Trump's new world order must be challenged at every single turn

The National

08-05-2025

Those of a certain generation will doubtless remember more vividly the former US secretary of state and national security adviser to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1970s, who died in 2023.
They will no doubt also recall that it was Kissinger who, in great part, was the architect behind such sinister and bloody events like the carpet bombing of Cambodia, the brutal subversion of democracy in Chile and American support for Argentina's military junta in its Dirty War of state terrorism in the 70s and 80s. In fact I could go on, for the list of Kissinger's controversial policies knows few bounds.
It is Kissinger of course that is credited with two very famous observations. The first is that 'America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests'.
His second observation, said half-jokingly, that 'the illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer', proved anything but funny in light of the Watergate scandal and prevailing politics of the time.
Which does indeed bring me to Trump.
For the inescapable fact is that both these phrases could have been expressly written for him and have all but been uttered if not enacted since his return to power this year.
Let's start by simply replacing the word 'interests' with the word 'deals' for that, after all – if what we are led to believe is true – is Trump's own political raison d'être.
'My whole life is deals,' Trump reasserted yet again last February after talks with French president Emmanuel Macron on Ukraine.
In itself of course there is nothing wrong with political deals, they are after all the bedrock of sound diplomacy. But then Trump's 'deals' have nothing to do with diplomacy and everything to do with intimidation and coercion.
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The mistake Americans made in re-electing him was to believe that the 'deals' he promised were meant to work in their interests, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Trump's actions – not that we should need reminding – are not rooted in the rules and responsibilities to the United States or its allies. They are instead driven purely and simply by the acquisition of power and gain for both the president himself and those sycophants and acolytes that surround him.
In that grasping rush to acquire and accumulate, everything is up for grabs, be it territory, resources, technology and anything else that perceivably might turn a buck or a billion.
If serving such interests means as Kissinger said: 'America has no permanent friends or enemies,' then so be it as far as Trump is concerned. For in the space of a little over 100 days, the fracturing of the post-1945 order is gaining pace.
The dangers here are obvious and you don't need to be a watcher of the doomsday clock to recognise that in just a matter of months since Trump re-entered the White House, the world has become a more unpredictable, unstable and combustible place.
It's a place that The Economist magazine recently characterised as fast approaching a 'might-is-right world in which big powers cut deals and bully small ones.'
Some insist that Trump is seeking to resurrect a Cold War-style global structure in which big powers carve up geographic spheres of influence.
If so, there is just one very big problem with this. It's that the geopolitical landscape right now is a very different place than it was back during that era.
Dangerous as things were in those days, there was at least the comparative safeguard of checks and balances of the very kind that Trump's administration has set about dismantling.
Instead, today's geopolitical landscape is one inhabited by oligarchs and economic mercenaries just like Trump. A plethora of rogue leaders willing to play fast and loose with the lives of their citizens and that of others worldwide in order to consolidate their power.
For example, just pause for a moment and consider Trump's slash-and-burn approach to diplomacy.
It's a playbook that has launched a global trade war and slashed US foreign aid, diminishing 'soft power' and helping destabilise regions across the world.
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It's also one that has disparaged Nato allies and willingly embraced Russia's narrative about its invasion of Ukraine.
It's one that has also given the green light to Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu government, which has been hankering for a long time to prosecute its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and seize yet more territory in southern Lebanon.
What Trump has profoundly helped unleash is the capacity of one country after another to breach what has been a basic rule since the end of the Second World War.
In short, he has lifted the barrier on those countries whose illegal ambitions are to seize territory by force without being held to account.
What he signals as acceptable overseas, Trump also deploys at home in America itself, as the country's courts will attest, again bringing echoes of Kissinger's disquieting threat of 'the illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer'.
Ironically, if there is a note of positivity in all of this, it's that any final constraint on Trump might yet come from the American people themselves.
For beyond the MAGA fanatics, polling points to a drop in Trump's approval ratings. But caution is paramount here, for nothing can be taken for granted, and political complacency over Trump's nefarious and toxic administration and their policies would be fatal.
And so it is that just as America faces a battle to prevent a McCarthyesque attempt to exert control over the country's institutions, so the world confronts a Trumpian attempt to dismantle the foundations of democracy elsewhere. Again, this is much the same as Kissinger's policies helped do back in the 70s and 80s.
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We should be under no illusion or misunderstanding here, for what Trump's administration has brought to the world are threats not seen since just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Like it or not, in great part because of Trump, a new world order with new rules is taking shape.
As Margaret MacMillan, emeritus professor of international history at Oxford University, recently summed it up writing in The Atlantic magazine, 'all at once, spheres of influence have ceased to be just something historians and political scientists study, but the emerging reality of a volatile new world'.
The challenge now, be it in Scotland, the UK, Europe and beyond, is to provide cast iron solidarity with those steadfast in ensuring that such a new world order is not solely shaped and determined by Trump. Failure to do so would almost certainly mean that those extremists and fascist hangers-on waiting in the wings will move to seize any advantage such an opportunity presents.