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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
As a true “globalist,” I watched Donald Trump’s inaugural address on my phone while stuck in Davos traffic. A European executive, sharing the World Economic Forum bus with me, buried her head in her hands and lamented, “I can’t believe this is happening.”
But the response from delegates from the Middle East, Asia and Africa was very different. Many people in the Global South (to use a boring acronym) think that Trump is good news for them. Recent polling station It shows that in countries like India, Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil, this pro-Trump attitude extends far beyond the Davos elite.
The American president is widely seen, outside the West, as transactional, pro-business and a peacemaker. What’s not to like?
Quite a lot actually. Look beyond the hype and there are many reasons for the Global South to be deeply concerned about Trump’s America.
The US president is essentially calling for an abandonment of the “rules-based international order” that has provided the stability and open markets that have allowed China, India and much of Southeast Asia to become much richer over the past 30 years.
Throwing out those rules and moving into a fully transactional world can sound refreshingly simple. But a world without rules is one in which the strong prey on the weak – without any framework of law or principle to constrain them. And most countries in the Global South are more likely to end up as Prey than Predator.
Panama, Colombia And Mexico is among the first nations to discover how unpleasant Trump’s world is. About 80 percent of Mexico’s exports go to the US. If Trump continues with his threatened tariffs, he could push America’s southern neighbor into economic depression.
Mexico, of course, is not alone. Trump has threatened most of the world’s major trading nations with tariffs. The notion that it doesn’t really matter because the president is a “transaction” – and that all his threats are simply refined into an agreement – ignores the way business operates. International companies need stability and predictable legal regimes if they are to have confidence in long-term cross-border investments.
The proof is that even when Trump makes a deal, there’s no guarantee he’ll stick to it. During his first term, the US negotiated a new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico – known as the USMCA. But Trump is now demanding new concessions.
If all agreements can be broken, in response to some new grievance or to take advantage of a shift in the balance of power, then no trade agreement is safe. As one former central banker told me in Davos, “The logic of it is that you end up trading safely within your borders.”
Westerners may be shocked to see the US president talking like a mob boss who wants more money for protection. But many in the Global South have always believed that American leaders act like mobsters—even if they talk like missionaries. At least, they say, Trump has now given up his furious moralizing. The hope is that the less hypocritical of us will be easier to deal with, because they won’t make unrealistic demands based on irrelevant Western values.
But we begin to see him proudly proclaiming to me that he has no altruistic interest in the outside world – and it’s not pretty. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, announced the suspension of almost all US aid programs. Only those who directly benefit from Americans will be restored. This could end programs like Pepperwhich provides drugs to fight HIV and AIDS and has saved millions of lives around the world.
Trump, meanwhile, appeared to casually endorse ethnic cleansing in Gaza. This could be terrible news for the Palestinians who would lose their homeland – and will also deeply alarm Jordan and Egypt, who are expected to take in new refugees.
The US is certainly not going to volunteer to relocate anyone. The poem carved on the Statue of Liberty proclaims: “Give me your tired, your poor . . . The stark rejection of your coastal shore.” But, to put it mildly, that’s not the mood of Trump’s America, where the president’s supporters wave banners demanding “mass deportation now.” Programs for the resettlement of refugees in the USA already existed suspended.
Reducing legal immigration from places Trump once described as “shithole countries” might also sound like good policy to many Americans. But that doesn’t sound like good news for the middle classes of the Global South, who may find that prized visas for skilled immigrants or students are much harder to come by.
Still, perhaps all worries about trade, aid and migration can be waved away if Trump follows through on his promise to end wars around the world. However, the president’s aspiration to be a global peacemaker is difficult to reconcile with his declared ambition to expand American territory.
If there is one idea that the countries of the Global South all claim to reject, it is imperialism. If Trump turns out to be both serious and literal in his plans to expand America’s borders, their applause for him may fade quickly.
