Welcome to the new world dis-order.
The world has self-evidently been moving towards a “new global dis-order” for at least a decade, but the election of Donald Trump in November 2024 supercharged the process and made it seem almost cataclysmic.
It was already a world which at once seemed to be at the mercy of strong-man politics; but which was everywhere fragmented and smaller regional powers exerted their own coercive tactics; where international organisations count for little but the “tech-bros” throw their own weight around the global stage, intervening in domestic politics when it suited them; where international law was derided and the United Nations insulted, but still everyone still ran to the UN to claim legitimacy for what they want.
All this had been happening for some time, but the arrival of a vengeful Mr Trump for a second term in the White House – this time, a man with a plan – has made disorder the new norm.
President Trump has his own domestic agenda, which aims to change US politics forever, and he may not appreciate the fundamental importance to the rest of the world of the two international trends he has thereby embraced.
One is the legitimisation of conquest through force against sovereign nations.
He was, and is, serious about incorporating Greenland into the US, even though it belongs to Denmark.
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He was, and is, serious about taking the Panama Canal back into US hands, by whatever means necessary.
He may or may not be serious about incorporating Canada into the US.
Above all, he has been deadly serious about recognising, even officially legitimising, the brutal conquest of eastern Ukraine by Russia.
All this is music to the ears in Moscow, which has an ongoing agenda to restore the power of the old Soviet Union by force.
So too, in Beijing, which is already seizing areas in the South China Sea and intends to snuff out any independence for Taiwan.
It’s music to the ears, too, of the hardline Zionists in Israel who see this as the moment to seize and annex all the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza; to those Serbian leaders who still want to carve up Bosnia in the western Balkans; to those Gulf monarchies who dabble in the incipient breaking up (perhaps very soon) of states like Yemen and Sudan.
It even suggests to Indian hardliners that this might be the time to “resolve” the Kashmir issue in India’s favour.
When the US, in other words, embraces an imperialist mission for itself, it has the effect of legitimising it for everyone else.
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And in a world where law and international institutions are in steep retreat, there are a lot of imperialists around – not just in Moscow and Beijing, but in many of the world’s most troubled regions.
The second fundamental trend is the retreat of the US into isolationism.
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In the past, the US has been “isolationist” more often and for longer than it has ever been “universalist”.
But Washington’s embrace of universalism after 1945 created a dominant “Western world” that provided a social and economic anchor around which all other global military and political competition revolved.
Of course, the “Western world” was never the whole world, but the international order it promoted tried to build international institutions, it restrained nuclear proliferation, it tried to promote international law, and until the economic crisis of 2008, it thought it had the best general model for economic development.
All that is reversed by US isolationism.
We do not yet know how the Trump version of it will play out, but the publication of the National Security Strategy in early December made it very clear that the core of that “Western world” – the transatlantic relationship – had fundamentally changed in Washington’s eyes.
The US has a different vision from its European allies over Russia, over what is at stake in Ukraine, of economic relations, indeed of the nature and culture of liberal democracy itself.
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We do not know if this is temporary or permanent. But with the central building block of transatlantic relations pushed so obviously to one side, the subtle influence the “Western world” had on global politics over the last 80 years will be largely absent.
The year 2025 may go down as the moment when the slide away from a global order we had too easily taken for granted suddenly became a cliff edge. And that is down to one man who acts more on instinct than foresight.
