Help Me Understand... The New World Order

It's easy to see what's happening but hard to intuit what comes next.

Asking you to help me understand some aspect of the world about which I am genuinely uncertain has quickly become one of my favorite parts of this Substack community! So, after a brief hiatus, I am once again turning to you for help in puzzling through an important aspect of our rapidly changing world, and opening this thread up for comment from everyone.

As ever, a friendly reminder: Be nice to each other. Engage in good faith. You can express robust disagreement in polite terms. And please do support my work—and get all my writing, plus ad-free access to full episodes of the podcast—by becoming a paying subscriber today.

Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

At some moments, history moves gradually. Beneath the surface, the tectonic plates are slowly shifting—but to all appearances, the world is largely static.

At other moments, history moves at a dizzying pace. The tectonic plates have built up so much stress that one suddenly gives way, releasing seismic waves that cause a series of massive earthquakes. Everything seems to change all at once.

The remarkable spectacle in the Oval Office on Friday was just the latest indication that this is the kind of moment in which we now find ourselves.

I have grown hesitant about adding my voice to a chorus of condemnation even when I agree with its sentiment. Others are better at singing from a hymn sheet than I am; and I have, from long experience, learned that such exercises do more to make those who are already on “the right side” feel righteous than they do to persuade anybody whose mind isn’t yet made up. But suffice it to say that I too found disgraceful the spectacle of an American administration berating the leader of a country desperately fighting for its own survival against an invading army. Even if one could look past the shameless narcissism—most obviously on display when Donald Trump evoked with genuine feeling how much Vladimir Putin must have suffered during the Russia inquiry—it should be obvious that any serious attempt to strike a peace deal on terms acceptable to Ukraine is undermined by such a public display of dissension.

We likely won’t know for years or decades whether Trump and J. D. Vance intended to provoke Volodymyr Zelensky or if the mismatch between their personalities and worldviews produced an organic explosion. And it is perhaps inevitable that some people are now suggesting that Zelensky should, for the good of his country, have gritted his teeth for another half-an-hour to avoid provoking the ire of Vance and Trump.

(My own feeling about this is that the strengths and the weaknesses of most politicians tend to be more intertwined than people recognize. A politician who always acts coolly and rationally, one who in the helpful conceptual scheme suggested by Max Weber pursues an instrumental “ethic of responsibility,” may well have been able to avert this fiasco; indeed, that is what Keir Starmer had done the day before, to the benefit of his country and the detriment of his dignity. But such a politician would never have been able to muster the irrational bravery of which Zelensky proved capable in February 2022, when he stayed in Kyiv even though the fight against Russia looked hopeless and his life was in acute danger; that took a politician who sometimes does the honorable thing even when that is seemingly irrational, someone who is capable of choosing what Weber called the “ethic of ultimate ends.”)

What does seem clear is that Trump is putting an end to the foreign policy the United States has pursued since the end of World War II. Indeed, his worldview seems to rest on two assumptions that run directly counter to the way in which, for all the serious differences between them, every president since 1945 has thought about America’s role in the world.

The first is that Trump has a fundamentally zero-sum view of the world. America’s relationship with allies like Japan or the United Kingdom has been based on the assumption that both sides would benefit from the partnership. In particular, America would provide its allies with a security guarantee; in return, it would enjoy international stability, reap the benefits of free trade, and have huge sway over the rules governing the world order. Even if the United States might be a net contributor in the short run, expending more for its military budget than its partners, these alliances would over the long run serve the country’s “enlightened self-interest.”

Trump, by contrast, seems to believe that every deal has a winner and a loser; since American allies in Europe or East Asia are not unhappy about the current arrangements, this must mean that it is his nation that’s the sucker. Hence Trump’s determination to use his leverage over America’s longstanding allies to extract as much short-term gain as possible. Europeans perceive this as a mob boss asking for protection money; Trump is likely thinking of himself as a businessman renegotiating a rotten deal.

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The second assumption shaping Trump’s foreign policy is his belief that spheres of influence are the natural, and perhaps even the morally appropriate, way to organize international relations. Previous presidents insisted that any country should be allowed to determine its own fate, inviting nations that were friendly to the United States to become allies wherever they might be located on the map. Hence the “Western” alliance (with a capital “W”) has long included geographically eastern countries like Japan or South Korea.

Trump, by contrast, seems to believe that maintaining an alliance structure that ignores spheres of influence is naive, needlessly costly, and fundamentally sentimental. The goal of his foreign policy is to reap the fruits of the power America enjoys in its own hemisphere, not to guarantee the freedom of faraway polities in Ukraine or Taiwan.

Panama and Greenland are in America’s sphere of influence, and so Trump believes that he is entitled to make outrageous demands on them. Conversely, he seems to regard Ukraine as falling into Russia’s natural sphere of influence—a fact which, I believe, does more to explain his annoyance at being expected to help the nation than either his public bromance or some supposed secret deal with Vladimir Putin.

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In times of rapid transformation, like the one we are now living through, it is far easier to observe what aspects of the old order are being destroyed than to intuit what the new order which will eventually take its place might look like.

If Trump gets his way, the world will become much more transactional. America’s erstwhile allies in the western hemisphere will either need to learn to stand on their own feet or to pay financial tribute to their protector. Those which happen to be located in the vicinity of the world’s most powerful authoritarian countries will need to accommodate themselves to the diktat of Beijing or Moscow. Will such a world prove relatively stable? Or will it allow some dictator to grow so powerful that he starts to encroach on the “natural” sphere of influence of another great power, starting the very global war that self-proclaimed realists like Trump claim to know how to avoid?

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But of course Trump may prove more successful in destroying the old order than in shaping the new order. Perhaps China will step into the void left by America, for example, effectively reordering the world according to its own preferences, at least outside the western hemisphere. What would a Pax Sinica look like? Could it hold? And what role would countries like India, Brazil or the United Kingdom play in such a scenario?

As with so much these days, there seem to me to be far more urgent questions than there are serious attempts at an answer. So I would once again like to ask you, dear members of this wonderful community, to help me think through what all of this means:

What is the likely fate of Ukraine? Will the rift in the transatlantic relationship widen? Can Europe muster the will to fend for itself? Will the Trump administration allow China to establish its own sphere of influence in East Asia, and what will that mean for Taiwan—or, for that matter, for Japan and South Korea?

What, in short, will the new world order look like? Are we in for a new period in which might openly makes right—or will new rules come to tame the ever-lurking anarchy of the international system?