The world after Trump He oversaw the end of the American age

For future historians, Donald Trump’s awkward curtsey when greeting Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan, when they arrived at the White House for tea in September of this year may serve as a turning point. In a genuflection not accorded to his allies, the President saluted the epoch he has brought into being. Impelled by a degenerate capitalism in which everything is for sale, and a singularly manipulable demagogue, America is aligning itself with the adversaries of what used to be called the Western world. As in the Yalta conference in February 1945, when a triumvirate of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union carved up Europe into spheres of influence, a new global order is taking shape. Unlike the Yalta settlement, which ended with the Soviet collapse, the international system projected by America, China and Russia today implies a precipitous retreat of Western power. 

Trump’s presidency has now entered its most dangerous phase. With little left to lose after an earth-shaking midterm wipeout, he is released from political restraint. He has accepted the result with apparent grace, dismissing the fact that the elections were a referendum on his presidency with the assertion that he was not on the ballot — an amusing claim, since he spent the campaign saying the opposite. The mood in the party is sombre. The Florida governor Ron de Santis, mooted as a presidential candidate, has described the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans”. No doubt rightly, given its impact on prices at the pump, the vice-president JD Vance — also looking to his future — has averred “the reason we lost is the war”. They and many others are pointing the finger at Trump, but he may not care. 

In control of the House and Senate, the triumphant Democrats can launch as many legal challenges as they like. They can block legislation, launch investigations into his crimes and impeach him, but he retains the presidential veto, and the supreme master of the attention economy will not be out of the limelight for long. An adventure in Cuba would be a welcome distraction, and he may yet trigger a greater cataclysm in the Gulf. Trump’s second administration is the experimental refutation of liberal legalism. Post-Trump America is not a constitutional republic but an illiberal democracy, the triumph of politics and executive power over law and procedure.

For future historians, Donald Trump’s awkward curtsey when greeting Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan, when they arrived at the White House for tea in September of this year may serve as a turning point. In a genuflection not accorded to his allies, the President saluted the epoch he has brought into being. Impelled by a degenerate capitalism in which everything is for sale, and a singularly manipulable demagogue, America is aligning itself with the adversaries of what used to be called the Western world. As in the Yalta conference in February 1945, when a triumvirate of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union carved up Europe into spheres of influence, a new global order is taking shape. Unlike the Yalta settlement, which ended with the Soviet collapse, the international system projected by America, China and Russia today implies a precipitous retreat of Western power. 

Trump’s presidency has now entered its most dangerous phase. With little left to lose after an earth-shaking midterm wipeout, he is released from political restraint. He has accepted the result with apparent grace, dismissing the fact that the elections were a referendum on his presidency with the assertion that he was not on the ballot — an amusing claim, since he spent the campaign saying the opposite. The mood in the party is sombre. The Florida governor Ron de Santis, mooted as a presidential candidate, has described the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans”. No doubt rightly, given its impact on prices at the pump, the vice-president JD Vance — also looking to his future — has averred “the reason we lost is the war”. They and many others are pointing the finger at Trump, but he may not care. 

In control of the House and Senate, the triumphant Democrats can launch as many legal challenges as they like. They can block legislation, launch investigations into his crimes and impeach him, but he retains the presidential veto, and the supreme master of the attention economy will not be out of the limelight for long. An adventure in Cuba would be a welcome distraction, and he may yet trigger a greater cataclysm in the Gulf. Trump’s second administration is the experimental refutation of liberal legalism. Post-Trump America is not a constitutional republic but an illiberal democracy, the triumph of politics and executive power over law and procedure.

Those who believe Trump shares a mindset with the world’s leading tyrants are mistaken. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese leader displays his all-consuming narcissism. Putin is an archetypal creature of the Soviet system, a cold-eyed killer schooled in the art of survival. Xi is a suspicious autocrat possessed by the insecurity of his position. Putin’s aggression combines self-preservation — his own survival inseparable from that of his regime — with a neo-tsarist vision of a mystical “Russian realm” targeted for destruction by the West. Xi’s “Chinese dream” is the project of making China into the global hegemon and an unapologetic affirmation of Chinese civilisation.  

Embodying nothing except his own emptiness and venality, Trump is the ideal dupe for these flinty tyrants. Possibly he fears Putin as the possessor of kompromat of some sort — there must be many possibilities — and he has certainly done business with the regime. But if Trump is behaving like a Russian asset, it is not because he was recruited as a Manchurian candidate in Moscow 40 years ago. Putin never expected Trump to become president (any more than Trump did himself) and seems to view him with bemused contempt. Trump sees the Russian dictator through the lens of his ideal self-image as strongman and admires him as a model of how to use state power to accumulate personal wealth. 

Those who speak of the Putinisation of America can point to undeniable parallels. Putin is a master of vranyo, the Bolshevik practice of telling lies that both speaker and audience know perfectly well are falsehoods — as when he denied that the “little green men” invading Crimea in 2014 were Russian troops. The goal is not persuasion but domination: by imposing a narrative that is transparently false, the very idea of a domain of facts independent of power is undermined. With his incoherent boasting — claiming to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability, then justifying a resumption of the war to destroy it — Trump also asserts power over facts. The difference is that Putin knows he is lying, whereas in Trump’s moment-by-moment solipsism, truth has no meaning.

For his critics, Trump is the kingpin of a Putin-style kleptocracy. It is true that his second administration has seen the presidency monetised to an unprecedented degree. Diplomacy has become a rent-seeking family business. Insider trading has been normalised. In August of this year, the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) launched a premier data feed allowing Wall Street banks and high-frequency trading firms access to his market-moving Truth Social posts milliseconds before they become available to the public, with subscribers paying a hundred thousand dollars a month for the service. 

By the time they leave office, Trump, his family and acolytes will have amassed immense riches. Likewise, Putin’s extraction of capital from Russia’s economy has, by some estimates, made him richer than Elon Musk. Yet wealth and government interact differently in Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. Under Trump, the US is ruled by a variant of capitalism in which the state is used as a means of corporate enrichment at the expense of America’s strategic interests. In Russia’s version of state capitalism, corporate influence is curbed when it threatens the state itself. The same is true in China.

When Russia’s richest oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, became involved in opposition politics and negotiations to sell part of his oil company, Yukos, to American firms, he was arrested at gunpoint on his private jet, sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian penal colony and Yukos bankrupted. When the CEO of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, criticised China’s financial regulators, he was taken out of circulation and his business empire dismantled. In contrast, the Trump administration authorised the export of high-end computer chips of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia for export to China. During Xi’s visit to Washington, Trump bent the knee in more than one sense. He reportedly pitched the Chinese leader regarding purchases of American military technology, violating decades-long commitments to Taiwan and other allies. He prioritised corporate gain over national security and America’s standing in the world.

Trump’s “transactional” diplomacy consists of the exchange of American power for promises of private gain. The settlement of the Ukraine war being brokered by Trump’s special envoys, his son in law, Jared Kushner, and the real estate investor Steve Witfkoff, follows this playbook. A multibillion-dollar deal to acquire the international holdings of Lukoil, Russia’s largest remaining private oil company, has apparently been discussed, along with reopening the Nord Stream pipeline, blown up in September 2022. Elon Musk’s Space X — on Trump’s instructions, according to Musk — imposed speed limits on Starshield, which allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian drone and missile attacks. Sanctions have been paused, and Trump has called more than once for Zelensky’s removal. 

Trump’s aim is full-scale economic détente with Russia, which he believes will realise large profits for him and his coterie. Very likely he and they will benefit, but there is something spectral about the fabulous wealth envisioned in these sordid machinations. Why should Putin respect the terms of any deal? The “energy ceasefire” Trump believed he had agreed with him was flouted within hours. Much of Trump’s chicanery is based on fantasies — the reverse of realpolitik. If Ukraine is being sold out, it may be for next to nothing. 

Lured by dreams of financial gain, Trump has torn up whatever remained of an American-led “rules-based” order. This is more than the much-discussed passing of a unipolar order. American power is imploding, with the post-Cold-War leviathan now a floundering, flailing behemoth. Rather than an “unreliable friend”, the US seems closer to the enemies of the countries that depended on it for their security. Yet there can be no assurance that America’s new strategic partners will keep their end of the deal. When they met in St Petersburg in October, Witkoff praised Putin as a “humanitarian” for releasing an American prisoner captured in eastern Ukraine in April 2022. Such a toadying eulogy may be understandable. For the US, Yalta 2.0 may yield little more than the prisoner’s release. The presumed exchange is that Russia ends its support for Iran while the US forces Ukraine to surrender; but America has no way of ensuring Russia’s compliance, let alone that of China or Iran.

The Iran debacle itself began with a whim that set in motion a fateful escalation. The illusory prospect of another Venezuela-style coup, semi-magical in its flawless operational execution, was irresistible. What Trump described in March as “a little excursion” has been a forced march to strategic defeat. The result of decapitating the Iranian leadership has been to install a military dictatorship more repressive than the decaying theocracy it replaced. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has become a permanent threat to the Strait of Hormuz. The pre-war status quo, in which it was an open international waterway, is irrecoverable. 

This was not unforeseen. Similar bombing campaigns have been war-gamed many times, with similar results. As Barbara Tuchman showed in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), history is not so much a catalogue of error as a succession of follies whose consequences can be known in advance. 

However the war develops, America has forfeited its position in the Middle East. Over the past months, its bases in the Gulf and Iraq have been disabled and its armouries depleted. Tens of billions of dollars have been expended using costly missiles against cheaper and more quickly replaceable drones. Iran’s partner in the “Axis of Resistance”, the Houthis have turned another vital waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, into a high-risk corridor, while launching a deadly wave of strikes on Saudi airports and refineries.The Gulf monarchies are constructs of European colonialism propped up by American security guarantees that have proved effectively worthless. It cannot be long before regime change comes to the Kingdom, weakened by festering rivalries within the House of Saud since Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz Carlton coup in November 2017. How could the debt-laden US withstand the collapse of the petrodollar, which channelled Saudi oil revenues into an AI-led stock market bubble already showing signs of bursting? 

Another “short, intensive” bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear and energy facilities, which seemed to be prefigured in the “limited” American strikes on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz early this week, would only postpone a further American retreat. Trump’s curtailing aid to Israel has been seen as reducing the likelihood of a resumption of the war. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump may still think they can “finish the job”.  

Iran’s economy is being slowly strangled by the American naval embargo that is blocking its seaborne oil exports. Yet the regime retains the capacity to devastate the Gulf’s energy production, causing acute shortages of diesel — the fuel on which the global economy runs — and irreplaceable agricultural chemicals. Undersea cables and data centres could also be attacked. The true Iranian nuclear option is disabling water and desalination plants. Weaponising its geography, with its mountainous streams, inland rivers and lakes, Iran could wreak an enormous civilian catastrophe in the desert kingdoms of its Gulf enemies. 

At a global level, a species of total war is already underway. In the delirium of the Western mind, Gaza has been singled out as a unique catastrophe, but the reach of the battlefield into civilian life is practically universal. In Ukraine, Putin’s relentless bombardment destroys schools and scientific academies and cuts off electricity and water, aiming to render Kyiv uninhabitable and drive out millions of desperate refugees. Across Europe, Russia is orchestrating assassination, arson and cyber-strikes, together with drone strikes that could easily spiral into mass casualty events.  

The Baltic and Nordic states have fortified their defences, but most European countries seem paralysed. Poland — the most militarily prepared — is in the throes of constitutional crisis. Emmanuel Macron’s technocratic centrism has reached its endgame. Teetering on the edge of default, the Fifth Republic is rehearsing the upheaval that will come when Marine Le Pen enters the Élysée Palace — as must now be likely — and Jean-Luc Mélenchon mobilises an insurrection against her. “Cost-of living” rioting and looting has spread to Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland and Albania, among other countries. It is hard to envision the French banlieues and AfD strongholds in former East Germany accepting the cost of deploying European troops indefinitely in Ukraine. Nor is it clear that Europe could afford to forgo the billions of euros’ worth of oil and gas it buys from Russia (which help Putin fund the war). A European solution is a mirage, and for all the heroic resourcefulness of its struggle, Ukraine cannot go it alone. Unless Zelensky’s supporters in Washington can somehow tie Trump’s hands, the logic of the situation is a brutal partition.

In America, Trump’s rise was a by-product of the neo-liberal cult of globalisation. It was not simply an increase in inequality that stoked “populist” revolt. Whole sections of society were denied any productive role. Capital was exported and manufacturing offshored, labour imported and communities abandoned. With their workless families, drug habits and short lives, the human detritus of American industry could be safely left to moulder on their reservations. Yet post-industrial decline has now affected much of the middle class. Occupations and career structures have melted into air. Neoliberal economics was the enterprise of re-engineering capitalism without a bourgeoisie, and the hollowing out of middle-class life has continued under Trump’s corporate kleptocracy. There was bound to be a countermovement from the Left. New York mayor Zohran Mandami’s “democratic socialism” is not a movement of organised labour. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zack Polanski’s movements, it is a bourgeois populism, varnishing the status anxieties of heavily-indebted graduates and downwardly-mobile professionals with high-rent progressive causes. Incubated in campus seminaries of anti-Western orthodoxy, Mamdani’s leftism is set to be a deciding force in Democratic politics. 

A sea change is underway in the Republicans as well. As he limbers up for a presidential campaign in 2028, JD Vance is cultivating the same nativist constituency that is the audience of Tucker Carlson — aside from Trump, America’s most accomplished demagogue. A devil’s brew of anti-Semitism, historical revisionism and conspiracy theory is shaping up as the ruling ideology of the MAGA Right. As in Europe, the old centre ground no longer exists. 

The midterm clean sweep was a repudiation of Trump more than an endorsement of the Democrats. The winners included Dr Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan, US Senate) and Dr Abdul Hamawy (New Jersey, US House), Egyptian-born Muslims closely aligned with the progressive wing of the Democrats who campaigned strongly against the war. Foreign policy positions that used to be bipartisan are being questioned and rejected in both parties. Europeans who are still invested in the notion that the Trump era is an unfortunate anomaly would be wise to think again. Nothing is further from reality than a reversion to Nikki Haley-style interventionism. It is not fantastical to see the US becoming the first advanced post-Western state and joining Russia in a China-led Eurasian bloc. 

That does not mean such a concert of powers would be stable. If a trilateral summit between Xi, Putin and Trump is held at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Shenzhen scheduled for later this month, their exchanges may well come to nothing. In some ways this looks less like February 1945 and more like the run-up to August 1914. Now as then, great powers are engaged in wars for control of natural resources against a background of tangled and shifting alliances. With multiple players and no one in charge, miscalculation by any of them could bring disaster on all. 

Another future is possible, however. Rather than drifting towards another Great War, we may be entering an era of peace. A curious kind of peace, to be sure, accompanied by unending bloodshed. Proxy wars and urban terrorism will rage unabated. War and peace will, in effect, be one and the same. The West will cease to exist as a geopolitical or civilisational bloc. But joining forces with its adversaries will fuel another stock market boom, and what neo-Marxian theorists fondly call “late capitalism” will enjoy a new lease of life. Having used the neoliberal interlude to build a mercantilist juggernaut, China will re-establish globalisation in a dirigiste form that entrenches its economic primacy, with Russia exploited as a vassal state. A certain equilibrium will prevail, underpinned by the shared interests of transnational ruling classes.

Then again, none of this may come to pass. The future may not be advancing authoritarianism but accelerating disintegration. If Taiwan is not easily absorbed, Xi’s autocracy may be overthrown, and China could revert to disunity of a kind recurrent in its history. Putin might be toppled by war-weary oligarchs, only to be replaced by a more extreme anti-Western despot ruling a nuclear-armed Muscovy surrounded by breakaway fiefdoms. The United States may fragment, with enclaves of anarchic high-tech vitality booming alongside wastelands of poverty and desolation, presided over by an enfeebled federal government.

But of one thing we can be certain. Donald Trump has brought Western hegemony to a close. A world-historical figure as much as Napoleon or Mao, the founder of MAGA has ushered in a post-American age.