The rhetoric from the White House signals a new world order that is nasty and brutish and in which might makes right
In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Gradually and then suddenly,” he says. So, too, perhaps with the rules-based international order that has governed relations between member states, after the dizzying first weeks of the second Trump presidency. Three years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the violation of the UN Charter by a permanent member of the Security Council severely tested the principles upon which the post-war order had been built. It exposed the fragility of an open, rules-based international system founded on the three pillars: economic integration through a global trading system and international financial institutions; collective security based on sovereign equality; and self-determination. However, today, the U.S. has switched from backing Ukraine to echoing Russia in a repudiation of the Charter principles. This has dealt a body blow to the UN-based system of global governance.
The birth of the world order
The current world order rose from the ashes of World War II. Over several conferences between 1941 and 1945, the U.S., the U.K., and the Soviet Union agreed to the formation of an international organisation based on collective security to maintain peace and manage relations between states as sovereign equals. Beneath the lofty principles was a hard-nosed recognition that loyalty to the system rested on calculations of self-interest. It was therefore decided at the Tehran Conference of 1943 between Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin that this organisation would enforce peace through ‘four policemen’: the U.S., Britain (then still an imperial power), the Soviet Union, and China (the latter two were needed to fight Japan). By the Yalta Conference of 1945, France was included at the top table, mainly to deal with territories that had been occupied by the Third Reich.
The imposition of a victor’s peace was avoided by insisting on the sovereign equality of all states in a rules-based order. Great power rivalries would be managed by a system of collective security and economic integration. In reality, however, the 1945 Yalta Conference implicitly accepted spheres of influence for the Soviet Union in eastern Europe and, by extension, for the U.K. and the U.S. in the rest of Europe. This was the price for Stalin’s agreement to fight with the Allies against Japan.
Yet, flawed though it was, the UN system, the Bretton Woods organisations, and subsidiary organisations lubricated the conduct of relations between states. Even if war did not disappear, the system privileged norms and principles that made international relations more predictable and consensual and fettered the power of larger states to the ideals of a rules-based forum of sovereign equals. In time, spheres of influence yielded to self-determination.
Upending the world order
President Donald Trump has taken a bulldozer to this system. He has undermined international agreements by pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, signalling its departure from the World Health Organization, and ordering a review of American membership of all international organisations and treaties. And by unilaterally imposing tariffs on trading partners, he has thrown the global trading system into complete disarray. Overnight, norms and expectations of behaviour from a founding member of this international order have been upended. The U.S., the most powerful nation, is behaving like a declining power, pursuing a nationalist foreign policy, seeking to expand its influence and borders within its hemisphere, and promoting its economic and mercantilist interests.
But perhaps the most dramatic move has been Mr. Trump’s reinstatement of ties with Vladimir Putin. His attempts to negotiate a peace in Ukraine without Kyiv at the table, calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator, and agreeing to Russian demands that no NATO troops set foot on Ukrainian soil to enforce any ‘peace’ that is negotiated have stunned Europe. Europe has to come to terms with managing its own security, having ridden on the U.S.’s coattails for decades within NATO. The meeting between American and Russian officials at Riyadh may not have been a Yalta moment, but the parallels are strong. The main difference is that this is not a victor’s peace, but a sell-out from Ukraine’s former backer.
The rhetoric from the White House (and Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account) signals a new world order that is nasty and brutish and in which might makes right. The U.S.’s retreat from the global stage to its neighbourhood, while Mr. Trump tries acquiring Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and perhaps Gaza, may seem the stuff of fantasy, but if he is to be taken at his word, it signals the start of a new imperial age.
The world is being divided into spheres of influence. The U.S. will exert power on its own hemisphere, and perhaps on West Asia. By repeating Mr. Putin’s lines on Ukraine and NATO expansion, Mr. Trump has effectively handed over Europe to Russia, leaving Mr. Putin free to pursue his revanchist claims on Ukraine and recreate imperial Russia’s lost glory.
That leaves China, which has propped up Russia through its Ukranian adventure. Beijing’s irredentism regarding Taiwan has so far been held in check by the U.S.’s security guarantees in East and Southeast Asia. America’s retreat leaves China free to consider moving on its claims to Taiwan. India would do well to remember that China has never accepted the McMahon Line. Suddenly, along with the world order, our neighbourhood too is starting to look more insecure.
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