Revenge of the Sovereignistas - TomDispatch.com

Revenge of the Sovereignistas - TomDispatch.com John Feffer, The Global Backlash Against Globalization Posted on August 1, 2024 Recently, as TomDispatch regular John Feffer reminds us today, Vladimir Putin met with Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, North Korea. And though no one mentioned it, there was, in fact, a missing participant in that meeting. I’m sure you know just whom I’m thinking of — the American president who pursued Kim back in 2019 and, while he never visited Pyongyang, at one point took 20 steps into North Korea. While president, he also praised that country’s leader for “having a great and beautiful vision for his country.” Only recently, in his address at the Republican convention, he said of Kim, “I get along with him. He’d like to see me back, too. I think he misses me, if you wanna to know the truth.” As for Putin, Trump had any number of complimentary things to say about him while in office and, in 2022, praised his invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy.” Only this year, he insisted that he had told “one of the presidents of a big [NATO] country,” not (in his opinion) putting enough money into its defense budget that, when it came to Putin’s Russia, “I would encourage [the Russians] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.” Now, imagine that the same man is once again in a race for the presidency, that he’s already made mincemeat out of Joe Biden, who only recently bowed out, and, if the polls are to be believed, still stands a reasonable chance of returning to power in Washington (or if not, of causing untold crises verging on a possible civil war). He is, in short, the ultimate all-American nationalist (but only, of course, if that nation is run by a leader by the name of Donald Trump). Either way, he could be the ultimate destroyer of nations, including this one. And with that in mind, consider Feffer’s look at a planet on the brink of what could indeed be a new nationalism of an unnervingly Trumpian sort. Tom