In just 50 days, President Trump did more than any of his modern predecessors to avoid the foundations of an international system that the United States has meticulously erected during the 80 years that has come victorious from the Second World War.
Without officially declaring a reversal, of course or offering a strategic justification, he prompted the United States to change camps in the Ukraine War, all abandoning to help an emerging and erroneous democracy defend its borders against a greater invader. He did not hesitate when he ordered in the United States to vote with Russia and North Korea – and against almost all traditional American allies – to overcome a resolution of the United Nations which identified Moscow as the aggressor. His threats to take control of the Panama, Greenland, Gaza and, more incredibly Canada, its predator, including its claim on Tuesday that the border with the northern ally of America is an “artificial separation line”.
He cut Ukraine of arms and even American commercial satellite images, partly out of part on his explosion in the oval office with President Volodymyr Zelensky, but largely because the Ukrainian president insists on a guarantee that the West would come with his country if Russia restores and re -evaluated.
Trump imposed prices on his allies after having described them as leeches on the American economy. And he damaged confidence among NATO allies so much that France discusses the extension of the small nuclear umbrella in his country above Europe, and Poland plans to build his own atomic weapon. The two fear that the United States can no longer be counted to act as the ultimate defender of the Alliance, a basic role he created for himself when the NATO Treaty was written.
No one knows how much Trump will be successful by tearing away from each American president since Harry Truman built – an era of institutions that Mr. Truman’s secretary of state being commemorated in a book entitled “Present in creation”. Living in Washington these days is to have the impression that we are present at destruction.
It could be four years or more before we know if these changes are permanent or if the guards of the old system will affect, as soldiers trying to survive in the trenches of the Donbas. By then, the Western allies may have passed a system centered on America.
Or, like Joseph S. Nye Jr., the political scientist known for his work on the nature of the soft power, recently said about Mr. Trump, “he is so obsessed with the problem of free horsemen that he forgets that he was in the interest of America to drive the bus.”
But perhaps the most remarkable thing is that Mr. Trump erodes the old order without ever describing the system with which he plans to replace it. His actions suggest that he is the most comfortable in the world of the 19th century of high power policy, where he, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping de China, negotiate between them and let less powers fall online.
Trump is already claiming success. To its defenders, the agreement of Ukraine Tuesday at a temporary cease-fire proposal, a Russia has not yet accepted, seems to demonstrate that the use by Mr. Trump of its lever effect on Mr. Zelensky was worth the tumult. But historians can determine that these 50 days were essential for reasons that did not have much to do with Ukraine.
“The big debate is now whether it is a tactical decision to reshape our foreign policy or a revolution?” said R. Nicholas Burns, American ambassador to China under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and to NATO under President George W. Bush.
“I came to think that it is a revolution,” he said. “When you vote with North Korea and Iran against NATO allies, when you cannot resist Russian aggression, when you threaten to take the territory of your allies, something has fundamentally changed. There is a break in confidence with the allies that we may never be able to repair. »»
‘Nothing will be on our way’
Retrospectively, the first sign that Mr. Trump’s approach to the world would be radically different from that he continued during the first mandate came a cold morning early in January in his club in Mar-A-Lago in Florida.
For weeks, he had sounded more and more martial on the need for the United States to control Greenland, due to its mineral wealth and its strategic location near the arctic waters used by Russia and China. He accelerated his requests for access to the Panama Canal and continued to repeat the need for Canada to become a 51st state, until it became clear that it was not joking.
It was an amazing threat. An incoming president had threatened to use the world’s largest soldier against a NATO ally. Some have brushed it like Trump Bravado. But in its inauguration, it doubled. He said that the world would no longer exploit the generosity of America and the security it offered to the allies. He spoke of an America which “would continue our manifest destiny”, a rallying call from the 1890s, and congratulated William McKinley, the president loving the prices which took the Philippines in the Hispanian-American war. And he spoke of creating an “external income service” at “price and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens”.
“Nothing will be on our way,” he said. And nothing has.
The effort to tear the American agency for international development, created by President John F. Kennedy as part of the avant-garde of the American soft power, only took a few weeks; The main argument playing before the courts is whether the government has to pay entrepreneurs $ 2 billion for work already completed. Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, who led the government’s accusation of the government, recognized that foreign aid is so derived from the Maga movement as a home for liberal values and corruption that the agency was an easy first brand.
Disassemble it, they knew, would also be afraid in the hearts of government employees who realized that they could be the next. Groups that do similar work and were once praised by Republicans – such as the United States Institute for Peace and the National Endowment for Democracy – are in life.
Ukraine: the first test
The biggest change was yet to come: Ukraine.
For three years, Democrats and most Republicans had largely seen war through the objective of traditional American foreign policy. The United States was responsible for defending a democracy in difficulty which had been illegally invaded by greater power seeking its territory.
But now, as president, Mr. Trump called “Dictator” Zelensky, while refusing to say the same thing about Mr. Putin. He justified his refusal to call Russia the aggressor in war as a necessary measure to act as a neutral mediator. Then, during his first trip to Europe, his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said that the United States would never accept Ukraine’s admission to the NATO alliance, and said that it should abandon the territory it had lost against the Russian aggression.
With the blessings of Mr. Trump, they had given Mr. Putin two of his initial requests, while clearly indicating that if Ukraine wanted a security guarantee, he should speak to its European neighbors – but that the United States would not participate. The other day, Trump said that he had found features with Russia more easily than facing Ukraine.
“He has transformed the American policy on the Russo-Ukraine War to 180 degrees,” said John R. Bolton, third of Mr. Trump, and perhaps the national security advisor. “Trump is now sitting with the invader.”
But Europe has dug more deeply with the Ukrainians, essentially dividing the greatest NATO power of all its other members except a few. Not since the Suez crisis in 1956 – when France, Great Britain and Israel have invaded Egypt – the United States found themselves on the other side of a conflict of its closest allies. But this violation was deeper and more fundamental.
A senior European official, speaking shortly after the Munich security conference last month, said that it was clear that Mr. Trump’s real program was simply to get a cease-fire-all cease-fire-then “normalize relations with the Russians”.
The prospect of European officials if concerned, who believe they can be the next in the views of Russia, that Friedrich Merz, the long-standing promoter of the Transatlantic Alliance who is ready to be the next Chancellor of Germany, said in the night of the German elections that his “absolute priority” would be to “realize the independence of the United States”
“I never thought that I should say something like that,” he said, but he had concluded that the new administration was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”.
Rethink the future
Perhaps one of the reasons why Trump’s revolution has taken the world by such a surprise is that many Americans, and American allies, thought that Mr. Trump’s behavior in the second term would roughly reflect what he did in the first.
He largely brought the national security strategy published during his first mandate, they thought, which brought together China and Russia as “revisionist” “determined to make economies less free and less just, to develop their soldiers and control information and data to suppress their companies and develop their influence”.
Read today, this document seems to come from another era. Mr. Bolton maintains that Mr. Trump “has no philosophy or great national security strategy”.
“He does not make” politics “, but a series of personal relationships.”
Now, his collaborators rush, with little success, to impose a logic on all of this.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a classic hardliner from Russia before taking his current post, suggested that Mr. Trump was trying to detach Russia from his growing partnership with China. There is no evidence that it works.
Other members of Mr. Trump’s national security team spoke of a “2.0 -monroe doctrine”. This suggests a world in which the United States, China, Russia and perhaps Saudi Arabia are responsible for their distinct spheres of influence. Sir Alex Younger, the former MI6 chief, the British Spy Agency, said in an interview with the BBC that she Yalta’s conference reminded him – Roosevelt’s meeting, Churchill and Stalin in 1945 – where “strong countries decided to fate small countries”.
“This is the world in which we enter,” he predicted, adding “I don’t think we return to the one we had before.”
Of course, such a arrangement has long been a dream of Mr. Putin, because it would increase the power of its economically declining state. But like Dmitri Medvedev, the former Russian president, said it on social networks the other day: “If you had told me only three months ago that it was the words of the American president, I would have laughed aloud.”
