By Fikret Akfırat
Francis Fukuyama, a former neocon but popular neoliberal ideologue, sees Trump’s election victory as “the end of neoliberalism.” He writes that “the blowout victory of Donald Trump and the Republican Party on Tuesday night will lead to major changes in important policy areas, from immigration to Ukraine. But the significance of the election extends way beyond these specific issues and represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a ‘free society’ has evolved since the 1980s.”[1]
Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man quickly ended up in the trash due to its lack of scholarship and scientific backing. In his 2006 book America at the Crossroads, Fukuyama criticized the neocons of “irresponsible consumption of American power” and distanced himself from them, following the Iraq war.
According to Fukuyama, the globe has become a global village, borders have vanished, and the neoliberal globalization movement has brought about the “end of history.” The universal village would be ruled by the Atlantic imperialists. Another theory proposed by hegemony to stifle anyone who disagreed with the “global village” was the Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington! According to this idea, “Western civilization,” which had brought about the “golden age” of humanity at the “end of history,” needed to be suppressed to counter the threat posed by “eastern civilizations,” mainly Islam but also Orthodox Christianity.
Samuel Huntington, who is not a neo-con but is sometimes referred to as a “conservative realist,”[2] supported the US’s global “exporting democracy” initiative while also highlighting its drawbacks.
We now live in a different world, though, and a lot has changed since then.
The fact that Trump was elected at a time when the world is going through a major shift should actually be stressed. It obviously signifies “the loss of the globalists,” as Dr. Aleksandr Dugin so eloquently stated. Maybe we could state it this way: Trump, who promotes “turning inward,” won the US elections because of the multipolarity that has taken hold in the world.
And what will be the consequences of this situation? We are discussing this. The main thing is that multipolarity has created the conditions for the US to decline. However, Trump won a victory against the globalist wing, but the losers continue to have a certain amount of power and influence within the American state apparatus. Consider the momentum that the enormous wheel has built up over the years as we try to picture this situation. Therefore, it is necessary to take into account that some of the policies from the previous period may continue in the Trump administration. What is certain, however, is that in the coming period we will witness a struggle between Trump, who is advocating a different program from their predecessors, and the globalists.
The outcome of this conflict will have a significant impact on the future of NATO, the current conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and the Balkans, as well as the wave of African independence and, most significantly, US policy against the fair world order movement spearheaded by the cooperation between China and Russia. And the American military’s presence in Syria may be one of the first fronts in this conflict. Despite not making the news, the topic is being debated behind the scenes. Trump’s actions during his presidency from 2017 to 2021 with relation to the U.S. military deployment in Syria are well-known. In a Twitter message published on December 19, 2018, Trump said, “We’ve been fighting for a long time in Syria. I’ve been President for almost two years and we’ve really stepped it up. And we have won against ISIS. We’ve beaten them and we’ve beaten them badly. We’ve taken back the land and now it’s time for our troops to come back home.”[3]
However, because of barriers in the US state structure, Trump was unable to carry out this decision.
According to a recent media story, Trump’s stance has not altered. Senator Robert F. Kennedy Jr., JFK’s nephew who declined to run for president in favor of Trump as an independent, recently spoke to the media about a chat he had with Trump:
“When I was with President Trump, we were talking about the Middle East, and he took a piece of paper and drew on it a map of the Middle East with all the nations on it, which most Americans can’t do. Then he wrote in each country the troop strength. He said we have 500 men on the border of Syria and Türkiye, and a little encampment that was bombed. He said there’s 750,000 troops in Türkiye. There’s 250,000 militants in Syria. If they go up against each other, we’re in the middle.” According to Kennedy, Trump later asked his generals what would happen if a conflict broke out, to which they reportedly replied, “They’re going to be cannon fodder.” Trump’s response was decisive: “Get them out.”[4]
Notably, Tulsi Gabbard, who visited Damascus in 2017 to speak with Assad, was Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence. Former Democratic Party member Gabbard, who has criticized American engagements abroad, had been a Trump supporter since 2020. If confirmed for the role, Gabbard would oversee all 18 of the nation’s intelligence agencies. Gabbard criticized the Biden administration, saying, “This administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts in regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before.”[5]
While the US has established a timeline for its troop withdrawal from Iraq as part of the “coalition against ISIS,” the topic of troop withdrawal from Syria has been up for discussion for a while. Meanwhile, excluding the Neocons, it can be said that there is a broad consensus in the US on the withdrawal of troops from Syria. The policy that Trump and his supporters endorse, which calls for “returning the US to the domestic arena” and “focusing more on the Chinese threat” in the international arena, also views the pullout from Syria as essential.
This policy, however, marks a shift from the “Middle East strategy” that the United States has been employing for the past three decades. The strategic objective of the “Greater Middle East Project,” which was initiated in the early 1990s under the leadership of neocons during the administration of Bush Sr., is to disintegrate Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Türkiye in order to establish a “puppet Kurdistan,” or as we refer to it, a “second Israel.” The campaign to dismember Syria through the PYD/YPG (also known as the Syrian Democratic Forces in disguise), a terrorist organization affiliated with the PKK, continues within the framework of this goal, the roots of which were built with the Gulf War in northern Iraq in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US has been actively working with the PKK to establish a supposedly independent entity in northeast Syria for the past ten years. The USAID agency and numerous US and European NGOs have been constructing infrastructure, educational facilities, hospitals, and administrative units in the area, as well as training the personnel who will work there, in addition to providing the PKK with thousands of trucks full of weapons and ammunition, including heavy weapons.
However, Syria is putting up a fierce fight against it, Iran is fighting against it, Iraq is attempting to revive its central state, and—most importantly—Türkiye is opposing this process. The status quo that Türkiye has been an Atlantic partner since 1946 is being fundamentally challenged by this issue.
The “realists,” who are becoming more influential now that the Trump administration is in power, contend that measures should be created to keep Türkiye “inside the NATO tent,”[6] while the neo-cons, the most adamant representatives of the globalists, want this plan to be accomplished at the expense of Türkiye. Given these circumstances, the most profitable solution for the US would have been to get Türkiye to accept the dismemberment of Syria, withdraw American troops from the region, and give the entity in northeastern Syria under Turkish auspices. There are those in the US pushing for this “solution.”. However, there are no conditions for Türkiye’s state and social dynamics to accept this “solution.”
Let us conclude by highlighting this point: In the current global environment, the Trump administration’s actions and their methods will depend on more than just its chosen course of action and the ideals of its appointments. The ability of China, Russia, Iran, India, Türkiye, and the developing nations of the world at large to influence the new US administration’s agenda is perhaps more important than that.
[1] Francis Fukuyama, What Trump unleashed means for America, Financial Times, November 8, 2024.
[2] Jacob Heilbrunn, The Clash of the Samuel Huntingtons, The American Prospect, December 19, 2001.
[3] https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1075528854402256896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[4] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/trump-wants-troops-out-northern-syria-says-rfk-jr
[5] https://www.npr.org/2024/11/13/nx-s1-5189603/trump-tulsi-gabbard-director-of-national-intelligence
[6] Robert A. Manning, The Turkey dilemma and the limits of US power, The Hill, January 18, 2023.