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America the apex predator sharpens its teeth
Who’s eating who in the new geopolitical food chain.
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Mr Donald Trump, an instinctive predator, was never going to be a zookeeper.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Simon Kuper
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Canada, Denmark and Panama spent most of the past 80 years in the geopolitical equivalent of a petting zoo. In a petting zoo, nobody’s allowed to eat the animals. The zookeeper keeps everybody fed. Even defenceless sheep and rabbits can thrive. But now, US President Donald Trump is emptying out the zoo into the wild. That means every country needs to perform a food-chain audit: who wants to eat us, and how can we stop them?
The jungle is the geopolitical norm, argues international relations scholar Robert Kagan in his 2018 book The Jungle Grows Back. The jungle has no rules to stop predators eating prey. This was the global state of affairs until 1945. Then two wounded predators, Japan and Germany, went vegetarian. Soon afterwards, the chief colonial predators, Britain and France, retreated to their lairs. Lions lay down with lambs. Only a few unlucky regions – especially the Sahel, Central Africa, the Middle East and countries bordering Russia – remained at the mercy of predators.
