Trump's cost to the US is very heavy

In international relations, the fact that a country has the power to do something does not mean it can use that power as it pleases. Exercising power sets another power in motion against it, and in that case the cost of using power is to reach the limits of one's own power quickly and to exhaust it.

The United States has never owed the power it holds internationally to always using it recklessly and flaunting it before all and sundry. On the contrary, that power has rested on the trust it gave that it would not use it without rules, on its ability to tell friend from foe, and on the strong impression it gave that its use of power was under control. In this sense, the greatest power is credibility.

When the United States under the Trump administration began to use the dollar and trade tariffs as a trump card in its political dispute with Turkey in particular, it completely exhausted the trust placed both in itself and in the dollar. For that reason, the greatest cost to the US administration of its operation against Turkey has been the loss of this trust, but this is not the whole of the loss, only its beginning.

In fact, the dollar has been presented as an autonomous entity that, whatever happens, should never even occur to US politics as something to be used, or never does. But it has never been left autonomous in its own domain as it was presented; the dollar has always been the trump card or the weapon of covert operations. The difference in what we are living through today is that this is being done very recklessly and openly.

This hands all the international powers of the world, on a plate, the opportunity they have been seeking in the heavens for a revolt against the dollar. We have heard so many legends about how an intention or attempt to leave the dollar cost a country or its leader their end; from now on we will hear plenty of ordinary scenarios saying that this is not so difficult after all. From now on we are entering a process in which the collapse of the dollar becomes inevitable.

Law is another field that, whatever happens, should never even occur to US politics as something to be used. The legends about the independence of the legal apparatus from politics in the US are more rigid than the American legend itself. Examples of even US presidents being put on trial while still in office further reinforce this legend. Yet even there, the fact that the law is sometimes independent of presidents does not mean it is entirely independent of politics.

In the end, within a diversified politics, presidents and judges may find themselves on opposite sides, but this does not mean that judges are entirely remote from and independent of politics, just as they are not entirely remote from capital or oligarchic formations. The US authorities, who tried to make Turkey memorize this legend in the matter of the Deputy General Manager of Halkbank or in the FETÖ case, have, when it comes to Turkey's law in connection with the Brunson matter, come to the point of voicing the assumption that the law is suddenly a matter between the two lips of a politician, which is in fact like a confession about their own situation.

There is one thing Turkey has achieved in the Brunson case. That is that the following question has been asked forcefully: You expect us to believe that courts exist in the US, so why do you not believe that courts exist in Turkey?

We do not fail to see here how a disgusting Orientalist prejudice is at work. This prejudice keeps insisting that there is no independent, autonomous judicial institution in the Islamic world, and hence in Turkey, whereas it exists in their own countries. On the occasion of the Brunson case, Turkey offers an extraordinary opportunity for those who hold this Orientalist prejudice to confront their own reality.

The US, which on the basis of some data it has found that they did not comply with the embargo it imposed through its own tyranny, held free citizens of Turkey, whom it rounded up in their own country without account or reckoning, or people it picked up at random, for years in Guantanamo under irrational and merciless conditions of torture without trial, can claim "innocence in essence and forever" for one of its citizens who is held in Turkey with near-conclusive evidence of cooperation with putschists and terrorists. The hypocrisy the US displays regarding its citizen to whom it has attributed a self-appointed innocence also demolishes its claim to the rule of law in its own country.

Another, heavier cost of Trump's policy to the US is the alternative power that has begun to form against the dollar and the US. Today we are talking about a process that brings China, Russia and Iran, and then its only ally in the region, Turkey, as well as the European countries, together on one front against the US. The world of the future will indeed be a world in which American hegemony has disappeared.

We used to see this as a very distant future; thanks to Trump, this future has come very close.