Donald Trump loves giving two fingers to the world’s great political brains. Before the US election, for example, Rory Stewart predicted that Kamala Harris would strut to victory. The sage of the centrist dads had egg on his face when the Donald won with 77 million votes. But now he’s in power, there’s a less likely – and considerably more impressive – commentator Trump is posthumously contradicting: Immanuel Kant.
In his 1795 essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ (which any undergraduate student of politics will be painfully familiar with), Kant posited that a world made up of constitutional republics is the only possible precondition for a lasting global peace. It is this principle that provided the foundation of the post-war international political consensus – that like-minded democracies who have no interest in fighting one another should coalesce under supra-national bodies, such as the European Union, to ensure that tyranny can never again wreak havoc across the globe.
With Trump’s appetite for a good deal, anything is possible
But we’re not in Kansas any more.
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