As Donald Trump’s global tariffs come into effect – with the world continuing to reel and the markets still in turmoil from the shock of their announcement – it makes sense to look for parallels in US political history to try and better understand the plan.

The law-breaking of the Nixon administration and his eventual resignation may be comparable, as may Eisenhower’s bitter anti-left attacks of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. You could perhaps also compare Trump’s actions to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential directive to intern 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were held for years in grim conditions, after Pearl Harbour in 1941.

But the most relevant and most recent comparison is that of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) barely 25 years ago.

PNAC was a neo-conservative think tank established in 1997 amid right-wing dissatisfaction over Bill Clinton’s failure to capitalise on the US’s post-Cold War status as the world’s only superpower. It would go on to play a key role in shaping US foreign policy after Republican George W Bush won the 2000 presidential election.

The organisation’s founding statement said it was crucial for the US to “shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests” and “accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles”.

Ten of the 25 people who signed that statement went on to serve in Bush’s administration, where they quickly set to work on enacting its principles. With the plan already mapped out, they were able to enact foreign and security policy decisions in their first six months in office that were comparable in scope and pace to those undertaken by Trump in recent months.

One such decision was withdrawing the US from the Kyoto climate change protocols, along with opposition to the idea of climate change even being a problem. Others include Bush’s antagonism to the planned International Criminal Court and his suspicion of arms control agreements including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.

Five months into Bush’s administration, the New American Century was beginning to take shape, ably summarised by a leading neoconservative commentator, Charles Krauthammer, in The Washington Standard on 4 June 2001:

“Multipolarity, yes, when there is no alternative. But not when there is. Not when we have the unique imbalance of power that we enjoy today – and that has given the system a stability and essential tranquillity it had not known for at least a century. The international environment is far more likely to enjoy peace under a single hegemon. Moreover, we are not just any hegemon. We run a uniquely benign imperium.”

Then, three months later came 9/11. The reaction of Bush and PNAC to that crisis may offer some lessons for the future of the Trump world vision, particularly in light of the major global financial downturns we’ve seen since he unveiled new tariffs on all US imports in last week’s ‘Liberation Day’ speech.

Bush’s immediate response to the attacks was a huge US military effort to terminate the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and disperse the al-Qaida movement. This was backed by PNAC, which sent a letter to the president days after 9/11 commending his new “war on terrorism” and urging him to extend it to Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The organisation had been pushing for this since 1998, when it wrote to then-president Clinton to demand it.

With the war in Afghanistan initially seeming to succeed, Bush was emboldened. His State of the Union Address in January 2002 made abundantly clear that the US would act as it saw fit and view all other states as being either ‘with us or against us’.

To rapturous applause, including scores of standing ovations, he said:

“…the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”

Ignoring several analysts who warned that any early success in Afghanistan would turn out to be a trap, Bush went on to agree to PNAC’s demands on Iraq, which he termed another “axis of evil”. He ordered US forces to invade in March 2003, entering PNAC’s global ‘war on terror’.

Less than a year later, US and allied forces in Afghanistan were engaged in a bitter counterinsurgency conflict that would last 20 years and end in ignominious defeat at the hands of the Taliban.

Iraq degenerated into another insurgency complicated by internal confessional conflict that lasted almost as long, and even now leaves Islamist paramilitary groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS ensconced across much of the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.

Overall, the violence of the post-9/11 conflicts, which PNAC was instrumental in orchestrating, has led to over four million people being killed directly or indirectly and close to 40 million people being displaced.

PNAC closed in 2006, having been largely overshadowed by failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but remains relevant today.

Make America Great Again may not have been coined for the Bush era but the sympathies are similar enough. While PNAC and Bush’s vision had a stronger element of ideology than Trump’s – whose first focus is always Trump, followed only by the accumulation of American wealth – both movements believe the US to be the world leader in all things that matter.

And although the Trumpian transition has so far been more rapid, both approaches share a similar arrogance and hubris, are frequently disorganised and have unplanned consequences.

Until last week, the new Trump administration seemed firmly set in its ways, confident in its ability to carve out the future it wants. That is already in question, especially with the highly adverse reaction to the US’s “liberation by tariff”.

Bush’s Project for the New American Century failed slowly, with terrible human consequences in the post-9/11 wars. It will be deeply ironic if Trump fails much more quickly because of his own wacky ideas, pushed through with the help of the incompetent sycophants he has surrounded himself with.

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