The liberal international order may not be dead, but it is dying. Multilateralism too is waning, if not on its last legs. Globalization from above is, of course, yesterday’s story. For long, the US acted both as a guarantor for a system of global trade and as a defensive umbrella for the Western alliance. It cost the US billions, but it bolstered its image as a preeminent global power. That is no longer the case. Trump is now ushering in a new imperial age with imperialist designs.
With the advent of Trumpism, it’s not clear yet precisely what this new operating system will look like. There is confusion all around. Many strategic analysts believe Europe is reliving a 1938 moment. It refers to a situation when bigger powers seek to decide the fate of a country without its involvement. In 1938, agreements were signed allowing Nazi Germany to annex German-populated territories in then-Czechoslovakia, setting the stage for the Second World War.
Finland’s President Alexander Stubb warns, Europe has to choose between the Yalta moment and the Helsinki moment. The Yalta moment marked a division of Europe among the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union. The Helsinki moment helped ease Cold War tensions. Some experts have proclaimed the death of the Helsinki moment.
The world has turned upside down. As Simon Tisdall, columnist with The Guardian, says, Trump’s world is a “disordered world of raw power, brute force, selfish arrogance, dodgy deals, and brazen lies.”
The US-Europe divide is a new reality. The phase of liberal triumphalism is over. As Robert Kagan in his seminal book, Of Paradise and Power, says, the United States and Europe are from different planets. While the martial Americans are from Mars, the pacifist Europeans are from Venus. Suddenly, they appear to be from different centuries.
Marcel H. van Herpen, director of The Cicero Foundation, has identified six dimensions of the growing transatlantic divide: a transatlantic perception gap, a transatlantic capabilities gap, a transatlantic attitude gap, a transatlantic value gap, a transatlantic religion gap, and a transatlantic strategy gap.
Suddenly, Europe realizes that the world in which it felt cozy and comfortable has withered away. How can Europe expect respect and demand a sense of equality with Washington when 70 percent of all NATO spending is American? Trump has told Europeans that the US would no longer purchase European peace and prosperity with American blood and treasure.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio believes that the world is now “multipolar” or is “inevitably heading in that direction.” Which multipolar world is he referring to? Way back in 2009, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also talked of the world’s desire to move “away from a multipolar world” towards a “multi-partner world.”. A more realistic view of the current world is the advent of “multi-great powers.”
China’s muscular rise, BRICS’ growing clout, and now Trump’s new unilateralism and sovereigntist worldview in global affairs have hastened the end of the liberal international order.
Europe is reconciling to a new reality: Europe without America. While the US has snubbed and publicly humiliated Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Europe is now embracing a “coalition of the willing” to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants Europe to “do the heavy lifting.”.
NATO is moving towards a post-America configuration. A NATO without the United States would be possible, but it will face some serious challenges. The Alliance heavily relies on the US for key capabilities like operational intelligence, air-to-air refueling, missile defense, and more. As George Allison argues, without “American enablers,” NATO’s ability to sustain a long-term fight would be tested. Moving tanks and troops around Europe effectively would still be a big challenge.
Trump is readying America for both an economic war and a geopolitical war of his own choosing. US Vice-President J D Vance bluntly said that “there is a new sheriff in town” during his fiery speech in Munich. But the moot point is whether Europe and the Global South will accept the new sheriff.
The liberal international order is crashing amid an ugly face-off with friendly leaders. Great-power competition has returned with a vengeance. The United States is pitted against China and maybe China-Russia together. The US could also find itself against Europe.
Trump doesn’t seem to bother anymore about alliances. But his abrasive-style politics may destroy America’s soft power. The American Century started in 1945 and continued for 80 years. American political scientist Joseph Nye doesn’t see a second American century, but he believes the US will be the preeminent power for quite some time.
We are witnessing the end of a world order that was led by the United States. Even the pretension of morality and ethics will have no place in the new world order. As Adam Garfinkle, founding editor of The American Interest, argues, “We are now living in a post-NATO world where black is white, up is down, friends are foes (and vice versa), and once-unthinkable impossibilities have become our new reality.” German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock calls it “a new era of wickedness.”
Western nations have begun to realize that they can no longer prosper by relying on an ever more globalized rules-based world order. That long period is now over. Trump may be a symptom of its demise, but he is not entirely responsible for bringing it about.
We are living a new moment of great uncertainty. Trump’s explicit rejection of multilateralism, disinterest in democratic values, broad contempt for international organizations, and confrontational approach toward China have accelerated these trends.
Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth visualizes a “new Yalta” moment when Xi Jinping and Putin both could “make deals with Trump” on “dividing the globe into spheres of influence.” Some analysts predict Trump, Xi Jinping, and Putin, and maybe Modi, will have a free hand to command their spheres of influence in their regions.
The future world order could be one of uneven multipolarity, featuring several major powers or regional blocs of unequal capabilities, connected by flexible and fluctuating economic and security ties.
Trump’s disdain for the multilateral order is compounded by his transactional approach to international relations. America’s withdrawals from global commitments would mean the United States losing a key tool of influence and leverage over other economies and other countries.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says that the national priority must be securing America’s own borders and deterring “communist China.” Trump likes to talk tough, but China works on capabilities. Tough talk and public humiliation of allies may please the MAGA constituency, but in today’s world, you can’t talk tough and carry a big stick. It remains to be seen what countries will accept being America’s servile partners willing to accept a strictly transactional relationship.
The rise of China and the “rise of the rest” are two factors that have weakened the West’s domination. Washington will also have to acknowledge the limits of its power. China has acquired the clout as well as the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to reshape the international order.
Today, the Global South, BRICS in particular, has options it didn’t have in the past. If during the 1990s, BRICS sought to deepen their connection with the Euro-Atlantic hub, they are now taking more steps to tighten the relationship between themselves to bypass the West.
The world without the West is becoming preferentially and densely interconnected. The Global South has been working to transform the norms and values of the new international order that the West had consolidated in the last few centuries. India and China have repeatedly criticized how Western civilization has dominated the international order while their own values are not seriously taken into consideration.
The Global South is not in favor of a world divided into a system of two blocs and alliances. The bloc’s system is not acceptable to most countries. A large majority of the Global South may prefer to have diffuse centers of power. Historical parallels can be deceptive. The world is in a complicated multiplexed period.
It is also premature to say that Russia and China will form a bloc. China may be interested in taking advantage of the present chaos. In fact, Sergey Radchenko, a historian of the Cold War, argues that it is difficult to say what China wants—to replace the current international order or to undo it through a grand strategy.
We have entered what a major public opinion poll indicates is an “à la carte” world where countries may choose the US in one area of policy, China in another, and Russia and Europe in yet other policy domains.
Trump’s sovereigntist and isolationist policies will be counterproductive. The US can’t be a superpower wielding global influence by reviving America’s sovereigntist tradition, whereby it once rejected American membership in the League of Nations and membership in NATO.
Trump’s hostility toward NATO should hardly come as a shock. The Republican Party has for long nursed deep skepticism towards liberal internationalism. Organizations such as the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations are depicted in the right-wing press as nefarious cabals intent on subverting American sovereignty and independence.
Trump has a poor record of peace-making. His Doha Agreement with the Taliban was as feckless a piece of diplomacy as any in history, and his negotiations with North Korea came nowhere near a denuclearizing deal. His Ukraine gamble has failed, and Trump has suspended all military aid to Ukraine.
Winston Churchill once boasted that “history will be kind to me,” as “I intend to write it.”. Trump can’t expect history to be kind to America, nor will it be kind to the old continent. The MAGA president may tear down the edifice of the Western rules-based international order. But it may prove to be a harbinger for the sunset of Trump’s new Pax Americana.
