Trump’s dystopian order leaves Europe angry and exposed — but Bharat and China may have the last laugh

The British suffer from nostalgia. Americans suffer from denial.

As Kathleen Burk incisively notes in her 2018 book, The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires 1783-1972, Britain knows it once had an empire and quarrels endlessly over whether it was a “good thing” or it was “benighted”. The United States, on the contrary, refuses even to admit it ever has been an empire.

“Even posing the question can outrage people. A positive answer does not necessarily condemn the United States to the ninth circle of hell, but it can seem to call into question Americans’ self-identity as citizens of a country devoted to the rights of men and women,” Burk writes.

This denial is not accidental. It is structural. American imperialism has always functioned best when disguised as morality. Coups and regime changes are renamed “democratic transitions”, invasions are projected as “humanitarian interventions”, and mass killings are justified as collateral damage in the service of democracy and liberalism. By this logic, the United States never conquers; it “liberates”. It never dominates; it “democratises”. And it never causes chaos; it brings “peace”.

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The record, of course, is soaked in blood, enmeshed with violence, and embedded with despotic tendencies. By conservative estimates, Washington has interfered in regime-change operations across the world, often leaving behind shattered states and permanent instability. Yet each exposure produces the same ritual response: denial, moral rationalisation and selective amnesia.

Empire, Americans insist, is something others do; America is, if at all an empire, an “Empire of Liberty”, as Thomas Jefferson, one of the American founding fathers, had claimed as early as 1780. (Interestingly, Jefferson, in April 1809, wrote to President James Madison that the acquisition of Cuba plus “the North” (Canada) would enable the US “to have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation”.)

One might be tempted to dismiss these actions as aberrations associated with particularly malign administrations — Nixon and Kissinger or Bush and Cheney, for instance. Indeed, the Nixon-Kissinger years remain emblematic of American realpolitik at its darkest. Few episodes illustrate this more starkly than the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.

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Nixon’s visceral hostility towards Bharat, combined with Kissinger’s Cold War calculus, led the US to back Pakistan’s murderous military junta even as the latter unleashed mass slaughter in East Pakistan. As Gary J Bass exposes in his book, The Blood Telegram, American leaders, far from being ignorant of the atrocities, were complicit through silence, diplomatic cover and, worse, material support.

As Niall Ferguson dryly observes in his biography of Kissinger, Nixon and Kissinger were hardly outliers. A Brookings Institution study cited by Ferguson shows that the US used military force or threatened its use three times more often during the Kennedy years than during the Nixon-Kissinger era. The implication is uncomfortable: American violence abroad is not an exception but a structural feature of its global role, independent of partisan or ideological packaging.

This pattern continued. George W Bush is reviled — rightly — for Iraq. But Barack Obama, the liberal messiah, institutionalised assassination as state policy. Under Obama, drone strikes multiplied nearly tenfold, in comparison to the Bush era, in which thousands were killed, most of them civilians. Yet Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Bush was projected as the object of visceral global hatred. The difference was never the violence. It was the vocabulary.

With Donald Trump in the White House, the American mask has finally fallen off. With his January 3, 2026, Venezuela raid, Trump did not invent American imperialism; he merely vulgarised it — he stripped it of its moral cover and exposed it naked. When reports surfaced that he had considered sending troops to kidnap Venezuela’s President from his bedroom, Trump did not mumble about democracy or human rights. He said the quiet part out loud: oil.

Trump did not pretend the American empire was about democracy, liberalism and benevolence. He exposed its transactional nature. This bluntness, paradoxically, is something that should make Trump an attractive — even preferable — option for emerging powers. Reports suggest that, for all his unpredictability and overt anti-Beijing stance, he is popular in China.

The Chinese can see through the unique opportunities he provides. Of course, he targets China on issues from tariffs to Venezuela, but he is equally hostile to Europe and to potential anti-China allies such as Bharat. This gives China extra elbow room, though Trump’s policy may be aimed at tightening the noose around Beijing.

Such disruptions weaken established, traditional hierarchies. Trump opens too many fronts simultaneously — against allies and adversaries alike — undermining the coherence of the Western-led order. This instability creates space for new alignments, new partnerships, and ultimately a new world order. For countries like Bharat and China, this is a taxing time, but amidst these uncertainties lies an opportunity.

However, the die seems to be all but cast for Europe. For eight decades, Europe has enjoyed a unique historical fraud — power without responsibility. Protected by American arms and subsidised by American taxpayers, Europe had it easy preaching morality to the world. It was an empire by proxy: dominance without cost, sanctimony without sacrifice.

Trump is threatening to end this party. Suddenly, Europe is exposed — militarily weak, strategically confounded, and geopolitically at a crossroads. The sheer absurdity of recent events captures the moment perfectly: European nations holding simultaneous meetings — one to protect Ukraine from Russia, and another to protect Greenland from the United States. They just know they cannot hold any of the two on their own. When your principal ally becomes a potential threat, history has turned a corner.

If Greenland does “happen”, which seems a likely scenario given Trump’s obsession with the island, Nato will not survive — definitely not in the spirit it exists today. European pretensions of military strength and ethical supremacy will collapse. The post-1945 illusion of a rules-based order will give way to what always existed beneath it: power, naked and abrasive.

And once that door opens, it cannot be closed selectively.

China will not miss the Venezuela-Greenland signal. Taiwan will no longer be a question of “if”, but “when”. After all, moral lectures sound hollow when borders are redrawn by those who wrote the rules.

Bharat, too, stands at a historical threshold. From Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to the strategic vulnerability of the Siliguri Corridor, New Delhi has lived with post-colonial distortions imposed in moments of weakness. In a world where might is once again the final arbiter, one wonders whether Bharat should remain frozen in a moral order designed to preserve obsolete Western outcomes.

Even Trump’s trade wars, again heating up with reports of a new American Bill threatening a 500 per cent tariff on Russia’s trading partners, including Bharat, China and Brazil, may end up proving beneficial for Delhi.

Historically, the country has rarely reformed out of choice — the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis is a case in point. Protectionism, tariffs and economic shocks force deliberation, diversification and discipline. Trump’s disruption may do what comfort never does: wake Bharat up from its institutional lethargy, which in the end would do the nation an immense service.

Trump’s “madness” does not promise a safer world; it, in fact, threatens to push the globe into a crisis rarely seen since World War II. But it does offer new openings for emerging powers long strangled by Western institutional lopsidedness, monopoly and hypocrisy.

Trump’s chaos is not merely noise. It is the sound of an old world order cracking under the weight of its own contradictions — and of new possibilities breaking through.

Only those better prepared will survive the global storm. But then, that is how the world has always evolved: the survival of the fittest and the most prepared from one chaos to another, from one challenge to another, from one opportunity to another.

Bharat should look closely at the opportunities tucked within Trump’s dystopian order. If Delhi plays its cards well, this may be the moment that propels it into a new power zone. It is time to think big — and play smart.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)