Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman explains why the current US president may go down as a leader who changed the course of history and embodied the spirit of an age, whether he is ultimately successful or not. If future historians do indeed decide that Mr. Trump was a Hegelian world-historic figure, what might they say? (Read more on the Financial Times site)





GIDEON RACHMAN, FINANCIAL TIMES: When Donald Trump spoke at the UN last month, the audience laughed at him. It was an unprecedented insult to an American president. But I have an uneasy suspicion that Mr. Trump may have the last laugh. The 45th US president could yet go down as a leader who changed the course of history and embodied the spirit of an age.



The German philosopher Georg Hegel wrote about world-historical figures, could Mr. Trump be one of them?







To qualify for that title you don't have to be a good person or even intelligent. You just have to change history.



The quintessential world-historical figure of Hegel’s era was Napoleon, whom the German thinker described as the "world-spirit on horseback."



As the current president of France, Emmanuel Macron, explained, "Hegel viewed great men as instruments of something much greater. He believes that an individual can indeed embody the zeitgeist (world spirit) for a moment, but also that the individual isn’t always clear they are doing so."



If future historians do indeed decide that Mr. Trump was a Hegelian world-historic figure, what might they say?



First, that he broke decisively with the elite consensus about how the US should handle its relationship with the rest of the world. His method was to use U.S. power much more overtly and brutally in an effort to rewrite the rules of the global order to the U.S.'s advantage.



In particular, Mr Trump decided that globalisation, embraced by all his predecessors, was actually a terrible idea that was weakening America’s relative power and eroding the living standards of its people.



Mr. Trump also decided that a richer and more powerful China was obviously bad news for America — and he became the first president to try to block China's rise. Whether or not this is a good idea, it is undoubtedly a historic development, because it reverses more than 40 years of American foreign policy.



On the domestic front, future historians might note that Mr. Trump was the first president to notice the huge gap that had opened up between elite American opinion and that of the wider public — on a range of issues from immigration, to trade, to identity politics.



But will all this radicalism be crowned with success? From a Trumpian perspective, the early signs are positive -- the U.S. economy is booming while China's is sputtering. The U.S. Supreme Court has been reshaped. Under crushing American pressure, Mexico and Canada have agreed to rewrite their trade deal with America, and Mr. Trump stands a good chance of re-election in 2020.



Of course, it could all still go wrong. The Trump trade wars could backfire, the U.S. economy could overheat, the stock market could tank. In the worst case, Mr. Trump's confrontational style could lead to war with Russia and China.



But even ultimate failure and disaster might not invalidate Mr. Trump’s claim to be a truly historic president. Hegel suggested that things usually end badly for figures who re-shape history.



They die early like Alexander, they are murdered like Caesar; or transported to St Helena like Napoleon.



A cheering thought, perhaps, for Mr. Trump’s many foes, if not for the man himself.

