By Andreas Kuth

It is interesting when the Elon Musk quotes from Virgil and the Great Seal of the United States. Novus Ordo Seclorum, the tech titan turned staunch supporter said via X (formerly Twitter) Donald Trumpas he celebrated Trump’s victory with the newly elected US president himself. Translated, the phrase means: “a new order of things.”

On the other side of the world, in Russia, Alexander Dugin shared the same sentiment. He is a far-right philosopher associated with “Eurasianism,” a narrative that glorifies anti-Western Russian neo-imperialism. “So we won,” Dugin reported via X. The world will never be the same again because the “globalists have lost the final battle”.

It’s tempting to dismiss the views of Musk and Dugin amid the hyperbole that has gripped the planet since Trump made his stunning comeback. So many experts exaggerate so many things right now. There is nothing new though. Perhaps, there will be no “new order”. Perhaps, the world will change less than it seems after all.

And yet, a striking pattern suggests that Trump 2.0 represents a historic turning point in what Musk and Dugin envision. From Europe to Asia to the Americas, people who over the years have praised what has been called a liberal or “rules-based” international order are in various stages of the Kübler-Ross cycle of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). Everyone who is captive to the opposite vision, of strong power, is celebrating, from Viktor Orbán in Hungary to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel or Narendra Modi in India.

Other terms for this old, and now probably obsolete, order are the Pax Americana or—as Henry Luce, the founder of Time and other magazines, called it—the American Century. Luce wanted America to shed the isolationism that had kept it out of international affairs between the world wars and instead become the world’s Good Samaritan—the ruler of a stable and free system of states.

If Musk is right that Trump will bring a new order, and Dugin is right that the globalists have lost, then the American Century fades from view. But what does this mean?

The US will abandon the relatively open and regulated trade regime it established after World War II. With Trump’s promised sweeping tariffs, he will instead usher in an era of trade wars and economic nationalism reminiscent of the 1930s.

It will also, albeit gradually, render the United Nations Charter as meaningless as the League of Nations was in the 1930s. That charter already seems outdated these days, as Russia and China (and sometimes the US ) continue to despise his ideals. But Trump will go even further, rejecting principles such as the sovereignty and integrity of all countries, large and small. Instead, it will make deals with authoritarian leaders to carve out “spheres of influence,” as European empires did in the 19th century. For the smaller countries this will spell disaster. And the first victim will probably be Ukraine.

Another casualty will be international law as institutionalized by the UN (which many MAGA Republicans [σ.σ. κίνημα Make America Great Again – Κάντε την Αμερική Ξανά Σπουδαία] they want to abolish) up to the International Court of Justice and the Hague Tribunal. Their place will be taken by the law of the jungle, the notion that the strong do whatever they want.

As Trump erodes multilateralism in general, he will also abandon other aspects of international cooperation, notably America’s alliances. It may not withdraw from NATO, but it will undermine its deterrent effect on adversaries by treating America’s commitment to mutual defense as a bargaining chip. It will take the same approach with allies in Asia, where outgoing US President Joe Biden has built new defense alliances to contain China.

No one knows how the great powers and their Machiavellian leaders will react to this abdication of American hegemony. Will Russian President Vladimir Putin be satisfied once he absorbs the four Ukrainian provinces he claims to have “annexed,” or will he proceed to occupy all of Ukraine and then march on Moldova and other post-Soviet states? Will Chinese President Xi Jinping offer Trump a deal to let China militarize the entire South China Sea and later take Taiwan in peace? Trump is unlikely to lose sleep over these issues because he is only thinking about one trade at a time.

It is equally uncertain how America’s friends, mainly middle powers and smaller nations, will find space among the new spheres of influence that Trump and other strongmen will design. Two of them, Germany and Japan, were America’s enemies in World War II, then became US protégés and models of the more peaceful American century, with Germany integrating into NATO and the European Union and Japan more recently in US-led groups with South Korea, the Philippines and India.

Once Trump withdraws America’s protection over these allies, what will prevent a resurgence of old animosities, from rivalries between Germany and France or Germany and Poland to lingering tensions between the Japanese and Koreans? Why wouldn’t they all want to have their own nuclear arsenals?

Pax Americana has always been imperfect for many people in the world, from Vietnam to Iraq it looked like hypocrisy. But it was the closest the world had come to a classroom. Over time, this order will recede as the international system returns to its natural state of anarchy. Humanity’s common problems, such as climate change, will remain unsolved. The worst risks, such as nuclear war, will become more likely.

Is this another exaggeration? I hope I am proven wrong. But if the Musks and Dugins of the world are celebrating the return of Trump and the end of the American century, the rest of us are rightly worried.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics.

SOURCE: The Washington Post