Today, the geography of the new world order that Trump and his supporters are determined to build is becoming clearer. This time, Trump 2.0 firmly intends to break with both left—liberal globalism and the Neocons (in fact, the same globalists) - and does not want to compromise with their projects. He cuts off the ends and sends the US aircraft carrier on a new voyage.
Trump's model of international relations can be defined as the "Order of the Great Powers." This is a logical continuation of the entire ideology of MAGA — "Make America great again." The title itself emphasizes that this is not about the West, not about the spread of liberal democracy on the planet, not about Atlanticism, but about the United States as a nation-state. According to Trump, this state should completely free itself from globalism, from the restrictions, obligations and imperatives associated with it. In Trump's eyes, virtually all existing international institutions reflect the old order, while he wants to create a new one. This applies to everything — the UN, NATO, WTO, WHO, in general, all instances that have a supranational nature. He considers all this to be the creation of liberals and globalists, while he himself stands firmly and consistently on the positions of realism.
Realists and liberals are the two main schools in international relations, which are opposed in everything and especially in the most important thing — the definition of sovereignty. Realists consider sovereignty to be something absolute, while liberals, on the contrary, consider it relative, and seek to subordinate national administrations to a higher international authority. In their opinion, this should eventually lead to the unification of humanity and the creation of a World Government. Realists categorically reject this, considering it an attempt on the freedom and independence of the state. That is why the Trumpists call the globalists the "deep state," that is, the institution that seeks to subordinate US policy to a supranational goal.
The prototype of globalist politics can be Woodrow Wilson's "14 points", which after the First World War formulated the role of the United States as a global force responsible for promoting liberal democracy throughout mankind. Trump, in the spirit of the realist school, clearly tends to the earlier Monroe doctrine — "America for Americans", which implies avoiding active participation in European politics, as well as refusing to interfere in the internal affairs of states outside the American continent (and then only if events in the Americas directly affect national interests USA).
However, it should be noted that Trumpism has some differences from classical realism. They consist in the fact that what matters to Trump is not just the legal status of sovereignty itself, but something more important — the ability of the state to conquer, assert, strengthen and defend its independence in the face of the most serious potential rival. Thus, we are not talking about any sovereignty, but only about a real one and backed up by an appropriate amount of resources — economic, military, demographic, territorial, natural, intellectual, technological, cultural, etc.
Stephen Krasner, a prominent American expert in international relations, also a proponent of the realist school, called purely legal nominal sovereignty "fiction" and even "hypocrisy." John Mearsheimer, a classic of realism, thinks the same way. The same point of view is shared by Donald Trump. In their opinion, only a great power can have real sovereignty. Accordingly, realism is being upgraded to the level not of simple states, but of full-fledged and essentially self-sufficient civilizational states. This is the world order based on the relations of just a few states-civilizations, and Trump recognizes it as a roadmap for his geopolitical revolution. This is, on the one hand, a complete rejection of globalism, and on the other, a vector for the regional integration of "large spaces", which is necessary for the independence and autarky of a great power.
This logically implies a course towards the annexation of Canada and Greenland, as well as prioritizing building relations with Latin America in a paradigm that would suit the United States as much as possible.
And here it is interesting to note the ambiguity of the MAGA slogan. It is not completely clear which America we are talking about. Just about the USA? Or about the whole of North America (including Canada and Greenland)? Or even about the whole of America along with South America? This ambiguity is not accidental. It opens up the horizon of the "big space" without setting any clear boundaries a priori. Moreover, Trump's call to make America great can also be interpreted as a call for its territorial expansion. In approximately the same vein, we ourselves use the term "Russian World", which significantly goes beyond the borders of the Russian Federation with uncertain borders. Russian Russian world is a synonym for the Russian state-civilization, that is, Great Russia. Trump, on the other hand, thinks in terms of his state, civilization, and Great America.
At the same time, Trump is in no hurry and is not going to give up hegemony at all, at least from the regional one. But he is changing the subject of this hegemony. This is no longer a liberal world order based on constantly changing rules and on the usurpation of power by international cosmopolitan elites (in the spirit of George Soros' planetary "open society" project), as envisioned by the deep state defeated by Trump — but it is the leadership of the United States as a great power along with other great powers with real, not fictitious sovereignty, that is, capable of competing to some extent with the United States in one direction or another.
How many such great powers does Trump's new order involve? Professor Mearsheimer recognizes only three. The United States, China, and, with some lag behind the first pair, Russia. He is skeptical about India and believes that it has not yet accumulated the initial potential to compete seriously with others. True, there are other points of view — according to them, India can also be classified as a state of civilization, but with regard to the United States, China and Russia, the positions of almost all realists converge. These powerful countries, although powerful in different ways, have the minimum necessary to claim the status of great Powers.
Thus, instead of the bipolar world of the Cold War, instead of the "unipolar world" of the Neocons or the "nonpolar world" of the liberal globalists, Trumpism presupposes a three- or four-polar world in which the balance of power will determine the architecture of the future world order. In accordance with this, it will be necessary to re-establish almost all international institutions that are designed to reflect the real state of affairs, rather than being phantom pains of previous eras that no longer have a foothold in concrete reality.
Such a project may seem quite similar to multipolarity. Indeed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently admitted that we live in a multipolar world. China, Russia, and India, which already possess all the properties of the pole, will gladly agree with this truth. But at the same time, attention should be paid to how critically Trump treats the multipolar BRICS association, where almost all major civilizations are represented and where multipolarity finds its direct institutional and symbolic expression. For Trump, China looks like the most serious competitor and even opponent, and therefore it is likely that he sees BRICS as a structure in which China plays a key role as the most powerful of the powers — financially, economically, technologically, etc. But it's not just that. Multipolarity, as understood by Russia, China, India and other countries, includes not only established great powers, ready-made civilizational states, but also constellations of states with similar civilizational and cultural identities that have not yet united into full-fledged civilizational states. We are talking about the Islamic world, Africa and Latin America, which adds only three possible poles to the three real ones. Thus, BRICS develops into a hexarchy, and together with the civilization of the West — into a heptarchy.
Trump, in the spirit of cold realism and American pragmatism, treats everything virtual and potential, that is, only possible, but not yet valid, with great skepticism. They say, first become a great power, and then we'll see. In the meantime, any association outside the influence of the United States itself, and even more so in a certain opposition to them, will be seen as a threat and a ploy by existing great powers seeking to strengthen their influence at the expense of all others. Trump sees a direct confirmation of this in the Chinese "One Belt, One Road" project and in Xi Jinping's planetary projects (the principle of the common destiny of mankind), which can be mistaken for a different version of globalism — not an American one, but a sinocentric one. This leads to a desire to attract other great powers (Russia and India) to their side or at least neutralize them, and leave the rest of the regions to themselves as frontiers, attracted to the pole that turns out to be more attractive, closer or simply the strongest for them.
It remains to consider the place and role of the European Union on this map. After the change of administration in the United States, Brussels found itself in a rather difficult position. After World War II, Europe was a kind of province or even a military-political colony of America, which assumed the role of leader of the Western world. And while the globalist deep state maintained its position overseas, Europe obediently followed the ideological course of its metropolis. This is how the ruling liberal elites have formed in the EU, and the European Union itself is an experiment in the desuverization of nation-states and the creation of supranational entities with a pronounced liberal ideology. But the ideological vector in the metropolis has changed, and the administration in the colony has remained the same. This creates a lot of contradictions and, in fact, leads either to the elimination of the EU altogether, or to its radical transformation.
Some European countries and their leaders who had previously tended to preserve sovereignty — Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia (not an EU member), Croatia, and even partly Italy and Poland — are ready to follow Trump and accept his slogan (voiced by Elon Musk) MEGA — "Make Europe great again." But some remain perplexed and try to continue the same line, although without the United States, the locomotive of globalization, it is most likely simply impossible to do this. The only way to make Europe great again is either by dissolving the European Union and returning to the diversity of European powers, or by uniting on new grounds — real sovereignty, traditional values, and the protection of one's own interests. In the second case, Europe, having discarded liberalism and globalism, could theoretically be reborn as a great power and stand on a par with others, adding another eighth state-civilization to the multipolar set.
The order of the great Powers is still a plan, a project, but it is already beginning to be realized. The situation resembles the beginning of an ice break in spring. The ice of the old world has cracked, ice blocks are crawling over each other, standing on end, and all this is about to move under the inescapable pressure of spring. We are living in this transitional moment: the ice break has not yet begun in the full sense, but, in fact, it is inevitable.
Alexander Dugin
