You know it’s going to get interesting when Elon Musk quotes from Virgil and the Great Seal of the United States. Novus Ordo Seclorum, the tech-titan-turned-MAGA-megaphone tweeted, or rather Xed, as he basked in Donald Trump’s victory with the president-elect himself. In English: “a new order of the ages.”
On the other side of the world in Russia, Alexander Dugin shared the sentiment. He’s a far-right philosopher associated with “eurasianism,” a narrative that glorifies anti-Western Russian neo-imperialism. “So we have won,” Dugin gloated on X; the world will never be the same again because the “globalists have lost their final combat.”
It’s tempting to dismiss Musk and Dugin as bookends of the hyperbole that’s taken over the planet since Trump staged his stunning comeback. So many pundits are exaggerating so many things right now that we should remember Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun. Maybe there won’t be a “new order.” Maybe the world will change less than it seems.
And yet a striking pattern suggests that Trump 2.0 does represent a historic turning point on the scale that Musk and Dugin imagine. From Europe to Asia and the Americas, people who over the years praised what’s been called the liberal, or “rules-based,” international order are in various stages of the Kübler-Ross grief cycle (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). All those in thrall to the opposite vision, of “illiberal” strongman rule, are jubilant, from Viktor Orban in Hungary to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel or Narendra Modi in India.
Other terms for that old, and now possibly moribund, order are the Pax Americana or — as Henry Luce, the founder of Time and other magazines, called it — the American Century. He wanted America to reject the isolationism that had kept it out of international affairs between the world wars and instead to become the world’s Good Samaritan — the hegemon of an open, stable and maximally free system of states.
Nations slip their bonds
If Musk is right that Trump will deliver a new order, and Dugin is right that the globalists have lost, then dusk now falls on that American Century. Here’s what that means.
The United States will walk away from the regime of relatively open and regulated trade that it built after World War II. With the sweeping tariffs that Trump promises, he will instead launch an era of beggar-thy-neighbor trade wars and economic nationalism reminiscent of the 1930s.
He’ll also, albeit gradually, render the charter of the United Nations as meaningless as the League of Nations became in the 1930s. That draft of a world constitution already looks tattered these days, as Russia and China (and the United States, when it feels like it) keep flouting its ideals.
But Trump will go further, jettisoning principles such as the sovereignty and integrity of all countries, large and small; he’ll instead make deals with autocrats to carve up “spheres of influence” as the European empires did in the 19th century. For smaller countries this will spell disaster. And the first victim will probably be Ukraine.
Another casualty will be international law, as embodied in institutions from the U.N. (which many MAGA Republicans want to defund) to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Taking their place would be the law of the jungle, the notion that might makes right. Kant and Grotius are out, Thucydides and Hobbes are in.
As Trump corrodes multilateralism in general, he’ll also forsake other manifestations of international cooperation, notably America’s alliances. He may not pull out of NATO, but he will undermine its deterrent effect on adversaries by treating America’s commitment to mutual defense as a protection racket. He’ll take the same approach with treaty allies in Asia, where incumbent president Joe Biden has been so eager to build new “minilateral” webs of forward defense to contain China.
America walks away
Nobody knows how the major powers and their Machiavellian leaders will react to this abdication of American hegemony. Will Russia’s Vladimir Putin be sated once he absorbs the four Ukrainian provinces he claims to have “annexed,” or will he go on to seize all of Ukraine, then march on to Moldova and other post-Soviet states? Will Xi Jinping offer Trump a deal to let China militarize the whole South China Sea, and later digest Taiwan at leisure? Trump is unlikely to lose sleep over these questions, because he’s thinking only one transaction at a time.
It’s just as uncertain how America’s friends, mainly middle powers and smaller nations, will fit between the new spheres of influence that Trump and the other strongmen draw up. Two of them, Germany and Japan, were America’s enemies in World War II, then became American proteges and paragons of the more irenic American Century, with Germany embedded into NATO and the European Union, and Japan more recently into United States-led groupings with South Korea, the Philippines and India.
Once Trump withdraws America’s aegis over these allies, what is to prevent old hostilities from resurfacing, from enmities between Germany and France or Germany and Poland to lingering resentments between the Japanese and Koreans? Why wouldn’t they all want to have their own nuclear arsenals?
The Pax Americana was ever imperfect and to many people in the world, from Vietnam to Iraq, smacked of hypocrisy. But it was as close as the world has come to order. Not all at once, but over time, that order will devolve to entropy as the international system reverts to its natural state, which is anarchy. Humanity’s common problems, such as climate change, will remain insoluble. The worst risks, such as nuclear war, become more likely.
Yet more hyperbole? I hope I’ll be proven wrong. But if the Musks and Dugins of the world are celebrating the return of Trump and the end of the American Century, the rest of us are right to worry.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. ©2024 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.