In a period of only 50 days, President Donald Trump has done more than any of his modern predecessors to undermine the foundations of an international system that the United States erected laboriously in the 80 years after that he was victorious of World War II.
Without formally declaring a change of course or offering a strategic justification, it has pushed the United States to change the side in the Ukraine War, abandoning all speech about helping a nascent and imperfect democracy to defend its borders against a larger invader. He did not hesitate when he ordered the United States to vote with Russia and North Korea – and against practically all traditional United States allies – to defeat a UN resolution that identified Moscow as the aggressor. His threats to take control of the Panama Canal, Greenland, Gaza and, what is more incredible, Canada, sound predators, including his affirmation on Tuesday that the border with the ally of the northern United States is an “artificial separation line.”
He prevented Ukraine access to weapons and even the American commercial images by satellite, partly because of his anger in the oval office with President Volodimir Zelenski, but especially because the Ukrainian President insists that he be guaranteed that the West will go to the aid of his country if Russia is rebuilt and invades it again.
Trump has imposed tariffs on his allies after describing them as leeches of the US economy. And he has damaged so much confidence among NATO’s allies that France is discussing its country’s small nuclear umbrella over Europe and Poland is thinking of building its own atomic weapon. Both fear that you can no longer count on the United States to act as the maximum defender of the Alliance, a fundamental role that it created for itself when the NATO treaty was written.
Nobody knows to what extent Trump will get pieces what all US presidents have built from Harry Truman, an era of creation of institutions that the Secretary of State for Tuman recalled in a book entitled Present at the creation. Living in Washington these days is to feel as if one was present in destruction.
They could spend four years or more before we know if these changes are permanent or if the guardians of the old system will guide themselves, such as the soldiers who try to survive in the trenches of Donbás. By then, Western allies have left behind a system focused on the United States.
Or, as Trump Joseph S. Nye Jr. recently said, the political scientist known for his work on the nature of soft power: “He is so obsessed with the problem of polizones that he forgets that the United States has been interested in driving the bus.”
But perhaps the most notable is that Trump is eroding the old order without ever describing the system with which he plans to replace it. His actions suggest that he feels more comfortable in the nineteenth -century world of the policy of the great powers, where he, President Vladimir Putin de Russia and President Xi Jinping of China, negotiate with each other and let the minor powers fit.
Trump is already winning successes. For its defenders, the fact that Ukraine accepted on Tuesday a proposal to the temporary fire, which Russia has not yet accepted, seems to demonstrate that Trump’s use of his influence on Zelenski was worth it. But historians may determine that those 50 days were critical for reasons that had little to do with Ukraine.
“The great debate now is whether it is a tactical movement to remodel our foreign policy or a revolution,” said R. Nicholas Burns, an American ambassador to China under the presidency of Joe Biden and in NATO under the presidency of George W. Bush.
“I have come to think that it is a revolution,” he said. “When he votes with North Korea and will go against NATO’s allies, when he is not faced with Russian aggression, when he threatens to take the territory of his allies, something has changed fundamentally. There is a rupture of trust with the allies that perhaps we can never repair. ”
“Nothing will get in our way“
In retrospect, the first sign that Trump’s approach to the world was going to be radically different from the one he applied in the first mandate occurred a cold morning from the beginning of January at his Mar-A-Lago Club of Florida.
For weeks it had been increasingly martial about the need for the United States to control Greenland, for its mineral wealth and strategic situation near the Arctic Waters that Russia and China use. He accelerated his demands for access to the Panama Canal and continued to repeat the need for Canada to become a state 51, until it became clear that he was not joking.
At a press conference held on January 7, two weeks before his inauguration, he was asked if he would rule out using military or economic coercion to achieve his goals in Greenland or Canada. “I’m not going to commit to it,” he said. “You may have to do something.”
It was a surprising threat. An incoming president had threatened to use the world’s greatest army against an NATO ally. Some took it as a brave from Trump. But in his inauguration, he redoubled the bet. He said the world would stop taking advantage of the generosity of the United States and the security it offered to its allies. He spoke of a United States that “our manifest destiny” will pursue, “an appeal of the 1890s, and praised William McKinley, the tariff president who took the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. And he talked about creating an “external tax service” to “tax with tariffs and taxes to foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
“Nothing will get in our way,” he said. And nothing has done it.
The attempt to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development, created by President John F. Kennedy as part of the avant -garde of American soft power, lasted only a few weeks; The main argument that is debated in court is whether the government has to pay the contractors 2000 million dollars for work already carried out. Trump and Elon Musk, who heads the commission of remakeing the government, acknowledged that foreign aid is so ridiculed by the Maga Movement (acronym in English of the political slogan “let’s make the United States great again”) as a seedbed of liberal values and corruption that the agency was an easy white.
They knew that dismantling it would also infuse fear in the hearts of public employees, who would realize that they could be the following. Groups that carry out a similar work and that were once praised by the Republicans – such as the American Institute for Peace and the National Foundation for Democracy – are in danger of death.
Ukraine: the first test
The greatest change was yet to come: Ukraine.
For three years, the Democrats and most Republicans had observed war largely through the lens of traditional American foreign policy. It was up to the United States to defend a democracy in trouble that had been illegally invaded by a larger power sought by its territory.
But now, as president, Trump called Zelenski “dictator.” He justified his refusal to qualify Russia as aggressor in war as a necessary measure to act as a neutral mediator. Then, on his first trip to Europe, his secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, declared that the United States would never accept Ukraine’s admission in the NATO alliance, and said he would have to give up the territory he had lost for Russian aggression.
With Trump’s blessing, they had given Putin two of his demands in advance, while making it clear that if Ukraine wanted a security guarantee, he had to speak with his European neighbors, but the United States would not participate. The other day, Trump said it was easier to deal with Russia than with Ukraine.
“He has taken a 180 degree turn to American politics about the Russian-Ukrainian war,” said John R. Bolton, Trump’s third national security advisor, and perhaps the most resentful. “Trump is now on the invader side.”
But Europe has entrenched more with the Ukrainians, essentially separating the greatest power of NATO from almost all its other members. Since the Suez crisis in 1956 – when France, the United Kingdom and Israel invaded Egypt -, the United States had not met on the other side of a conflict of its closest allies. But this rupture has been deeper, and more fundamental.
A high -ranking European official said shortly after the Munich Security Conference last month that it was clear that Trump’s true agenda was simply to get a stop on the fire – any high on fire – and then “normalize the relationship with the Russians.”
The perspective worried both European officials, who believe that they could be the following in the sight of Russia, that Friedrich Merz, promoter for a long time of the transatlantic alliance and who is about to become the next Chancellor of Germany, declared the night of the German elections that his “absolute priority” would be “to reach an independence from the United States.”
“I never thought I would have to say something like that,” he said, but had concluded that the new government was “largely indifferent to the destiny of Europe.”
Rethink the future
Perhaps one of the reasons why Trump’s revolution has taken the world by surprise is that many Americans, and allies of this country, thought that Trump’s behavior in the second mandate would imitate what he did in the first.
They thought that the national security strategy published in their first mandate would be largely girdled, which grouped China and Russia as “revisionist” powers that are “determined to make the economies less free and less fair, to grow their armies and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
When reading it today, that document seems to come from another era. Bolton argues that Trump “does not have a philosophy or a great national security strategy.”
“It does not ‘politics’, but a series of personal relationships.”
Now his assistants strive, with little success, to impose a logic on all this.
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a classic supporter of the hard line with Russia before occupying his current position, suggested that Trump was trying to take Russia from his growing association with China. There is no evidence that this is working.
Other members of the Trump National Security team have talked about a “Monroe 2.0 doctrine.” That suggests a world in which the United States, China, Russia and perhaps Saudi Arabia assume the responsibility of its different spheres of influence. Alex Younger, former Chief of the MI6, the British Espionage Agency, said in an interview with the BBC that reminded the Yalta conference – the meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in 1945 – in which “strong countries decided the fate of small countries.”
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“That is the world we are going,” he predicted, adding: “I don’t think we returned to what we had before.”
Of course, such an agreement has long been a Putin dream, because it would raise the power of its state, economically in decline. But as Dmitri Medvedev, former Russian president, said on social networks the other day: “If they had told me only three months ago that these were the words of US President, I would have laughed out loud.”