Head-on | Trump is presiding over a new world disorder

United States President Donald Trump is upending a global order underwritten by the West since the end of the Second World War in 1945. The order governed global institutions ranging from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The US-led West controlled the levers of the world’s military, economic and financial power.

The balance of power began shifting from west to east in the first decades of the 21st century. The rise of China and India was a clear sign of the global centre of gravity moving towards Asia. Europe was in secular decline, its economic sclerosis masked by US military and financial guarantees. Those guarantees have expired.

Trump’s attempt to rehabilitate Russia in its war with Ukraine and support Israel’s territorial expansion in the Middle East are part of his worldview. Can this worldview survive the end of Trump’s presidency in 2029? The Democratic Party has vowed to reverse some of Trump’s radical military and trade policies if they regain control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

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But the fundamental shift in the balance of global power appears irreversible. A 300-year-long era of Western domination could be ending.

Is the break between the US and Europe over Ukraine also irreversible? Given Trump’s unpredictability, probably not. Future Democratic presidents will attempt to repair the damage done to the transatlantic alliance forged after the Second World War. But rapid demographic and ethnic changes will, within a generation, transform the US into a White-minority country for the first time since European colonists arrived in North America over 400 years ago.

Trump began the process of delinking the US from Europe using the pretext of reciprocal global trade tariffs and the Russia-Ukraine war. But “America First” and “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) are both dipped in a racist, White supremacist ideology.

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Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) seeks to banish DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) from America. DEI is essentially affirmative action to help African-Americans and other American citizens of colour who have faced historical discrimination and prejudice.

Trump himself is not a dyed-in-the-wool racist. He is a dealmaker. As he said last week: “My whole life is about deals.”

Trump’s MAGA supporters, however, are not dealmakers. Many are embittered, poorly educated racists. They dread a future when the number of White Americans in the US population falls below 50 per cent. That is estimated to take place as early as the mid-2040s. It is this fear that Trump has tapped into among his MAGA base. Illegal immigration from Central America and Asia, MAGA supporters know, will hasten America’s demographic shift into a White-minority country.

Trump’s MAGA policies on DEI, immigration, trade protectionism and isolation from Europe could ironically end up unmaking America. As Faisal Devji, professor of Indian history at Oxford University, noted in an insightful op-ed in a leading daily on March 1, 2025: “It is only now dawning on European politicians that the most serious threat the West faces as a geopolitical actor is neither Russia’s army nor China’s economy. Even Muslims and migrants, long the favourite internal enemies of Europe’s populists, pale in insignificance before the external threat posed by US policy on Russia and Ukraine, Canada and Mexico, and on Europe’s military and economic status."

“While it is tempting to attribute this challenge solely to the Donald Trump administration, it has been in the making for much longer under Democrat-led administrations than under Republican ones. Commentators are fond of following Trump by taking William McKinley as his model for a new American empire. But a more realistic assumption might be James Monroe and his vision of America’s power. Trump’s efforts to subordinate Canada, Mexico, Panama and Greenland to US power look like the making of a new Monroe Doctrine for a Western Hemisphere that, as in the original, abandons Europe to a world in which it no longer has any special claim to American assistance."

“While the Monroe Doctrine had signalled America’s rise, its reprise, however, is a manifestation of its decline. For a world in which India, Russia and China might get more favourable treatment than Britain, France or Germany is one in which US hegemony has collapsed and with it the idea of the West. If they cannot become its rivals, Europeans will now have to pay for the privilege of serving as America’s vassals. Globalisation has led to the emergence of new economic and military powers in the world outside the West, and these cannot be dragooned into serving as America’s allies as Europe once had.”

Weakening the West

Trump’s break with Europe therefore, while disrupting the 80-year-old transatlantic alliance, will also weaken the US-led world order as other powers in Eurasia, China and India rise.

That is precisely the opposite outcome of Trump’s America First policy. Trade tariffs will harm US consumers as local prices rise. The military alliance between Europe and the US could splinter as NATO flounders, leading to a global power vacuum.

Whenever a vacuum forms, as history has shown, other powers fill it. Trump knows that a US-Russia détente could split the West. Yet, with the dealmaker’s instinct to get the best possible bargain, he is willing to gamble away the very outcome he seeks.

None of this will matter to Trump when his second and final term ends in 2029. By then, however, the die would have been cast. Trump’s imperial impulse could ironically hasten the end of the Pax Americana he is attempting to rebuild.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.