President Donald Trump speaks to attendees during the inaugural parade at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2025.
President Donald Trump speaks to attendees during the inaugural parade at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2025. Credit: Jazmin Smith / Wikimedia Commons Credit: Jazmin Smith / Wikimedia Commons

Both imploding nuclear superpowers from the Cold War have become a threat to humanity’s attempts to establish global peace and security. From Ukraine to Gaza, from Venezuela to Greenland, events are moving very quickly, and this will not likely let up in 2026.

We need difficult, pivotal changes in Canada if we are to meet the threats to our sovereignty. Certainly, we must fully face the depth of our challenges – around national unity, economic precariousness and our home-grown far right. But we mustn’t shy away from a careful, critical analysis of the pitfalls of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s major project nation building, which I will undertake in a later piece.

But first we need perspective.

Neo-liberal corporate globalization, which spread more quickly after the demise of the Soviet Union, did not bring us a more stable, more egalitarian world order. Rather it exacerbated the climate crisis and laid the foundations for even more obscene inequalities and accelerating political polarization. The social dislocation aggravated the global migrant crisis.  Social fragmentation has been compounded by the rise of the tech oligarchs and their disinforming technology.

The backlash to unprecedented global corporate concentration of wealth and power has fueled widespread ethno-nationalism, which neither liberal aspiration nor traditional social democratic approaches, at least to date, have been able to curtail.

It is vital to grasp the convergences that have brought us to this dangerous point, which involves everything from political psychology to the decline of empires.

Trump’s malignant narcissism

Even before his second term, health professionals were warning about the dangers from Trump’s mental health. Two hundred signed a petition about him suffering from the “severe untreatable personality disorder, malignant narcissism.” This shouldn’t be confused with the fairly widespread, narcissistic self-referentiality in popular culture, though the libertarian drift helped lay the ground for Trump.

Malignant narcissism speaks to Trump’s psychopathic lack of conscience and his total lack of capacity for empathy. It also speaks to sadism, which Trump exhibits in everything he does, from his ICE attacks, to his legal targeting of political opponents, to his growing threats to other countries. Trauma, humiliation, projection and revenge are likely all at play. We see this with Trump’s aggression towards Greenland being self-justified because he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize. In his convoluted, self-obsessed world it matters little that the Peace Prize is based in Norway not Denmark.

America’s decline

The devastating consequences of Trump’s delusions cannot be underestimated.  But we can’t ignore the larger geopolitical context. Without the Cold War empires and blocs declining as they have, Trump would have remained just another manipulative, mob-like businessman. Trump was able to politically exploit the isolationism resulting from the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the effect of globalization on the traditional blue-collar economy, and the racist backlash to Obama’s presidency.

When we look at what typically occurs with the demise of empires it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that such a dangerous, unstable person has been able to concentrate such power.

Whether the decline of the Spanish, British, Soviet or American empires, there was over-extension of the military, debasement of the currency and a spiraling debt. There was a loss of control over resources and supply chains. With this comes loss of productivity, rampant social decay and loss of state legitimacy.

With no viable, progressive political alternative to address these multiple challenges in the broader public interest, mainstream conditions easily deteriorate and advantage authoritarian rule. The political elites, not the controlling economic class, typically gets targeted and blamed. Righteous populism fanning the politics of resentment inevitably obscures fact-finding and dulls compassion.

The U.S. was well along in its demise when the appeal of Trump and the MAGA movement took hold. The devastating crises in mass shootings, homelessness and fentanyl deaths, and the scapegoating of migrants and immigrants, can all be placed within this wider context.

Trump’s destructiveness

There is no basic rationality to Trump’s means and ends; his use of tariffs to bring back lost manufacturing capacity is already backfiring economically and, increasingly, he threatens to use them to enforce aggressive foreign policies, like taking Greenland.  His seeming success in getting other NATO countries to increase military spending, after the U.S. spending trillions on foreign wars, is not stabilizing the western alliance, especially as the U.S. now threatens the sovereignty of other NATO members. And, in spite of the America First, isolationist slogan, Trump’s megalomania is likely to take the U.S. military into more international quagmires.

Trump’s plan to steadily increase the military budget, which is approaching $1 trillion annually, his unapologetic support for a corporate state, with huge tax cuts to the super-rich, and his indebtedness to the tech oligarchs, will all skyrocket America’s debt.

These outcomes matter little to Trump. He and his subordinates just make things up to justify their authoritarian ambitions. At root, his “kingly reign” wants to see America back in a world preceding human rights, international law and the United Nations. Back to unbridled misogyny and “might makes right”. His proclamation that this is “his hemisphere” reflects how malignant narcissism and territorial imperialism fit hand in glove. Meanwhile, he steadily undermines democratic processes and accountability, transforming America from a liberal democracy to an electoral autocracy.

Guard rails from his first term are pretty much gone. In his rambling rant at the UN General Assembly, he attacked European immigration and green energy as threats to western civilization. White supremacy and the protection of fossil fuels are strangely interwoven into his reactionary ideology. The struggles for human rights, democracy and climate action are totally unified in the growing opposition to Trump’s authoritarian rule.

Mostly, Trump loves rubbing shoulders with other autocrats, along with royalty, which, for him, embody the Golden Age of arbitrary power. His malignant narcissism is always front and centre, as was so vividly shown when he had such embarrassingly puffed-up pride being the only U.S. president to be twice invited to visit the British Monarchy.  

Embracing truth and decency

It is most revealing that Trump’s Gaza peace deal, negotiated transactionally, was only signed by other autocrats; from Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, along with Trump. His Board of Peace, purportedly for Gaza reconstruction, which Trump chairs, is stacked with his inner circle, family, and, notably, apologist for the War on Iraq, Tony Blair. Invited countries that want a permanent seat will have to pay Trump $1 billion dollars. It is real estate, not Palestinians’ right to self-determination, that matters to Trump.

Trump has invited Putin to join his private Board and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now says he wants to join; the warmongers magically become the peacemakers. This further threatens multilateralism and undermines the authority of the UN. If Carney had agreed to join Trump’s Board of Peace, before Trump de-invited him because of his speech at Davos, this would not have provided any legitimacy, but it would have undermined Carney’s credibility.

The “ceasefire” has enabled Israel to continue with military attacks to further “cleanse” Gaza of Palestinians. It falsely implies that Trump’s peace deal enabled humanitarian aid to be restored, which it did not, whereas the right to receive such aid in the midst of warfare, which Israel systematically undermines, is enshrined in international law.

Everything Trump instigates is rooted in such deception. Even so, democratic leaders, including from Canada, have, to date, mostly been lining up to flatter and/or placate Trump; following their “strategy” to not poke the bear. But we should all know by now, what the people of Minneapolis are quickly realizing, that enabling psychopathic bullies just further emboldens them.

Opposition, solidarity and resistance matter more each day. Building trust and deeper perspective from the bottom up, in seemingly small ways, matters, as is, for example, happening with the Peace Walk by monks across the eastern U.S. As does the Europeans, finally, standing up to Trump over his threats to take Greenland.

We all must stand up in every way possible to affirm an alternative future; strengthening participatory democracies with renewed commitments to equality, human rights and protection of the planet. There will be no short cuts.

Jim Harding

Jim Harding is an activist, author and retired professor of environmental and justice studies, Jim Harding is the editor of The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left, which will be published by Fernwood...