Mankind\u2019s achievements over the millennia have been bountiful. Their evolutionary fruits \u2013 from the harnessing of fire, to vaccines, to the art of diplomacy \u2013 were never low hanging; they were imagined before they were ever grasped. <\/p>\n
But once held, they became indispensable. Until now that is, as 100 days into his presidency US President Donald Trump seems determined to throw this painful learning to the wind, risking a world forced into reverse. <\/p>\n
A torrent of tariffs, unleashed against the better judgement of experts, yet exalted by Trump\u2019s acolytes as the work of a deal-making genius are a case in point. So too is his willingness to throw allies to the wind, by threatening to grab Greenland, Canada even Panama by force if necessary. <\/p>\n
Whatever one\u2019s view of the policies themselves, Trump\u2019s total upending of the global status quo has sewn fear and uncertainty among America\u2019s friends, exacerbated market volatility and normalized economic aggression. It\u2019s a formula that over the centuries has rarely served the world well. <\/p>\n
The president\u2019s apparent over-arching ethos \u2013 might is right, and mine is greatest \u2013 is now demolishing geopolitical norms at speed. It is Ukraine that should give in to Russia, which \u201chas all the cards,\u201d Trump says. Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s \u201cpretty big concession,\u201d his US counterpart adds, is not \u201ctaking the whole country.\u201d <\/p>\n
Yet despite three years of \u201cmeat-grinding\u201d war, Putin\u2019s aim remains as contrary to international law as it was when he launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion. <\/p>\n
It is clear then why Trump struggles to do what all his allies find easy: to blame Putin for defying the rules-based world order in a brutal campaign to swallow his smaller neighbor. The US president often even blames Ukraine\u2019s President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war in which at least 42,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured, according to the United Nations, saying \u201che should never have started it.\u201d <\/p>\n
The implication \u2013 that the weak should capitulate to the strong \u2013 is an upending of millennia of evolution, culminating in the post-World War II, US-inspired rules-based international order that led to an unprecedented eight decades of relative global peace, prosperity and unimaginable scientific innovation. <\/p>\n
Trump, as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has commented, has broken the mold. \u201cOld assumptions can no longer be taken for granted, the world as we knew it is gone,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
The president\u2019s world view was nurtured by his property-developing, landlord father Fred Trump. Poor tenants unable to pay their rent claimed they were evicted; not an uncommon practice at the time, or since, but one that advantages the powerful over the weak. <\/p>\n
The parallels are not hard to spot: the world\u2019s most powerful man still relies on bravado and bullying to get what he wants. Today everyone is in his firing line. America has been \u201ctaken advantage of by virtually every country in the world,\u201d Trump inaccurately claims, \u201cwe\u2019re no longer going to be the country that\u2019s ripped off by every country in the world.\u201d <\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the rub. Such is Trump\u2019s braggadocio, no one he trusts appears brave enough to challenge him. Only when global markets soured, and his Petri dish economic experiment turned putrid, did he backslide on the threat to impose immediate tariffs on both friends and foes of the US, and even then, it may not be enough to avoid economic pain. <\/p>\n
China seems ready to wait out his trade-defying tariffs, having been preparing for this moment since Trump\u2019s first term. <\/p>\n
Now, it seems, he must learn a costly lesson for himself that economic evolution had already taught the experts. <\/p>\n
And while Trump\u2019s defiant pose after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was enough to convince Putin that he was \u201ca courageous man,\u201d the US president is already backing down on some of his tariff bravado, chastened by his loyalists who found their voices as bond markets tanked. <\/p>\n
In the view of both Putin and Trump, it is the tough who set the rules, and the man in both their crosshairs, Ukraine\u2019s President Zelensky, got this message Wednesday, \u201cthe man with \u2018no cards to play\u2019 should now, finally, GET IT DONE,\u201d as Trump wrote on his social media platform.\u202f Trump has since criticized Putin, questioning whether the Russian leader is interested in peace and suggesting \u201che\u2019s just tapping me along.\u201d <\/p>\n
The world Trump and Putin seem to crave is one of spheres of influence run from islands of power, where diplomacy is a time-consuming irrelevance replaced by imperial decrees. <\/p>\n
It would be a reset harking back to a darker time, essentially overturning the rules-based order. In the aftermath of great empires, regional warlords allied, feuded and fought each other for centuries before nations emerged, and largely did the same. <\/p>\n
By the 19th<\/sup>\u202fcentury diplomats like Klemens von Metternich, the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, spent entire careers attempting to balance Europe\u2019s feuding powers. He famously said, \u201cwhen France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches cold.\u201d <\/p>\n Today it is Trump spreading a chill. The Manhattan real estate developer has said he is going to \u201cget\u201d Greenland \u201cfor national security reasons.\u201d Greenland and its Danish patron, a NATO ally that is no match militarily for the USA, say no. <\/p>\n Canada\u2019s prime minister says the same about Trump\u2019s plans to make his northern neighbor the USA\u2019s 51st\u202fstate, insisting \u201cit will never happen.\u201d Mark Carney, a former central banker already battling Trump\u2019s aggressive trade tariffs, knows the threat is real, telling voters ahead of Monday\u2019s election in which his Liberal Party won a stunning fourth consecutive victory \u201cthe Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country.\u201d <\/p>\n Trump\u2019s world view is clear: he speaks as though he can reach out and take these things, and clearly believes he is working from an island of power, isolated from the negative consequences of his assumed conquests. <\/p>\n But no man, nor nation, is an Island. <\/p>\n Trump\u2019s weakness is not just that he might buy Putin\u2019s lie that he can conquer all Ukraine, or be outfoxed by Xi on tariffs, but that the rest of the world increasingly sees through his mantle of self-belief. <\/p>\n The costs of this muscle-power politics will be revealed more slowly than the near-instantaneous economic market pain to his trade tariffs.\u202fBut it still marks a return to an era of dog eat dog. History has shown how that turns out. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mankind\u2019s achievements over the millennia have been bountiful. Their evolutionary fruits \u2013 from the harnessing of fire, to vaccines, to the art of diplomacy \u2013 were never low hanging; they were imagined before they were ever grasped. But once held, they became indispensable. Until now that is, as 100 days into his presidency US President…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}