On Balance | Trump 2.0 could be upon us. Why are the business and national security sectors silent?
- In the US, national defence and business interests have always driven policy outcomes
- After Trump’s victory in Iowa, the silence from those with the biggest stakes in Pax Americana should provoke disquiet
A high-ranking official in the US government’s national defence apparatus, who has straddled Republican and Democratic administrations, gave a talk in Washington recently. Not surprisingly, the discussion quickly turned to the challenge China poses to American interests.
A similar shade of quiet concern, this time from the business world, came through in an article The Economist ran last week titled, “Many CEOs fear a second Trump term would be worse than the first”, which featured comments from several corporate representatives choosing to remain anonymous.
And there was this unnecessarily qualified statement by Blackrock vice-chairman Philipp Hildebrand in a Bloomberg Television interview: “You know, we’ve been there before, we survived [Donald Trump’s presidency], so we’ll see what it means. Certainly from a European perspective, from a kind of globalist, Atlanticist perspective, it’s of course a great concern.”
What about looking at this from the perspective of the American-led global order based on the rule of law, which has enabled unfettered economic growth for decades?
