At the start of his second term, President Trump surveyed the slowly rotting swamp that was the post-Cold War landscape, and he did not like what he saw.
He has determined to scour it clean of dangerous attachments, conditions, and — as we now know — regimes the president considers to be a legacy of past American weakness.
His ultimate objective? A world open for business that realistically reflects the preponderance of American economic and military power.
Towards this goal he has stormed with the disruptive force of a Category 5 hurricane.
The war with Iran is only a moment in Trump’s geopolitical pilgrim’s progress. It was preceded by aggressive moves against China, Panama, Greenland, Gaza, Mexico and Venezuela.
It will be followed by a settling of the family business with Cuba.
America’s global priorities have been radically rebalanced. NATO allies have been told to pick up their burden if they wish to see the US stick around.
Meanwhile, Latin America, long treated like a poor relation, looms large in the administration’s thinking.
World won’t be same
The recent Shield of the Americas summit held in Doral, Fla., brought together a dozen elected leaders from this hemisphere who have defied history by openly proclaiming themselves pro-American.
Some, like Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, sound decidedly pro-Trump.
I have no idea whether the president’s hard-charging strategy will succeed.
But I can say this with confidence: the world will never be the same.
An avalanche of events has been set loose that will not easily be stopped.
Relations that were based on the pretense of order have been swept away and replaced by a chaotic scramble for security.
The consequences will either dramatically favor the US or wreak severe retribution upon us for our overreach.
Either way, history is on the move.
Already, the global chessboard looks unrecognizable.
And if the winners in this great reshuffling are not yet known, it’s easy to identify the losers.
That would be the national and transnational grandees who had pictured themselves as pillars of a “rules-based world order.”
These are elite types who worship at the altar of process: every crisis must be papered over with consultations, negotiations and proclamations, until the public’s attention wanders and the trouble is decently shoved offstage.
Trump’s rage for change, for an actual outcome, feels to them threatening and immoral — a trampling on the proprieties.
In the rules-based world order, the point isn’t to defuse lethal situations like a hostile fanatical regime acquiring nuclear bombs — it’s to play-act at doing so, while adroitly turning present difficulties into someone else’s nightmare in the future.
Remember the Israel-Palestine “peace process” following the 1993 Oslo Accords? That alleged search for tranquility dribbled on for a decade before exploding into a bloody intifada.
Obama blunders
Remember Barack Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for Iran, whereby we gave the Iranians billions in exchange for their promise to delay building nukes for a few years?
That ended with the Iranians boasting to American negotiators that they could build 11 nuclear bombs any time they wished, leading directly to the devastation of the current war.
The rules-based world order is one of the many fantasies bestowed by Obama on an undeserving humanity.
There were no rules in the system — certainly no rules Obama heeded as president. He bombed Libya for seven months, assassinated hundreds of putative terrorists around the world, and turned Syria over to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin and ISIS.
Nor was there order in the system — savage conflicts erupted during its tenure in Ukraine (twice), Sudan (multiple times), Georgia, Gaza, Congo, etc.
Obama believed history was on the side of the angels. That meant paralysis was the best defense against any threat.
US was enemy
In the end, history would come to the rescue: the rule-breakers would fail and fall, and the virtuous nations would triumph.
This “hold me back” strategy was a transparent ruse for doing nothing, and it applied strictly and singularly to the United States.
Obama was convinced that the enemy was us. The flexible rules therefore applied only to us — whatever action the US took, whether we turned right or left, up or down, we were breaking the rules.
In brief, the rules-based world order was a way to induce American decline and protect the world from American trouble-making.
It bred a generation of global elites for whom deliberation is an art form, process is an end in itself, and immobility is perfection.
The war with Iran has shattered the fantasy forever.
It isn’t as if President Trump failed to warn world leaders, as he did the entire human race, weeks in advance, that he intended to deal aggressively with Iran.
But the fact that he actually meant it left them panicked and disoriented.
Shocked into action by the start of the war, the heads of government of Germany, France and Britain got on Zoom and did their favorite thing: consultation.
In the well-founded belief that their electorates expected more, they delivered the one outcome at which they excel: a proclamation, consisting of many words.
A week later, the three leaders were joined by a fourth, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, for more consultations and yet another proclamation, this one with slightly different words.
EU president Ursula von der Leyen’s response to the emergency has already become immortal — or at least viral.
On the Saturday the war began, von der Leyen said it was of the “utmost importance” to prevent escalation, then scheduled a crisis meeting for Monday.
Evidently, on the scale of importance, weekend leisure took precedence over stopping the killing.
And for Friedrich Merz, chancellor of Germany, the whole war thing posed an inscrutable “dilemma.”
I mean, on the one hand, you had Trump; on the other, the ayatollahs.
How is a morally lofty European to choose?
In general, confusion and contradiction characterized the global elites’ reaction to the war.
A handful on the left seized the opportunity to indulge their reflexive animosity towards anything connected to Trump.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, for one, accused the US of violating the UN Charter.
Under the callow slogan of “No to war,” Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s prime minister and the very model of a modern progressive politician, denied Americans the use of our big air bases in Spanish territory.
Most leaders, however, particularly among our traditional allies, had trouble explaining where they stood.
Canada’s ‘regret’
Canada’s liberal prime minister, Mark Carney, began with the fulsome assertion that “Canada supports the United States” — then felt compelled to add “with some regret,” finally observing that the actions of the ally he was continuing to endorse were “inconsistent with international law.”
In January, at Davos — galactic capital of elitism — Carney had given a much-applauded speech mourning the decline of the rules-based international order.
In March, by waffling on an existential question, Carney exemplified the delusional nature of that order.
The gold medal in the Perplexity Olympics was easily won by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Starmer single-handedly demolished Britain’s special relationship with the US by refusing American long-range bombers the air base in the strategic island of Diego Garcia.
Apparently, Starmer’s Labour cabinet felt that supporting an old and trusted ally in a war against the Islamic Republic might negatively affect the Muslim vote.
After Iran’s retaliatory strikes endangered the lives of the 300,000 British citizens in the Middle East, and Britain’s allies in the region wondered aloud what side the country was on, Starmer abruptly changed his mind — it was OK for his American friends to bomb the heck out of Iran from Diego Garcia.
Never a gracious winner, Trump basically told Starmer, “Thanks for nothing.”
Brits in dry dock
Only when an Iranian missile struck the British base at Akrotiri, Cyprus, did the prime minister seem to awaken from his dogmatic stupor and realize that a terrible war, with enormous stakes, was the subject under discussion.
At that point, there was little he could do. A guileless political establishment, long preceding Starmer, had hollowed out Britain’s war-making capability to practically nothing.
The numbers are astounding.
The British Navy ended World War II with something like 1,400 ships.
It began the Iranian conflict with 63 ships — and literally every major vessel when the war broke out was in dry dock, under repairs.
That’s saying “No to war” on an entirely different level.
Elite posturing and confusion about Iran stemmed from the same impulse. They craved desperately to return to the happy years BT — Before Trump — when words ruled the world and immobility could be disguised as statesmanship.
It’s a forlorn hope. The decline of the democracies, no matter how artfully camouflaged, has brought about the opposite of peace.
Cowardice and weakness are a poor place to search for rules. Entropy isn’t order.
And like it or not, for good or harm, Donald Trump will bestride the world over the next three years seeking high-risk but consequential outcomes rather than polite fictions.
