Trump’s ‘new world order’ is simply playing by the old rules
The world has been treated to a double helping of Taco in the past ten days. The acronym traders created to describe how “Trump Always Chickens Out” of extreme policy proposals when confronted with challenging realities got a good airing amid two apparent climbdowns by the American president.
Having warned Iran earlier this month that the US was “locked and loaded” and ready to strike if Tehran continued to suppress domestic protests, Donald Trump seemed to back off. With tens of thousands of protesters reported to be dead, the US still hasn’t fired a shot. Then, as European leaders braced for him to bury the transatlantic alliance that has existed for 80 years, Trump unexpectedly resurrected it. In his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the president walked back from his threat to use force if necessary to take control of Greenland, a move that would surely have ended Nato.
Hours later, after talks with Mark Rutte, the alliance’s secretary-general, Trump announced he had reached a “framework” agreement for US operations on the Arctic island — a framework that looked suspiciously like the relationship the US has always had with Greenland under existing treaties — and called off the additional tariffs he had threatened on European countries who failed to agree to his demands.
It’s too early to say for sure that Trump has “chickened out” of another strike at Iran. US warships have been on the move from the Pacific to the Middle East and it’s possible the reprieve for Tehran may only be temporary until logistics allow another assault.
But the great Greenland retreat was real. Despite spirited efforts by White House officials and Trump cheerleaders to insist the whole episode was another example of his brilliant dealmaking, it seems he backed off his outlandish threats thanks to resistance from within his own administration, the US military and Republican members of Congress, as well as a bearish turn on financial markets uneasy about yet another escalation of his trade wars.
Yet while some Europeans are breathing a deep sigh of relief that the “liberal global rules-based order” they cherish has lived to fight another day, a dose of sober realism is called for. Not only is Trump’s retreat purely tactical — and likely to be followed by more shockingly undiplomatic démarches — it offers confirmation of the central truth of the world order that Trump’s presidency represents. It wasn’t love for alliances, deference to international law or respect for treaties that stayed his hand, but a simple calculation of political, economic and geopolitical realities. It is that same narrow, calculated pragmatism that defines America’s approach to the world.
It has long been a paradox of Trump’s character that even as he lies through his teeth about everything from business deals he has won to elections he has lost, he has a unique capacity to speak truths no one else dare acknowledge. While conservative politicians utter soothing bromides about the blessings of multiculturalism and mass immigration, Trump blurts out the sentiments he — and many of his fellow citizens — really feel about their country, its heritage and identity. Where business leaders are trained by public relations professionals to paint their pursuit of profit in the language of uplifting fictions about shared prosperity, Trump will admit that it’s all about the money. And while global leaders talk movingly about their faith in the global order and the constraints of international law, Trump will say what they all know, deep down, to be true: the only rule that truly matters is that the strong prevail and the weak submit.
The reasons leaders of big countries reach for diplomatic dissimulation is that the truth is painful — for the obfuscating leaders themselves and even more so for their listeners. The big, rich and powerful don’t like to acknowledge they get their way because they are big, rich and powerful, so they pretend it’s all about justice, fairness and respect for rules. The weak don’t like to be reminded they are weak, so they insist their interests will eventually be served by the system of international justice that they insist they have helped to create.
To the polite fiction-tellers of international diplomacy, Trump’s assertion of might over right marks the death knell for an international alliance that has kept the peace in Europe and upheld the values of free peoples at home and abroad for eight decades. They also think it is a fatal blow to that liberal rules-based global order they claim has been the driving force in international relations for most of those decades.
As a senior European diplomat put it to me this week: “For years we have created a carefully cultivated walled garden to protect ourselves and our people from the jungle outside. Now Trump has shown that America is the jungle, breaking down our walls.” But shocking as it is, Trump’s brutal pragmatism is no great breach with the past. It is an acknowledgment that, for all the talk of the carefully curated garden, the laws of the jungle have always been paramount.
There is no better place to explode the hypocrisies of our global elites than Davos. I have been coming to the Swiss Alpine resort every January for almost two decades. Thousands of business leaders, politicians, diplomats, heads of nongovernmental organisations, academics, celebrities and journalists come, despite what you may think, not for the food or the wine, though it can be quite good, especially when some of the more capital-rich investment bankers fly in salmon caught that day from the Scottish Highlands, cases of perfectly chilled Chablis and three-star chefs from Paris for dinner for 100. They don’t come for the luxury accommodations — there isn’t a single seriously good hotel in Davos, and billionaire business leaders are frequently forced to bed down in the kind of place they wouldn’t board their Great Danes.
They come primarily to do business. The conversations outside the main World Economic Forum sessions often lead to big deals and contracts down the line. The opportunity for chief executives and their expensive lawyers to bend the ear of government officials — all in the public interest, you understand — can also lead to helpful regulatory or legislative outcomes for their shareholders.
But they come also to feel good about themselves. To spend a few days telling each other how virtuous they are. To hear that their phenomenal wealth, unimaginable worldly success and overweening influence are all the result of the right and proper functioning of a just world they have built with their own hands and brains. To dress up their ruthless pursuit of more money, more power and more opportunity in the gaudy garb of whatever happens to be the fashion of the moment — “sustainability”, “diversity”, “equity”.
A message Europe needed to hear
Trump, who doesn’t drink and likes his steak well done with a side of fries and plenty of ketchup, is the ultimate skunk at this feast. On the first anniversary of his second inauguration he came amid the sort of fearful anticipation that must once have awaited the arrival of a medieval monarch at a gathering of his barons. His unaccustomed emollience over Greenland was buried in the middle of a classic Trumpian broadside about American strength and European weakness.
It’s a message that Europe’s leaders urgently needed to hear, to shake them out of a longstanding delusional complacency that has characterised their view of how the world works. This world view holds that institutions and rules have been the key to a relatively peaceful world since the Second World War. It holds that the body that became the European Union produced peace in Europe. It says that under US leadership multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations, maintained global stability. Just as we abide by rules and laws at home that protect the weakest from the predatory, so this complex, balanced system of treaties, conventions and rules protected smaller nations from the powerful.
But this idea was always primarily a fiction. What kept the peace in Europe for decades was not the EU but the raw might of US military power. Was the Soviet Union dissuaded from invading west by Brussels or by the presence of mostly American troops, tanks and missiles? It’s true the global rulesbased order benefited the US too. That is why the US created it. It suited the US to present its pursuit of its own interests as a system of binding law. That made it easier to enlist others in the effort. But on multiple occasions in this supposed rules-based era, the US ignored the rulebook when it suited it: from the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, to assassinations, regime change plots and other operations all without any legal authorisation.
It is especially ironic to hear criticism of Trump’s disregard for the rules from those who orchestrated and supported the war in Iraq in 2003. While the US and its allies, notably Britain, justified the war by citing high principles of self-defence against imminent attack and promoting democracy, the main reason America went to war then was because it could — or thought it could — dismantle a nettlesome adversary.
In a widely noted speech at Davos, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister and former Bank of England governor, acknowledged that the rules-based system was always something of a fiction. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” he said. “That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
The changed reality in the early weeks of this year is not that the US has abandoned a rules-based approach to the world order. It is that the defence of Europe is no longer seen as a priority by the US. The Greenland dispute underscored that the US commitment to European security is more or less dead. Revealingly, when Trump argued it was imperative the US owned Greenland rather than just operating bases there, he said: “When we own it, we defend it” — a principle that doesn’t augur well for all the independent sovereign countries of Europe counting on American defence.
“ The big, rich and powerful don’t like to admit they get their way because they’re big, rich and powerful, so they pretend it’s all about justice, fairness and respect for rules
For decades, European attitudes toward their own security have been characterised by the blissful hypocrisy of claiming their commitment to international law has kept the peace, even as they have in reality depended on the US umbrella. Since the end of the Cold War they have lived in a kind of theme park of their own making, one in which war is a thing of the past and only peaceful coexistence keeps them safe, all while American soldiers have been patrolling the fence and guarding the gates to keep out the barbarians.
There is evidence now that most European leaders understand faith in this fantasyland was a mistake. On the fringes of Davos, a former senior European diplomat told me: “We have spent 30 years building our prosperous and peaceful societies without ever acknowledging the cost.”
Even as they berated America’s supposed abandonment of the international system, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and other leaders acknowledged their urgent need to wake up to the realities Trump has exposed. “We are not at the mercy of the new world order,” Merz said. “We do have a choice ... We can shape the future to succeed.”
America’s position had weakened
But it wasn’t hard to find European officials and policymakers who still cling to some version of their old fantasies. A widely expressed view (and hope) was that the current crisis was simply the product of the mercurial Trump, didn’t represent a larger shift by America, and that if they just hold on for another three years the old world will be reborn. This is a dangerous delusion. While it’s true Trump is not popular in the US, and especially that some of his more extreme ideas, such as seizing Greenland, are especially opposed by large majorities, he does reflect a wider American reluctance to maintain global security commitments. And Trump has the capacity to establish new realities on the ground that even a Democratic, Atlanticist successor won’t be able to undo.
Something important has changed in these turbulent years of Trump’s presidency. Many of his critics argue that his open rejection of the old liberal order will fundamentally weaken America’s standing. Embracing might as right will cost crucial allies who will no longer work alongside the US. America will lose the force of multilateral co-operation and cede the moral authority that gave it its power in the first place.
As Robert Kagan, a conservative historian, argues in a recent essay in the Atlantic: “So much of America’s influence in the world has derived from treating others as part of a community of democratic nations or of strategic partners ... Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was, and he has weakened America’s ability to protect its interests in the world that will be.”
But the opposite is true. America’s position in the world has already weakened substantially over the past 30 years. Disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (predicated, as we have noted, at least officially on the rules-based order), domestic political and social divisions, and above all the emergence of China have eaten away at the sources of US global dominance. America’s longstanding allies — the Europeans in the west and Japan in the east — are economically stagnant and strategically impotent. The world has already become multipolar and dangerous: the US president’s assertion of power hasn’t made it so.
Trump’s Greenland climbdown — and the faintly ludicrous Board of Peace forum for international cooperation he launched this week — shows realism requires an acknowledgment of constraints, domestic and foreign, on what a president can achieve by the simple exercise of raw power. Diplomacy, the pursuit of war by other means, in the old phrase, still has its uses.
As America’s dominance is challenged as never before, we should abandon the delusion that the soft power of moral authority can save it. We should stop pretending that Trump has brought down the curtain on an old order of institutionally protected peace. In a dangerous world it is comforting to think that the rules constrain the powerful. But the reality has always been that only the powerful make the rules.
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