Donald Trump’s New World Order Is the Old World Order

Henry Kissinger once said that every American president since Woodrow Wilson has had to embrace Wilson’s foreign policy idealism. Kissinger said this ruefully, and favored a very unsentimental realism in foreign affairs and a hands-off policy when it came to other countries’ domestic affairs. His view was always that America had no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

I suspect Donald Trump would agree with that. Because to him, the transaction is everything.

Converting Gaza into an oceanfront resort. Turning Canada into the 51st state. Annexing Greenland. “Reclaiming” the Panama Canal. Punishing our closest neighbors with punitive tariffs. Undermining NATO. Siding with Russia, our longtime adversary, while bullying our longtime allies. Holding a Ukraine peace deal hostage to gain access to the war-torn country’s rare earth minerals. Threatening to ignore defense treaties and flouting economic agreements. “My whole life is deals,” said the 47th president after meeting with the leader of France, America’s first ally, to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

The idea that all exchanges in foreign affairs are merely cold transactions of power—or “deals” untethered from broader moral commitments—has always been known as “realism.” But even arch realists have operated within the framework of the rule of law and the sovereignty of nation states.

That rules-based world order seemed to reach its zenith at the end of 1989, when the Berlin Wall was crumbling. The scholar Francis Fukuyama observed this high-water mark in “The End of History?”—his famous article positing that with the fall of Communism, an international consensus had been reached. It was the belief that, at the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy had triumphed over all of its 20th-century ideological rivals—Communism, fascism, monarchy, theocracy—and so we had come to what philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had prophesied as the end of ideological competition in world affairs. No more wars of imperial conquest, no more quarreling over borders, no more violent competition.

This was, as Fukuyama took pains to point out, not the end of events happening—front pages would still be filled with news—but the end of an evolutionary battle for the best way for human beings to govern themselves. (Hegel even worried that the world might reach a state of global boredom.)

I suspect that more people know about Fukuyama’s thesis and the article’s famous title from the torrent of criticism that the piece received, with clever headlines riffing on his title with variations like “The End of the End of History” and “The Return of History.” The 9/11 attacks, Tiananmen Square, the wars in Iraq (I and II), and the Russian invasions of Ukraine (I and II), as well as the rise of authoritarian states and “illiberal” democracies, all suggested that the happy consensus prophesied by Fukuyama was itself relegated to the ash heap of history.

But while history with a small h came roaring back, few talked about what was more ominous: the global retreat from liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarian rule. Most of the criticism seemed rooted in the idea that the languid boredom Hegel had predicted was very far from the case. Little was written about the idea that liberal democracy itself had perhaps failed—or that we had failed it—and what was emerging in its stead. Perhaps it was not the best model for human beings to govern themselves, or the best way for nations to achieve prosperity or happiness.

Certainly, that’s what Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Erdoğan, and Narendra Modi have been arguing. Indeed, their own respective foreign policies are based on the idea that America is not a model for successful governance, prosperity, or even the pursuit of happiness; that, in fact, our high-minded ideals are a hypocritical scam, and liberal democracy, as a form of government in the modern world, is not something to be emulated or copied.

Trump may well agree with that too. “We are not here to lecture,” he previously said.

Now, with the rise of Trump’s brand of chaotic gangster diplomacy, we seem to be approaching a new and different end of history, a completely transactional world—a world of economic nationalism, a world of strongmen and 19th-century power politics, with the return of spheres of influence. We have been reminded once again that history is not directional or evolutionary, despite what Hegel and even Karl Marx contended; rather, it is cyclical and repetitive, as Plato and Oswald Spengler argued. This new end of history is the return of humankind’s essential, Hobbesian nature: nasty, brutish, competitive, insecure.

In short, the new world order is the old world order.

The return of 19th-century balance of power dynamics creates the laboratory for what a harsher, less cooperative world looks like. World affairs have moved from the analogy of a chessboard to that of a billiard table, with nations colliding unpredictably. We’ve been moving in this direction for at least a couple of decades. But now, with America marching at the head of the parade, we have reached the point where we can say that liberal democracy is not on a path to become the universal form of global government. The ideological competition is over. Non-ideology has won. Sure, the Europeans still care about human rights and liberal democracy, but without US leadership, these values will seem parochial, not universal. The remaining liberal democracies do not have enough clout individually—or even collectively—to pressure countries toward democratic idealism and the rules-based international order. Maybe, if a Democrat is elected president in just less than four years, there will be a return to at least a façade of idealism, but that will just be a cover for a slightly less aggressive form of economic nationalism in a world where that has become the rule, not the exception.

This is exactly how the “America First” crowd wants it. They see this new end of history as a return to first principles. Trumpian foreign policy scholars argue that the US has been headed in the wrong direction since Wilson campaigned for the League of Nations after World War I. Before Wilson, they say, American foreign policy resembled America-first nationalism. It was strictly and exclusively focused on American sovereignty. It rejected entangling alliances (per Thomas Jefferson) and was resolutely anti-interventionist. It was against globalization, long before we had a word for it. And it was skeptical, if not downright doubtful, about the ability to engineer social change in the world. “It is our true policy,” George Washington said in his 1796 farewell address, “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

These conservative thinkers see a narrative of the last century that’s very different from the one seen by champions of liberal democracy. They believe that the benefits of immigration ended after World War I; that the value of free trade ceased after World War II; and that America’s last just conflict was the Gulf War of 1991. They are convinced that having deliberately lax standards on immigration is the not-so-secret Democratic tactic of forming a permanent electoral majority. They have a 19th-century mercantilist view of trade—that the US must have surpluses with its trading partners and that higher walls promote and secure American industry. And they see what they call the policy of “endless wars” as functioning like an employment agency for a permanent transnational managerial class of experts who know better than everyone else.

These America Firsters see the postwar American promotion of democracy as a corrupt distortion of the more originalist and isolationist American vision. Even the word democracy itself is seen by the New Right as a smoke screen for liberal elites to camouflage their own corruption. They argue that the efforts made by both Democratic and Republican administrations to promote democracy are themselves undemocratic. It is all undemocratic, they claim, because the basis of progressive democracy is the idea that bureaucratic experts must govern because, well, everything is so darn complicated.

The other reason that these conservatives are against promotion of democracy is even more basic: culture. They believe that democracy works in only certain cultures (see: Western Anglo-Saxon Judeo-Christian culture) and does not work in others (see: Asian and African cultures). While liberals think democracy is applicable to everyone (which is how the Framers saw it), the anti-global right believes that the West’s culture of individualism uniquely grew out of Christianity and the Renaissance. Individualism arose in Europe, wrote the political scientist Lawrence Mead, and it makes sense that “the West’s ‘free’ institutions clearly are an ill fit in most of the world.” Conservatives believe, to paraphrase the old business expression, that culture eats ideology for breakfast.

But under Trump, we are not only failing to promote democracy abroad; we also seem to be actively undermining it.

Gone are the days when American presidents and secretaries of state talked to foreign authoritarian leaders about human rights, transparency, and democracy. I had the privilege of seeing them do it. I sat in a room and witnessed Barack Obama and John Kerry talk to China’s Xi and other world leaders about human rights and transparency. That is what we used to do, and you can debate whether it was effective. But it was who we were. George Bush and his father did the same thing, as did Ronald Reagan and, of course, Jimmy Carter. Now we have an American president who does not see any benefit to alliances. To him, alliances are a protection racket from which the US is not getting enough payola.

In 1989, when Fukuyama published his “End of History?” essay, the idea that European fascism could return in any way, shape, or form seemed ridiculous. It was not only defeated, but also regarded with such opprobrium that it was the ideology that dare not speak its name. With the triumph of liberal democracy, there seemed to be no grounds in which fascism could take root. If liberal democracy could fix inequality, as Hegel believed, how could fascism take shape? But with the steep rise in immigration to Europe during the Syrian civil war, the stagnation of some European economies, and the roiling grievances of white working-class nationalists, fascism flickered to life again.

We have seen the return of “soft fascism”—a combination of ultranationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism—in Italy, Germany, and France. In all these places, the embers of fascism were reignited by immigration from the Middle East. Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and the architects of Brexit all asserted that the flow of darker, non-Christian immigrants from developing countries was undermining the traditional homogeneity of the culture and weakening its foundation. Germany, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom all have significantly larger foreign-born populations than they had several decades ago. As Fukuyama wrote, this is the flow from the “historical” world to the “post-historical world.” But it was the Europeans’ very post-historical faith in the values of liberal democracy that prevented them from seeing the repercussions of immigration. They did not want to seem racist or prejudiced toward these new immigrants, or to treat them differently than citizens.

As a result, immigration turbocharged a regressive nationalism. Nationalism as an idea in and of itself is neutral, but became imbued with a negative connotation because of how it was perverted by the rise of fascism in the 1930s. It was a toxic brand of ethnic exceptionalism that regarded other nation states as inferior. After World War II, at least in Europe, nationalism was muted, frowned upon, a throwback to a time to which no one wanted to return.

The antidote to toxic nationalism, said the internationalists, was rules-based globalization. This idea marked a return to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: that free markets would inevitably lead to free peoples. That economic liberalism—free trade and free markets—would usher in a liberal democracy. And in some cases, that did happen. Take South Korea. Or Poland. Or…Germany. But it did not happen in Russia. It has not happened in China. Nor does an open marketplace necessarily lead to a true marketplace of ideas, which is the underpinning of free speech. What has happened in the last 25 years is that burgeoning free markets in authoritarian countries have led not to more democracy, but to its nemesis: crony oligarchic capitalism.

Trumpian transactionalism is now welcomed in many parts of the globe. Many countries understand the law of rulers better than the rule of law. In the Gulf, and in parts of South America and Africa, Trump’s transactionalism is seen as better suited to nations’ own self-interest. As Nigeria’s minister of industry, trade, and investment, Jumoke Oduwole, said, “For us, it’s Nigeria first, it’s Africa first. We see this more in terms of opportunities.” In many cases, such nations see Trump’s style as agreeably transparent: Each side seeks maximum benefit absent any ideological or moral judgment.

The trouble is that Trump’s erratic behavior complicates what should be the rationalism of transactionalism. When you take transactionalism and combine it with a grievance-fueled, gangster-style diplomacy, you get a dangerously unstable multipolar world.

For decades after the end of World War II, the model of liberal democracy—with freedom as its engine—worked both economically and morally. But it was obviously not working for everyone. Increasing inequality, civil wars leading to mass migration, and the aftermath of COVID caused people to question the system that once was going to be the final form of government. Fukuyama wondered whether the end of history would usher in a time of bland stasis, with economic calculation replacing values we once stood up for. The good news is that there is plenty left to fight for.