From seeking to upend the global order to espousing the belief that might is right, to expressing expansionist aspirations and racist rhetoric, the US president’s actions echo that of the fascist dictator
US President Donald Trump takes questions during a press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 13. Pic/AFP
It is myopic of all nations, including India, to simply tote up their gains and losses in their dealings with the United States of America, for President Donald Trump poses a threat to them far graver than their pecuniary interests. Since taking office, his avalanche of executive orders and pronouncements suggest he wants to void the rules governing the international order, particularly the sanctity of national sovereignty. This, to him, is the path to Make America Great Again (MAGA).
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Roughly a century ago, a German strived to restore the Great Power status to his country, which had been vanquished in World War I. The international rules framed thereafter, he too thought, impeded Germany’s quest for greatness. He went about flouting them.
It is now Trump who has launched an assault on the global architecture of security and trade that the US played the most vital role in establishing. It is because of America’s image as the world’s oldest democracy, valuing freedom and human rights, that Trump’s ongoing wrecking game is perceived as merely a strategy to get the best deals for the US.
Yet the similarity between Adolf Hitler’s method in the 1930s and Trump’s in 2025 is stark. Hitler walked out of the League of Nations, as has Trump from the Paris Agreement, which all nations endorsed for tackling climate change—and which Trump thinks is an obstacle to MAGA. Quit he has also the World Health Organisation.
Hitler upended international treaties, remilitarised the Rhineland, annexed Austria in 1938, and declared he would occupy Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in the pursuit of creating Lebensraum, or Living Space for Germans. The rival powers thought diplomatic deals could contain him. In September 1938, in Munich, Britain, France and Italy agreed to cede Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for Hitler renouncing his claims to the rest of Czechoslovakia, which was absent from the meeting. The next year, Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia.
Elements of 1938 exist in 2025: After conversing with President Vladimir Putin, Trump declared Russia was willing to end the war in Ukraine. It might have made for cheerful news but for Trump’s defence secretary ruling out Ukraine becoming a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a compelling reason for the war there, nor regaining its border as it existed in 2014, the year in which Putin annexed Crimea. As was true of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich meet, Trump didn’t take Ukraine’s consent, thus weakening its bargaining power and, possibly, redrawing Europe’s map.
Trump’s disdain for the weak was displayed when, flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has bombed and killed over 47,000 Palestinians, he said Gaza’s population should shift to Jordan and Egypt, and the place be taken over by the US for building “the Riviera of the Middle East.” To the two Arab countries saying they won’t accept Palestinians, Trump responded, “I say they will.” Not too different from Hitler going on an annexation spree regardless of what other powers thought.
Trump’s belief in white supremacy, as false as Hitler extolling the superiority of the mythical Aryan race to which, he claimed, Germans belonged, has driven him to suspend all American assistance to South Africa. The reason cited: South Africa’s Expropriation Law, which allows the government to acquire land in public interest without, in certain instances, paying compensation, after going through a justification process subject to judicial review. This law seeks to redistribute land in South Africa, where its roughly eight per cent of white population owns nearly 70 per cent of farmland. Trump accused South Africa of discriminating against its white citizens, whom he promised to resettle in the US, in sharp contrast to his hostile attitude to non-white immigrants.
Hitler’s idea of Lebensraum aimed to unite all Germans in one Empire. Trump has repeatedly spoken of turning Canada into America’s 51st state. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he takes Trump’s threat seriously as he covets Canada’s critical minerals. For the same reason, he wants to gobble up Greenland. He has sanctioned International Criminal Court officials for issuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister. Trump’s blindness to mass killings and lust for expansion replicate Hitler’s.
Trump’s disregard for rules is wreaking havoc in the US, too. He has paused the functioning of United States Agency for International Development, throwing into disarray humanitarian projects worldwide, and plans to reduce its staff to five per cent of its current strength. Thousands of bureaucrats are due to be purged, deemed lacking in commitment to the Trumpian worldview. This is reminiscent of the Hitler era. America’s famed Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness programme has been put on hold, evoking apprehensions of cherished American values being crushed under MAGA’s wheels.
In this uncertain environment, India should cut deals with Trump, but without forgetting that his conception of the new global order gives primacy to the credo of “might is right”—and is a veritable invitation for the strong, including China, to feast upon the weak. Trump will renege on deals, discard and hitch allies to the MAGA bandwagon, as Hitler too did in the 1930s. Delhi’s quiescence—as on Gaza and South Africa, for instance—cannot shield India from the blowback of Trump’s disruption of the world order.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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