AMERICA THE APEX PREDATOR SHARPENS ITS TEETH / THE FINANCIAL TIMES MAGAZINE

America the apex predator sharpens its teeth

Who’s eating who in the new geopolitical food chain

Simon Kuper

© Harry Haysom

Canada, Denmark and Panama spent most of the past 80 years in the geopolitical equivalent of a petting zoo. 

In a petting zoo, nobody’s allowed to eat the animals. 

The zookeeper keeps everybody fed. Even defenceless sheep and rabbits can thrive. 

But now, Donald Trump is emptying out the zoo into the wild. 

That means every country needs to perform a food-chain audit: who wants to eat us, and how can we stop them?

The jungle is the geopolitical norm, argues international-relations scholar Robert Kagan in his 2018 book The Jungle Grows Back. 

The jungle has no rules to stop predators eating prey. 

This was the global state of affairs until 1945. 

Then two wounded predators, Japan and Germany, went vegetarian. 

Soon afterwards, the chief colonial predators, Britain and France, retreated to their lairs. 

Lions lay down with lambs. 

Only a few unlucky regions — especially the Sahel, Central Africa, the Middle East and countries bordering Russia — remained at the mercy of predators.

The US led a double life. 

Inside the petting zoo, it was chief zookeeper. 

Outside, it moonlighted as an ineffectual lion king, breaking its teeth on indigestible prey such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some protected countries thrived. 

Poland, savaged for centuries by Russia and Germany, suddenly found itself without predators around 1990 and has since been one of the world’s fastest growing economies. 

South Korea achieved something similar. 

Predator-free Australia zoomed along unstoppably.

Others in the petting zoo got lazy. 

The UK lacked the self-protective realism of Poland or Korea. 

Brexit is the kind of mistake you make when you have no natural predators and think, “What’s the worst that could happen?” 

Most protected countries stopped worrying about defending themselves. 

The American zookeeper handled that.

Then the zoo changed keepers. 

The perfect metaphor for the Trump administration was provided by Caroline Kennedy, describing her cousin Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s nominated health and human services secretary: “It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because [he] himself is a predator … he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.”

Trump, an instinctive predator, was never going to be a zookeeper. 

He wants the US to act like a canny, low-risk lion that only attacks or steals the food of defenceless small prey. 

His current target, Canada, is like the marine iguana of the Galápagos Islands, which evolved to sunbathe spreadeagled on rocks because it didn’t have predators. 

The iguanas had to wise up when visitors introduced dogs. 

Now it’s Canada’s turn.

Trump is more respectful of his two fellow apex predators, China and Russia (a wolf with a high risk-appetite). 

He placed lower initial tariffs on China than on Mexico and Canada, perhaps because China has sharper teeth.

The three apex predators have avoided major wars with each other. 

All three built their national mythology on an uncharacteristic period when they found themselves prey: the American Revolution, China’s “century of humiliation” from 1839 to 1949 and Russia’s battle against Hitler. 

That’s because hardly anyone likes to see themselves as an unprovoked predator. 

The exception is Trump: it’s his self-image.

Now he is signalling to the others: let’s each fill our bellies in our own part of the jungle. 

Smaller animals are panicking. 

Peoples at the bottom of historical food-chains, Palestinians and Kurds, tend to fare worse than everyone else when the jungle grows back elsewhere. 

Europeans are thinking, “We’re lambs. 

How can we survive? 

Let’s pretend there aren’t any lions.” 

Poland, which understands predators, has been quickest to evolve defences.

One country benefiting from the recent upheaval is Syria. 

In the late 2000s, Iran replaced the wounded American lion as the region’s chief predator. 

But now it has limped home, leaving Syria to enjoy an almost unprecedented window between predators.

Yet small animals can survive in jungles. 

One protective mechanism is what biologists call reciprocal altruism: taking risks to help each other, such as a bird calling to warn others about the presence of a predator, even if that call draws the predator’s attention to it. 

Reciprocal altruism works best when there are many lifetime interactions between creatures, giving them frequent chances to reciprocate. 

That describes international relations. 

States can expect to deal with Denmark or Canada for centuries, whereas the Trumpian lion will probably go extinct soon.