Trump and Brinkmanship Theory

Mohamed Omara Taqi Alden
The theory of " brinkmanship " that is being employed in the political field and international conflicts goes that you have to barricade yourself to the maximum degree, raise the ceiling of your demands to unacceptable-limit-s, and make it seem as if a major war is going to break out.

At that moment, everyone will lose all hope in the possibility of reaching any peaceful solution, here everyone has stood on the edge of the abyss.

And then when you make a very small concession, everyone will rush to accept the rest of your demands, believing that they have achieved a victory, defused the tension, and avoided the war scenario.


It is therefore a strategy of escalating an international crisis to the peak of conflict, and pushing it to the brink of the abyss in order to subdue the other party by summoning fear and the obsessions of a tragic end latent within it.
The brinkmanship theory was theorized by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the 1950s, and was actually applied during the major conflict between the United States and the Soviet -union- in what is known as the Cold War, the Korean War in 1953, and also during the Cuban crisis in 1962.

From here we can understand the measures that Trump has recently taken against many countries in the world, which have put international stability on the brink, as they revolve within the context of what this political theory proposes.
Also, the statements related to the Palestinian issue, what Trump announced of plans to displace the Palestinians and eliminate the Palestinian state project in favor of global Zionism are also, in our opinion, driven by the requirements of this vision.

I believe that these are measures that Trump and his allies will back down from some of them, but they will not stop pressing many times to achieve them as long as the international situation allows for that and they do not find a real international bloc to confront them.

However, the real edge of the abyss that Trump is taking America and the West to, which we mean in this article, is the edge of the abyss of Western civilization and the approach of its collapse, heralding the inevitability of the formation of a new civilizational system, and perhaps that is the only good thing behind the presence of Trump and his allies in power.
The fact is that the superman of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,´-or-the superman he preached, is embodied in the person of Donald Trump, this physical, utilitarian man, with an opportunistic pragmatic tendency, devoid of any human feelings, who does not know the requirements of human mercy and understands only his interests and nothing else, without caring about any human values.

Perhaps if Nietzsche had lived to see Trump, he would have changed many of his theses,´-or-would have collapsed from the poor and catastrophic interpretation of them.

Trump s inauguration is therefore a sign of the beginning of the collapse of Western civilization, and American civilization in particular, and then history will remember that moment well.

Here we see the complete compatibility of the Trumpian vision with the postmodernist view, as everything is for sale, including human dignity, values, eternal principles, history, and the rights of peoples to self-determination.
And that no one can resist the material temptations of the postmodern era, which, according to Trump s conviction, makes people their history from their memory, intoxicates them and puts them in a state of drunkenness and ecstasy due to the false, immediate material pleasures.

The American President Donald Trump himself is one of the latest products of postmodernism in its most degraded phase, an expression of its reaching the highest levels of human decadence, that empty and inwardly emptied body, and the wrestling man who glorifies power as a central value and does not care about human values.

The businessman and contractor where the values of profit and loss are the rulers and everything is negotiable and thus buy and sell, as sexual pleasures are called for and pushed to the maximum, excessive consumption, a life stripped of any real purpose, valueless work such as fashion shows, cosmetics, speculation and real estate brokerage, what is important to him is achieving the highest profit with the least effort. Also the inferior view of the other, the non-Western in particular, the one who is subhuman and therefore his life, possessions and wealth are permissible as long as that will achieve the ultimate happiness and well-being for the Western human being, he is truly (the permissible being), if we may borrow from the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben.

Also, the belief that money can buy everything, he, Trump, believes that he bought the presidential seat with his money and the money of his allies, and he is largely right about that.

Despite his secularism, we find him allied with extremist religious movements (such as religious Zionism´-or-Christian Zionism), which are able to consolidate the pillars of his state, and the end inevitably justifies the means.
If our great thinker Dostoevsky repeats that Western civilization has been characterized by three main features: (material utilitarianism, atrophy of moral sense, and self-centeredness), then Trump and his aides have pushed those characteristics and features to their extreme-limit-s.

I am certain that the moment he sits on the presidential chair is the inauguration of an era in which Western civilization, and American civilization in particular, enters a state of complete collapse after a period of moral and ethical decline that preceded it.

It is, therefore, the edge of the abyss. Trump is the new Hitler, but in its most vile and bloody version, who will lead America and the world order with it to the brink of madness.

( Mohamed Omara Taqi aldeen : Egyptian academic in political sociology and Arab-Zionist conflict)

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