Category World News

Cuba’s highest court has ordered two prominent dissidents to be taken back into custody on the basis that both had separately violated the terms of their parole.

On Tuesday, the Tribunal Supremo Popular – sometimes translated as the People’s Supreme Court – authorised the arrests of Jose Daniel Ferrer and Felix Navarro.

“In addition to failing to comply with the terms of their parole, [Ferrer and Navarro] are people who publicly call for disorder and disrespect for authorities in their social and online environments and maintain public ties with the head of the United States embassy,” said Maricela Sosa, the court’s vice president.

Both men had been released earlier this year as part of a deal mediated by the late Pope Francis and the Catholic Church. As part of the agreement, Democrat Joe Biden, the outgoing United States president, briefly removed Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Biden’s decision was quickly reversed as Republican Donald Trump replaced him as president on January 20. The very next day, Trump ordered Cuba to be restored to the list, which restricts foreign assistance, defence sales and other financial interactions with designated countries.

Still, by March, Cuba had announced it had completed its end of the bargain, releasing a total of 553 people. While critics of the Cuban government have called them “political prisoners”, Havana maintained that the released people represented “diverse crimes”.

On Tuesday, the US Department of State issued a statement condemning the latest arrests, which also reportedly swept up Ferrer’s wife and child.

“The U.S. strongly condemns the brutal treatment and unjust detention of Cuban patriots [Ferrer], his wife and son, as well as Felix Navarro and several other pro-democracy activists,” it said in a social media post.

It added that the US Embassy in Havana “will continue meeting with Cubans who stand up for their fundamental rights and freedoms”.

One of the most prominent critics of the prisoner release was Ferrer himself. A fisherman and founder of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), Ferrer has advocated for democratic reforms on the island, leading to clashes with Havana’s community government.

In an interview with The New York Times following his release in January, Ferrer framed the Vatican-brokered deal as a publicity stunt for the Cuban government.

“In a gesture of supposed good will, they free a number of people who should never have been jailed, and then they want in exchange for that for the Church and the American government to make concessions,” Ferrer said.

“They are applauded, and the world sees that they are so generous.”

Ferrer had publicly refused to accept the conditions of his release, including mandatory court appearances, on the basis that he should have never been imprisoned in the first place.

Both he and Navarro had been arrested before, beginning in 2003 with an incident known as the Black Spring. That saw 75 dissidents be swept into detention based on accusations they were colluding with the US government.

Ferrer had also been arrested in 2019 on allegations he had kidnapped and assaulted a man, a charge he denies.

Then, in 2021, Cuba convulsed with mass protests at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as basic supplies like food and medicine grew scarce. Many protesters blamed the Cuban government for the shortages and denounced the limits to their civil liberties.

Cuba – which has long blamed US sanctions for the island’s economic distress – answered the demonstrations with a police crackdown, resulting in widespread arrests. Navarro and Ferrer were among those detained, until their release in January of this year.

In a series of social media posts, Ferrer’s sister Ana Belkis Ferrer Garcia announced he had been taken back into custody early on Tuesday morning. Her brother had recently been running a soup kitchen in the city of Santiago de Cuba.

She noted that UNPACU’s headquarters were “looted” and multiple activists were arrested, along with Ferrer’s wife Nelva Ismarays Ortega Tamayo and their son Daniel Jose.

“All of them were taken to an unknown location,” Ferrer Garcia wrote on X. “Miserable and cowardly criminal tyrants! We demand their immediate release and that of all detainees and political prisoners.”

Later, she added that Ortega Tamayo and Ferrer’s son were released “after being held for several hours”.

Human rights organisations also offered condemnations of Ferrer’s and Navarro’s arrests. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a nonprofit based in Spain, tied the incident to the death of Pope Francis, who passed away at age 88 on April 21.

“Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz-Canel have not waited even 72 hours after Francis’s burial to undo their commitments,” the observatory said in a statement, naming Cuba’s former and present president, respectively.

Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Although a child of war refugees, Victoria Ngo got to learn more about her Vietnamese identity only during her college years in the United States in the 1990s.

The eldest daughter in a refugee family with a Vietnamese father of Chinese descent, Ngo grew up in a Chinese-speaking community in the US and for a while thought of herself essentially as just Chinese.

As an inquisitive schoolgirl, Ngo had noticed the differences, though, between her experience as Vietnamese and those of the Chinese people she grew up with.

Curiosity about her identity increased over the years, partly because questions she asked about Vietnam went unanswered by her parents and other relatives.

“I lived with people who only spoke Chinese. My siblings and I went to Chinese school on the weekends,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I also speak Vietnamese, and my name is a Vietnamese name. My experience is very much a Vietnamese experience in the sense that I came as a refugee and came during the wave of the Vietnamese refugee,” she said.

But Vietnam was just not spoken about. And certainly not the war that ended 50 years ago when South Vietnam’s then-capital, Saigon, fell to North Vietnamese forces and their leaders in Hanoi.

Trying to fill in the missing pieces of her family’s past, Ngo recounted how she signed up to attend a conference about the war in Vietnam at her college, “thinking that my father would be proud of me”.

His response was stark and unexpected.

“He said, ‘If you go to that conference, you are not my daughter!’” Ngo recounted.

“And I was like, ‘Wow, I thought I was just learning about our history,’ to which he responds: ‘That is not our history.’”

Ngo’s experience is not uncommon among Vietnamese families who fled their country as refugees after Saigon fell on April 30, 1975.

The fall of Saigon ended the war and marked the reunification of North and South with Hanoi as the new capital of post-war Vietnam.

But many of those who worked under the US-aligned government of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam as it was then known – its civil servants, soldiers, businesspeople – chose exile over unification and living in a communist Vietnam.

Too many lives had been lost. Too much blood had been spilled – North and South – that many, like Ngo’s father, could never forgive nor live with their wartime foes in peacetime.

For others, exile as refugees would be a choice taken to stay with relatives who feared persecution – or so they believed – if they stayed in Vietnam after the war.

‘There is this void in our history that doesn’t get talked about’

The US-backed wars in the three countries of Indochina left huge losses in their wake. Laos and Cambodia suffered an estimated 1.45 million deaths under US bombings.

In Vietnam, there were an estimated 1.1 million military deaths on the communist North’s side alone and more than 254,000 on the side of the South Vietnamese republic. Compounded with civilian deaths, the estimated death toll from the war in Vietnam stands conservatively at 3.1 million people.

For the victorious communist forces, they were left with a country in ruin. The northern part of the country was subjected to heavy US bombings. The railroads were inoperable. Most of the major roads were bombed into cratered tracks. Its economy was shattered. The northern population had also witnessed decades of conflict after the onset of French colonial rule in the late 19th century.

Southern Vietnam’s urban infrastructure was less damaged by the war. The countryside was in ruins as rural areas had become the front lines in the guerrilla warfare that marked most of the fighting in the South.

Croplands and forests had been poisoned by the US use of defoliant, better known as Agent Orange, the highly toxic chemical compound that was sprayed from the air to deny communist fighters on the ground the cover of trees and other concealing foliage.

Millions of Vietnamese people were affected by the use of Agent Orange, including at least 150,000 children who would be born with severe physical, mental and developmental defects, and others are still being affected to this day because the soil remains poisoned.

Unexploded bombs – in the many hundreds of thousands of tonnes – still “contaminate” up to 20 percent of Vietnam’s territory due to the millions of tonnes of ordnance used in the war, according to the Vietnam National Mine Action Center.

While their April 30, 1975, victory marked an end to the war for the North Vietnamese, for the defeated US-backed government and people of the South, the war’s end was for many the start of lengthy separation from family in “reeducation camps” or permanent exile to Western countries, such as the US, Australia, Germany and Canada.

Before the fall of Saigon, Ngo’s father was a high school principal in South Vietnam. After April 30, 1975, he was placed in reeducation camps twice before he made a desperate decision to take his family out of the country on a rickety, overcrowded boat in 1978.

The family would spend half a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines before being accepted by the US as refugees.

By the time of their arrival in the US in the early 1980s, Ngo’s extended family had lost everything. Her immediate family, two aunts and uncles, and a grandmother and her relatives shared a two-storey, 30sq-metre (323sq-ft) subsidised housing unit in Los Angeles.

Her father could not teach in the US and ended up becoming a deep ocean fisherman as well as doing odd jobs to put food on the table.

The Vietnam they fled became a bad memory to be forgotten, Ngo said.

“There is this void in our history that doesn’t get talked about. You don’t know about what’s happened in the past,” she told Al Jazeera.

A profound sense of loss is a narrative shared by many Vietnamese refugee families – deep pain from the past that is felt across generations.

Within some families, any mention of the war risks evoking strong emotions and triggering past griefs. The sensitivity is such that silence about the past is sometimes preferred.

‘Deep pain from her past’

Cat Nguyen, a young American Vietnamese poet, experienced similar evasiveness when it came to family experiences of the war.

Now based in Ho Chi Minh City – the name given to Saigon after the war in honour of the founding father of the Vietnamese Communist Party – Cat Nguyen said little was shared about their family’s past before coming to the US.

“My family, in particular my grandma, harboured deep pain from her past,” Cat Nguyen told Al Jazeera.

Cat Nguyen’s family also has a complicated political history.

While a maternal grandfather was an active revolutionary who supported anticolonial efforts against the French in pre-independence Vietnam, a paternal grandfather served in the government of South Vietnam and a maternal grandmother was the principal of an American-English school in Saigon.

But in 1975, Cat Nguyen’s family on both sides, and its political divide, left Vietnam.

Cat Nguyen’s father was just 10 years old and mother was 13 when they left Vietnam. They were “uprooted from their native land in the blink of an eye” for a new life in the US, Cat Nguyen said.

“The first few years in the US were filled with sadness for them: difficulties adjusting to a strange land, a language they were not fluent in, a people who did not understand the world they [the Vietnamese refugees] were coming from,” Cat Nguyen said.

The trauma of fleeing Vietnam was also compounded by official accounts that cast the refugees and Vietnamese diaspora as abandoning their country in its hour of much-needed national reconstruction.

This year’s 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon will be celebrated by the Communist Party of Vietnam as a day of unification and also “liberation of the south”.

That message speaks to the aspirations of millions of Vietnamese in the north and south who made great sacrifices during the war, but the party’s official history is inevitably limited.

To this day, the experiences of many in southern Vietnam and their perspectives on the war – what motivated them to resist North Vietnam’s political leadership, including Ho Chi Minh – remain absent from the celebratory narratives.

In this fateful historical showdown, southerners who fled overseas as refugees are cast in the role of puppets or traitors, lured and manipulated by the enemy’s luxuries and propaganda into abandoning their own people.

Seeing their experiences erased and delegitimised after the war added to the pain of displacement for Vietnam’s diaspora communities. It also explains the anger still harboured towards Vietnam’s leadership by an older generation of refugees, such as Ngo’s father.

This is a multigenerational resentment that still rears its head when refugee parents believe their children are being exposed to positive narratives about bustling, economically thriving Vietnam five decades after the war – which they brand as “the North’s propaganda”.

‘You crossed an ocean for me to cross another’

It is not only contemporary Vietnam’s official version of history that is problematic.

Cat Nguyen realised there were also gaps when turning to American high school textbooks to learn about the war in Vietnam.

In those schoolbooks, Washington’s decades-long military involvement in Vietnam, which left millions of people dead and millions scattered across the world as refugees, only “a small paragraph” was devoted to “how the US fought against communism in Vietnam”, Cat Nguyen said.

Although supposedly sympathetic to their former South Vietnamese “allies”, Cat Nguyen told of a US-centric perspective that still subjects Vietnamese refugees to an “Americanised gaze”.

“An Americanised gaze of refugees, meaning that Americans viewed all Vietnamese as either dangerous, threatening communists or as helpless, infantilised refugees,” Cat Nguyen said.

Such narratives had helped to justify US intervention and military occupation of Vietnam to “save” the Vietnamese from themselves and communism.

“While it is true that Vietnamese refugees suffered greatly, this gaze strips human beings of their own agency and humanhood, displacing them into a framework that upholds the system of white supremacy,” said Cat Nguyen, who has called Vietnam home for more than two years.

Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen noted in his book Nothing Ever Dies that Vietnamese refugees were able to find in the US – in whatever limited space that was available to them – opportunities to tell their immigrant stories, to “insert themselves into the American dream”.

But it was precisely that “dream” that Cat Nguyen would eventually grow disenchanted with along with its “capitalist propaganda”.

The “American dream” has erased “the history of the US’s genocide of Indigenous populations, enslavement of Black and racialised peoples, and violent colonial and imperial projects”, they said.

It is not that Cat Nguyen never had tried to fit into US society. Rather, from a young age, Cat Nguyen told of constantly being made to feel different in a society that “never sees them as American enough”.

“Throughout my life, I watched as the Vietnamese parts of me slowly eroded. It wasn’t until the passing of my grandmother – the person who taught me the most about where I come from – that I began desperately searching for a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual return to my ancestral homeland and my humanity,” Cat Nguyen said.

Seeking to reconnect, Cat Nguyen has become involved in art projects in the form of poetry, performance and filmmaking that experiment with a range of elements in Vietnamese folklore and traditional musical instruments to “unapologetically” recommit to “the fight against colonisation, imperialism and capitalism”.

Drawn to identify with Vietnamese revolutionary fighters from “the other side”, Cat Nguyen spoke of finding a source of personal strength in their wisdom and dying for their cause.

That conviction has not led to a dismissal of Cat Nguyen’s own family’s suffering as refugees in the US, but the acknowledgement of the coexistence of intergenerational trauma that Vietnam’s official history fails to include.

One of Cat Nguyen’s poems pays homage to their late grandmother: “You crossed / an ocean / for me / to cross / another and then you crossed / a world / before I / could follow.”

Ngo never did attend the university conference on the war in Vietnam that her father had threatened to disown her over all those years ago.

That was out of respect for her father’s wishes. Since then, she has gradually come to see events in Vietnam during the war years and after from the North’s perspective – albeit with critical eyes.

“I definitely see that when anything is too centralised and too authoritarian, you have corruption. But if the leadership is very strong and competent, things can move very efficiently,” said Ngo, who relocated to Vietnam more than 20 years ago.

Like Cat Nguyen, Ngo understands the trauma her family members from the South suffered.

It inspired her to pursue a career in psychology and public health focused on underserved communities. She became an associate professor of community health and social sciences at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

“One of the reasons why I work with marginalised populations and vulnerable populations is because I also understand that experience having grown up as a refugee and in the early years not having very much,” Ngo said.

After more than two decades in Vietnam, Ngo has focused on equipping primary care clinics with the capacity to take care of poor people who suffer from mental health problems but lack access to care.

“I feel like my experience as a refugee has really made me think a lot about the human condition and what kinds of social resources and economic resources we need to put in place to help people in transition and who are marginalised, to help people who are displaced in one way or another,” she said.

For both Ngo and Cat Nguyen, being part of the Vietnamese diaspora and its painful past has given them a nuanced perspective on Vietnam’s history that is not readily found in the competing narratives of North and South.

Divided by the flag

Kevin D Pham said there was a recurring story he was told while growing up in a Vietnamese refugee family in San Jose, California.

“I was told by my high school teachers and especially my family that communists were bad, essentially,” said Pham, an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Amsterdam.

Pham’s paternal grandfather was imprisoned by communist Viet Minh forces in the 1950s, and his maternal grandfather was imprisoned in a reeducation camp after 1975 and died there from malnutrition.

From a young age, Pham was taught to be proud of his Republic of Vietnam family heritage. Although he appreciates this perspective, he did not uncritically accept what he was taught. After graduating from university, he lived in Vietnam for eight months and, there, came to learn about and sympathise with perspectives from the “other side”.

But growing up in the US, he told of listening to his uncle, who was a pilot, as he recounted the glory of his younger days when he fought “the communists” during the war.

Pham’s father, on the other hand, was only 16 years old when he was forced to leave Vietnam and did not have much direct experience of warfare. Still, his patriotism for the vanquished US-backed Southern government was still unwavering.

Pham recounts how, during his youth, older Vietnamese men would stop and salute as he and his father cruised down the streets of San Jose in his father’s bright yellow Ford Mustang, which had three horizontal red stripes painted on the bonnet to represent the flag of South Vietnam.

In Vietnam to this day, the South Vietnamese flag is still taboo.

Among staunch Vietnamese nationalists, the south’s “three-stripes”, or “ba que”, flag has become a popular slur, symbolising betrayal of the nation, defeat and humiliation. Any association with the former government’s flag, however remote, has also been used to denounce and alienate.

In early 2023, Hanni Pham, an Australian-Vietnamese singer with the Korean band New Jeans, got caught up in the flag controversy and was subjected to an online campaign, which started when online activists spotted a South Vietnamese flag in a video recording made when she visited her grandparents’ home.

The only public place where you can still find an actual three-stripe flag in Vietnam is in Hanoi at the newly built Vietnam Military History Museum, where one is displayed as a historical artefact.

Yet attempts to reconcile Vietnam’s fractious past date back decades.

In 1993, under Vietnam’s then-prime minister, Vo Van Kiet, the Communist Party’s Politburo issued a resolution that marked the first official attempt at reconciliation by encouraging the country to “respect differences, join hands in dismantling prejudices, shame, hatred, and look forward to the future”.

Kiet was sensitive to the plight of Vietnamese refugees, something that he witnessed within his own family. In a well known interview in 2005 that drew both praise and criticism, he described April 30, 1975, as a “great victory” but one that left “millions happy, millions in sorrow”.

“It is a scar that needs healing rather than left to bleed,” he said.

In November, then-president and incumbent general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, To Lam, made a historic appearance at Columbia University in the US with Lien-Hang Nguyen, the daughter of a refugee family who became the first director of Vietnamese studies at the university and who has worked on building bridges between the diaspora and Vietnam.

Their meeting reflected a broader spirit of unity and healing emerging among Vietnamese people long divided by the scars of war and political differences.

Kevin D Pham said he noticed how those who have strong views on the historical North-South divide in Vietnam commonly use the word “puppets” as a slur, whether referring to supporters of the South Vietnamese government as “puppets” of the Americans or the North’s supporters as “puppets” of the Soviet Union and China.

“There is this tendency on both sides of seeing the other side as puppets who cannot think for themselves,” Pham said, adding that it indicates a “lack of curiosity” about the other side’s perspective and has become “an obstacle to true reconciliation”.

“What I encourage instead is the ability to understand multiple perspectives,” he said.

For Cat Nguyen, what is fascinating is that the current national flag of Vietnam – a yellow, five-pointed star on a red background – which once brought painful memories to family members still in the US, is now a source of comradery throughout Vietnam.

This was experienced firsthand when the Vietnamese national football team won the 2024 ASEAN championship in January. Cat Nguyen described flag-waving crowds storming onto streets across the country in celebration of a sporting, not a political, event.

“I am empathetic to the suffering from both sides despite which flags they identify with, either the three-stripe or the red flag with yellow star,” Cat Nguyen said.

“Everyone experienced so much violence, and ultimately I assign the most blame to US imperialism.”

As he celebrated his first 100 days in office with a rally in the city of Michigan, President Donald Trump has pledged to restore jobs to the country.

As Trump pursues norm-busting trade, immigration, and government overhauls, the White House made the remarks on Tuesday, which were dubbed an “accomplissement speech.”

Trump praised what he described as “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in our country’s history.”

He continued, “And that’s according to many, many people.” Everyone is claiming that “we’ve only just begun.”

More than an hour later, the president spoke to the audience as he entered the stage to sing “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood.

He said his administration was “ending illegal immigration,” “taking back our jobs,” “restoring the rule of law,” and getting what he called “woke lunacy and transgender insanity the hell out of our government” while standing in front of a banner read “The Golden Age.”

He also made threats against former US presidents Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, continued his years-long criticism of the media, and falsely claimed that Democrats attempted to “rig” the 2024 election.

Trump then abandoned his tariff plan, which has stifled global markets and caused unease among industry leaders.

In response to US automakers’ protests, Trump signed an executive order hours earlier to ease some tariff restrictions. The order would stop Trump’s various tariffs on imported auto parts for American-made vehicles from “stacking.”

His administration has implemented 25% tariffs on almost all of its trade partners, 25% on steel and aluminum, and 25% on trade with Mexico and Canada that are not covered by a prior agreement.

Trump repeatedly claimed in his Michigan speech that the moves are part of a “hard reset” that will bring industries back to the US.

They all want to re-enter Michigan and begin producing cars, he said. You understand why, then. due to our tax and tariff policy.

Significant about Michigan

Patty Culhane, a journalist for Al Jazeera, described the location as significant. Trump won the election of Michigan last year, but his state, which relies heavily on the auto industry, may face one of the biggest blows from his tariff policy.

We are 32 kilometers [about 20 miles] from Detroit, Michigan, where we are. The “Big Three” automakers, which are General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, are located there, according to Culhane.

“We’ve seen automakers really speak out against these tariffs,” she said, noting that Donald Trump wants to see virtually no car made entirely in the US.

“Many T-shirts in the crowd feature the word “UAW,” the United Auto Workers union. Because they believe that these tariffs will eventually force businesses to re-enter the US, the union voted against them.

Recent polls have revealed that Trump’s supporters’ enthusiasm for the Michigan rally does not reflect the general public, with nearly every major pollster finding that the president has recently received more negative feedback than positive feedback.

These included separate Morning Consult and New York Times/Siena polls that revealed 54 percent of respondents’ disapproval, a Marist College poll that revealed 53 percent, and an Ipsos poll that revealed 55 percent.

Trump referred to the polls as “fake” and “run by a bunch of crooks.”

The Conference Board, a website that monitors consumer opinions on the US economy, released new data hours earlier on Tuesday that showed the US economy is struggling.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, confidence dropped by 7.9 points to 86 in April as a result of Trump’s tariff rollout, which was the lowest level since May 2020.

Trump told his supporters that officials were “coming from all over the world to see your president,” even though no new trade agreements have been reached since the country-specific tariffs were announced and then paused.

He claimed that they were trying to reach a deal.

Trump also criticized Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, for failing to do a good job.

He opposed congressional proposals to lower taxes, which nonpartisan budget experts claimed would add trillions to the country’s $ 36. 00 trillion debt.

Trump declared that there will be the biggest tax cuts in American history in the coming weeks and months, including no tax on tips, no on Social Security, and no overtime.

Reverse yourself

Democrats, on the Senate floor on Tuesday night, criticized Trump’s presidency under the counter-programming slogan “100 days of chaos,” with more speeches anticipated to last well into the night.

Senate Republicans were referred to as “co-conspirators” who secretly oppose Trump’s agenda but refuse to express their full opposition.

The president is testing and violating our Constitution, destroying our image abroad, and gaining power for himself as the economy falters, the chamber’s No 2 Democrat, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, said.

“The Republican-controlled legislative branch seems to have lost all ambition as Donald Trump’s administration becomes too inflexible,” he writes. “In fact, the lambs’ silence is what drives the conversation.”

Aside from the community college where Trump’s rally was held, there were protests as well.

A busy street there was lined with hundreds of demonstrators who carried upside-down US flags and waved signs that read, “I dissent.”

Donald Trump’s world view can be challenging to pin down in Washington, DC.

During the first 100 days of his second term, the United States president started a global trade war, targeting allies and foes alike. Additionally, he also signed decrees requiring the US to leave, among other international forums, the Paris Agreement on climate and the World Health Organization.

Trump continued to make contradictory foreign policy proposals, including “owning” Gaza and annexing Greenland, taking over the Panama Canal, and “owning” the country of Israel.

And despite promising to be a “peace” president, Trump has said he intends to take the US annual Pentagon budget to a record $1 trillion.

He has distanced himself from a neo-conservative foreign policy and does not support democracy or human rights abroad. His “America First” stance and skepticism of NATO are in line with realist principles, but his impulsivity and diplomacy deviate from the norm.

At the same time, he has not called for a full military or diplomatic retreat from global affairs, setting him apart from isolationists.

What precisely motivates Trump’s foreign policy?

According to experts, the current global system is primarily fueled by dissatisfaction, which unfairly discredits the US with its rules and restrictions. Instead, Trump appears to want Washington to leverage its enormous military and economic power to set the rules to assert global dominance while reducing US contributions and commitments to others.

According to Josh Ruebner, a lecturer at Georgetown University’s Program on Justice and Peace, “the Trump doctrine is “scrap and grab,” allowing your allies to do the same.

Simply “tearing down”

Mathew Burrows, programme lead of the Strategic Foresight Hub at the Stimson Center think tank, said Trump wants US primacy without paying the costs that come with that.

According to Burrows, a veteran of the US Department of State and CIA, “he’s withdrawing the US from the rest of the world, especially economically.”

He continued, “But at the same time, he somehow thinks the US will be able to persuade other nations to end fighting and to do whatever the US wants.” “Hegemony just doesn’t work that way”.

Trump appears to think that using US influence to sway world leaders to accept his demands, he can get tariffs imposed, and occasionally using violence.

However, some critics claim that the US president rejects other nations’ ability to support nationalism, which eventually leads to opposition. Such was the case for Canada.

Following Trump’s call for Canada to become the 51st state, there was a wave of nationalist pride in our northern neighbor and an abrupt transition from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Party.

Foreign governments have accused Trump of “bullying” and blackmail, including China and Canada.

Some of Trump’s Democratic rivals have rushed to accuse him of abandoning the US global role, but at the same time, the US president has been projecting American strength to pressure other countries.

His approach is significant in contrast to that of his predecessor, despite its minor differences.

We are the unquestionable nation, according to the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was famous in 1998. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future”.

According to Albright, that alleged power and wisdom enabled the US to carry out Pax Americana, the idea of a peaceful global order under Washington’s leadership.

Trump may not agree with Albright’s assertion that the US is supposedly taller than other countries.

“America does not need other countries as much as other countries need us”, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this month.

However, she emphasized that other countries must engage in trade with the US to avoid Trump’s tariffs.

Trump wants to create jobs and revenues in this context rather than an international system governed by liberal values, as Washington envisions.

However, Burrows said the chief aim of Trump’s foreign policy is to dismantle the existing global order.

According to Burrows, “his negative attitudes toward the current order, where others appear to be rising,” are a big part of his worldview. And so, a lot of it is simply torn down.

The global order

Following World War II, the US took the lead in establishing much of the system that governs international relations.

Global affairs have been shaped by the United Nations and its organizations, international law, international treaties, trade agreements, and formal alliances for decades.

Critics of Washington point out that the US violated and opted out of the system where it saw fit.

For instance, the US did not sign the 1998 International Criminal Court Statute, which established the International Criminal Court. In a clear violation of the UN Charter, it invaded Iraq in 2003 without the UN Security Council’s consent. And it has been providing unconditional support to Israel despite the US ally’s well-documented abuses against Palestinians.

According to Matthew Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, “the United States has done a lot to support sort of multilateral institutions – the UN and others – that are based on these ideas.”

However, he continued, citing former US President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war against Gaza and President George W. Bush’s policies, including extraordinary rendition, torture, invasion, and protracted occupation. “The United States has always found ways to violate these norms and laws when it when it serves our purposes,” he continued.

But for Trump and his administration, there are indications that the global order is not just to be worked around, it needs to go.

During his confirmation hearing in January, Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio said, “The post-war global order is no longer just obsolete. It is now a weapon being used against us.”

Politics of grievance

Trump recently claimed that “almost every nation in the world” has “ripped off” the US.

His domestic policy rhetoric seems to resemble his promise to care for “America’s forgotten men and women” who have been treated unfairly by the “elites” domestically.

While the modern world order has empowered US companies and left the country with immense wealth and military and diplomatic might, Americans do have major issues to complain about.

Due to globalization, US jobs were moved abroad to countries with lower labor costs. Strategic errors that led to a generation of veterans with physical and mental injuries are largely seen as biased interventionist policies, particularly those that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a centre-right think tank in Washington, DC, noted that wages have stagnated for many Americans for decades.

According to Kabaservice, “the benefits of globalization were very poorly distributed, and some people at the top made enormous plutocratic sums of money that did not pass down to the working class’s general population,” Kabaservice claimed.

Voting Trump was “retribution” against the system, according to Kabaservice, who added that Trump’s “America First” strategy has pitted the US against the rest of the world for those who saw their factories closed and felt like they were living in “left-behind areas.”

“America is turning its back on the world”, Kabaservice said. Trump claims that America can be self-sufficient in all things, but it is already proving false.

According to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a think tank dedicated to diplomacy, Trump’s foreign policy, including his approach to allies, is influenced by “the politics of grievance.”

“He does believe that the United States – because of its role as world policeman, which he’s not necessarily in love with – has been shouldering a lot of the security burden of the world without getting proper compensation”, Parsi told Al Jazeera.

The US president has been suggesting that Washington should be paid more for stationing troops in allies like Germany and South Korea while calling on NATO allies to increase their defense spending.

Nostalgia

What is Trump’s opinion of the world then?

“He’s an aggressive unilateralist, and in many ways, he’s just an old-school imperialist”, Duss said of Trump. He desires to “extend” American soil. He wants to evict wealth from other regions of the world. “This is a classic example of foreign policy,” he says.

He noted that Trump’s foreign policy is to act aggressively and unilaterally to achieve what he sees as US interests.

According to Kabaservice, Trump wants the US to go back to a time when it was a major producer and not overly involved in global affairs.

He said, “He enjoys the idea that maybe the United States is a great power, sort of in a model from the 19th century,” and that it enables the other great powers to have their own sphere of influence.

Kabaservice added that Trump wants the US to have “its own sphere of influence” and to be “expanding in the way that optimistic forward-moving powers are”.

Rubio’s assertion that there is a “multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet” was supported by the notion of an America with its own “sphere of influence” earlier this year.

Parsi put it this way: despite his aversion to regime change, Trump is foremost seeking hemispheric hegemony, which is why he put an emphasis on acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal.

“You’re shifting not from the politics of domination towards restraint, you’re shifting from the politics of global domination to a more limited form of domination”, Parsi told Al Jazeera.

“Your own hemisphere is your only focus.”

When these nostalgia and grievance views have practical applications, the US may already have seen what happens. Trump’s erratic trade policy rocked the US stock market and sparked threats of counter-levies from Canada to the European Union to China.

Trump eventually delayed many of his tariffs, maintaining a 10% levie baseline and additional import taxes on Chinese goods. The US president acknowledged that the suspension of the measures was a result of how the tariffs were received. “People were jumping a little bit out of line. He claimed that they were becoming agitated.

In the end, Kabaservice told Al Jazeera, “Trump’s unilateralism and unpredictability have significantly damaged the world’s trust.”

“In the broad span of history, Trump will be seen as the person who committed terrible unforced errors that led to the end of the American century and the beginning of the Chinese century”, he said.

The US president declared that his legacy would be “that of peacemaker and unifier” in his inauguration speech earlier this year.