Though not yet two months old, Donald Trump’s second US administration is redefining the world system. The shock is all the greater for a generation of western commentators used to a largely managerial politics, and to assumptions about the essentially benign nature of US global empire. In the turmoil, confusion about the meaning and nature of events is widespread, not least on the left.
At the heart of Trump’s geopolitical shift are two connected movements. The first is a deepening of a pivot to China, a bid to contain the US’ peer competitor in coming decades. Though an official preoccupation of US presidents going back to the Obama administrations (and presaged even before then), it has been frustrated by continued US entanglements in the Middle East and Europe. Trump seems determined to finally break the impasse.
The cult of Trump – his personalised ‘party of one’ political form – makes him uniquely placed to carry out this rapid re-organisation by executive authority. His vaunted ‘deal making’ approach relies on a combination of the speed with which he deploys US strength, and the confusion created in the wake of his sudden breaking and remoulding of relations.
This is on display most clearly in the second part of Trump’s geostrategic movement. In the pivot to China, the ‘pivot’ is the central zones of US hegemony – North America and Europe. In order to move on China, the US is consolidating its hegemony in these two crucial continents, which between them account for so much of world economic activity and trade. Trump represents a rift from liberal critics in that he believes traditional methods of alliance building have failed. Onetime sleepy provinces of US imperium like Canada and Denmark are subject to threat and insult at least. Trump’s rapid, alternating declaration and cessation of trade war is designed to create a pervasive atmosphere of instability and dread. It is already working, with US allies like the UK bowing at every opportunity. The effect is only enhanced by the sponsorship of parties like Reform and the AfD in Germany by Trump’s lieutenants. This is about leverage over the traditional parties for Trump’s ends, more than it is about any simple ideological affinity.
Though aggressive and dependant on the initiative of the most powerful state in the world, these twin movements in fact represent a strategic retreat for US power. Taken in the long view of US empire, which arrived after WW2 and experienced a second wind after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it marks the turn from an expansive to a defensive phase. Trump’s pessimistic, zero sum view of a world jungle in which the US is merely the largest predator, rather than some transcendent force morally apart, makes him the natural figurehead of the shift.
European leaders, so long gratified in the glow of the latter ideological image, are struggling to adjust. But they are adjusting. There is credulity among some on the left about the extent of conflict between European liberalism and Trumpism. Behind the tantrums, politicians and pundits are communicating a real convergence of interests. The general argument is that for all Trump’s shocking lack of decorum, he is essentially right about Europe’s failures to militarise. This is a bid for a new supplication to US power, which European states know they will still have to live with in the era of the pivot. The ‘withdrawal’ from Europe is of US obligations to allies, not of US coercive power.
This does not mean that differences between the US and its European allies are merely incidental. Our rulers are, in Karl Marx’s words “hostile brothers”, who fight each other over the strategic course of the international system, in a way that reflects factional interests. Superficial accounts take the family affair to be open war, with fanatical proponents of vying camps seeing the whole meaning of politics in the hostility. But the leaders of these factions are still brothers in the end, united by the need to maintain the system and its structures of domination and exploitation.
This can be seen, too, in the domestic US side of developments. It isn’t enough for Trump to shuffle and subdue his allies abroad. He needs to root this new geostrategy in a changed US state. Modes of soft power, traditionally seen as aligned with the US global-liberal strategy, are under massive pressure. USAID, the CIA, and the Federal Civil Service have all been subject to Musk’s ‘chainsaw’ treatment. As in the international sphere, the method is to sow fear, this time by the sudden arrest of money flows and threats of mass redundancy.
Some of these changes are not easily reversable. The USAID cuts for example, which have trashed so many projects in the NGO and media sphere, mean that a whole layer of global proxies can never fully trust or depend on the US again even if the taps were to be turned back on. Taken together, the disruption of allies, US elites and such proxies looks like design. Trump and his team want to change course enough that the ship will steer true, even once the captain is gone. This partly explains the breakneck speed – Trump doesn’t have four years, but less than two. He can’t trust that he won’t be lamed in the midterm elections in November 2026, or even before. Trump’s project is already starting to hit turbulence in the markets and infighting among his lieutenants, with some balking at the pace of domestic reform.
However matters pan out in the US, on the other side of the Atlantic the shift already seems irreversible. States are charging their war machines to fit multipolarity. They are mindful that the pivot has been a long time coming, with a significant degree of US bipartisan assent for the principle. But what will not emerge will be a unified new Europe. ‘Europe’ as a political entity is largely a creation of the unipolar era. US power rebuilt the continent after WW2, and rallied it against a common Cold War enemy. Even the struggle for a modest degree of autonomy under the banner of the EU presupposed US world leadership. Without this format of external domination, Europe will increasingly splinter apart. This dissipation is already evident in the rejections of Starmer’s ‘Four point plan’ for Ukraine, with Germany and others declining to station troops in Ukraine. The European states, too, are hostile brothers.
A left that clings to a forgone era by demanding the unity of European leaders, arms to Ukraine and a return to 2010s era culture war ‘resistance’ to Trump is already meaningless. What is desperately needed is a political programme independent of both Trump and his supposed liberal enemies, rooted in opposition to the new European militarism on a class basis.
