I want to begin with this obvious fact: Obama's foreign policies were not revolutionary or an upset to the world order (first-rate powers, second-rate powers, third-rate, and so on), but deeply continuous with a set of geopolitical objectives and protocols that were established after the Second World War and initiated the American Age. In fact, Obama repaired much of the damage caused by his predecessor's globally unpopular war, and he reaffirmed the US's commitment to and leadership of its first-rate allies.

The next fact is this: Trump rose to power by exciting the racist passions of the GOP's base. The general feeling of this huge section of white America is that even “good Negro governance, ” as Ta-Nehisi Coates has called it, is intolerable because it annihilates a key structural feature of this feeling—that white superiority is really something within (innate, a-temporal) and not cultural (inculcated, historical). In the justifications that made the US's 400-year economic dependence on free, black African labor morally possible you will find precisely what's thrown into crisis when the non-essence of whiteness is exposed. Often, this kind of existential crisis can only find peace when under a tombstone or in a box filled with ashes.

So, all of the evidence we have shows that Obama did not dismantle American Empire. Indeed, he did the opposite. He reinforced it and in some cases improved its geopolitical positions. If this is clearly the case, then what exactly is Trump doing in the White House? What is the meaning of his decisions and policies, if they are discontinuous with those of Obama's? Can we attribute Trump's rejection of the established protocols for the maintenance of Empire to a pee tape? To the dark influence of a hostile power? Or is he really doing all of this to protect and re-create jobs in rural America?

My feeling is that any explanation of Trump's presidency that does not follow the dark/black coastline of Obama's presidency is basically blue-water sailing in a ship with broken instruments and spoiled supplies.

Remove the racial hatred of Obama, and you are left with no hard explanations for why the US pulled out of an agreement that placed it in a leadership position with first-rate powers. Now, it is in the strange situation of being, one, dragged down an enervating foreign policy course by second- and third-rate powers; and, two, using whatever strength it has left to force its closest allies to break with the logic of Empire (global capitalism) and conform with a logic whose only value is the maintenance of a sense of superiority for a mostly aging section of American white voters. True, the two (Empire and Racism) have often been close; but after World War II, they became more and more dissociated to improve the US's standing and appearance in a geopolitical order structured by the Cold War.

The question is: Will the world bend to Trump's will? Does the American Empire have that kind of strength? A strength that's already being tested by North Korea ("Kim Jong Un complained of 'U.S. hegemonism' to Russia’s visiting foreign minister [last week]"), and India ("India is ignoring US sanctions and sticking with Iran"); and now Canada, the US's second-biggest trading partner, is openly resisting Trump (Trudeau called the rationale for the tariffs "frankly insulting and unacceptable"). And when Trump is not threatening another very close and first-rate ally, Germany, with tariffs, his ambassador to that country, Richard Grenell, is talking about removing its democratically elected leader, Angela Merkel, from power. These are very strange times.

So, can American Empire impose on the world today a will that has no other justification than the destruction of anything that recalls eight years of "good Negro governance"?

I think Paul Krugman provided an answer in his May 31 column "Oh, What a Stupid Trade War":

Finally – and I think this is really important – we’re dealing with real countries here, mainly democracies. Real countries have real politics; they have pride; and their electorates really, really don’t like Trump. This means that even if their leaders might want to make concessions, their voters probably won’t allow it. ...

So this is a remarkably stupid economic conflict to get into. And the situation in this trade war is likely to develop not necessarily to Trump’s advantage.