America’s former allies who have always been Putin’s enemies? That, after all, is Russian strategic doctrine in a nutshell. Trump has often appeared to be unhinged. After this week, he will be unbound.

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