By common agreement, the already faltering world order that existed until just a year ago has just died. Although many, like French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the globalist meeting in Davos last week, are mourning his death, virtually no one believes it is possible to resurrect him. The person responsible for delivering the final blow was American President Donald Trump who, as soon as he began his administration, made it clear that he would subordinate absolutely everything else to the commercial interests of his own country and that the rest of the world would have no alternative but to submit to his demands.
Everything would be simpler if Trump were an ideologue committed to a coherent political doctrine, but it turns out that he is not. Unlike his friend Javier Milei, who does read books and is influenced by their content, Trump depends almost entirely on his sense of smell. Improvise. He often changes his posture from one day to the next. And the truth is that, so far, nothing has gone badly for him.
Inspired exclusively by his own experience, Trump believes himself more capable than others of understanding what is happening on the world stage. The man who rose to fame as a media personality, a star of a despised genre, “reality TV,” takes for granted that, deep down, what matters most is the personal character of the leaders, whether they are North American politicians or leaders of other countries, hence the admiration he seems to feel for the bellicose Russian Vladimir Putin and the Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping.
Needless to say, the two are celebrating Trump’s willingness to break with the United States’ traditional allies in Europe. Like the Americans, it seems logical to them to divide the planet into zones of influence, with Trump in charge of the Western Hemisphere, Putin in charge of his own neighborhood, China in East Asia, and what remains will be a kind of no man’s land in which everyone could look for opportunities to gain advantages. Be that as it may, the Americans know very well that Putin has lost a lot of ground lately and that, until further notice, the only significant rival they will have to face will be China.
If Trump represents anything, it is his own version of gritty realism. He is a sworn enemy of great abstractions, whether these underlie the progressive utopias that have caused so many disasters or the globalist “rules-based international order” supported by those who preceded him in the White House. He believes that power brings rights. As many have pointed out, this is an attitude that has very deep roots in the history of our species; More than two millennia ago Greek, Roman and Chinese thinkers claimed it in their writings.
Trump’s refusal to take “soft power” seriously—the idea, popular among Europe’s ruling classes, that in the long run the cultural and social achievements of a community would be more effective than military and economic power—has already radically altered the global landscape. By warning Europeans that from now on they will have to take charge of their own defense because, after eighty years of protecting them from their enemies, the United States was tired of paying the huge costs involved in doing so, he has stunned governments accustomed to privileging social well-being above everything else. Although the British, French and Germans have committed to greatly increasing military spending, they already face pressure from those who fear that those accustomed to living on state subsidies, and who tend to vote accordingly, will be disadvantaged.
Behind what is happening is the widening gap that has opened between the American economy and that of the European Union and Great Britain. By some estimates, in 2006, when a financial crisis erupted in the U.S. housing market that would have lasting repercussions, the gross domestic products of Europe and its transatlantic ally were roughly equal. Currently, the North American is 80 percent older with no signs that the situation thus assumed could be reversed in the coming years. On the contrary, everything suggests that Europe, victim of “green” policies imposed by progressive “elites” and the ever-increasing expenses demanded by the welfare state, will continue to fall behind just when it is forced to rearm itself. One can understand, then, the nervousness that is upsetting the ruling circles of the Old Continent.
As it could not be otherwise, the war that Trump is waging against the abstractions that in his opinion are undermining the West has motivated resistance from those who benefit from the old order. In their own country, Democrats have chosen to oppose head-on the summary expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants. Although at this point there are few willing to defend the principle of open borders, many feel sympathy for those immigrants who, after breaking the law to enter, have behaved as peaceful and productive citizens.
The epicenter of the resulting conflict is in Minneapolis, a city dominated by Democrats that, after the death almost five years ago of a black criminal at the hands of a white police officer, saw the beginning of a series of violent race riots in other parts of the United States and even in Europe. Could something similar happen because of the deaths of demonstrators protesting the presence of unprofessional immigration agents? It is possible,
Still, Trump and his supporters are determined to harness the power they have to end the influence, in their view, of ruinous leftist “woke” culture in which it was up to white males to play the role of enemies of all that is good and therefore have to be deprived of their “privileges.” Since those so qualified belong to the majority ethnic group in the United States and, more importantly, many blacks, Latinos and Asians are opposed to the sexual preaching of woke theorists, Trump’s efforts to eliminate racial and sexual discrimination in the name of “diversity” and reinstate respect for meritocratic values have the support of many who feel offended by his thuggish behavior.
As with Milei, Trump often behaves in such a bizarre and intolerant manner that it is often difficult to distinguish between what he is doing and the way he is doing it. Although both are reacting against an order that in their own opinion, and that of many others, endangered the future of their respective countries, the lack of balance that characterizes them is harming them.
All in all, although it was easy to agree with Milei when he ranted against the corporatist model that, before his arrival, was about to plunge into a hyperinflationary abyss that would surely have had catastrophic social consequences, it was not so in the case of Trump since the damage that the woke ideology was causing in the United States was less evident. classist arrogance of the academic and cultural “elites”, was enough to allow him to triumph electorally despite his notorious personal deficiencies.
Trump fervently believes in the primacy of the nation-state, a concept that, until recently, many treated as painfully outdated for a world they assumed was on the path to irremediably “globalizing.” He is far from the only one who thinks this way. In Europe, the “extreme right” denounced by the right-wing owes its growing power to the widespread feeling that ordinary Europeans are in danger of being sacrificed in the fight to save the planet from climate change, the alleged moral obligation to allow entry to millions of people with cultures and beliefs that are radically different from their own, and other priorities of intellectual minorities and billionaire businessmen convinced that national borders are primitive vestiges of less enlightened times. than the current one.
While Trump loves to boast about the supremacy he attributes to his own country in virtually all areas, Milei is forced to take positions that are relatively more modest although, of course, he does not hesitate to assert that the cause he believes he represents better than anyone else will end up prevailing everywhere. In Davos, where, to the surprise of many, he refrained from rudely insulting those who disagree with his ideas by giving a measured speech in defense of free enterprise in which, for some, the most striking thing was the allusion to the hypothetical intellectual death of Niccolò Machiavelli because in Milei’s opinion the end is not always enough to justify the means and, for others, the statement that “America will be the beacon of light that rekindles the entire West.” Needless to say, for Milei, “America” is not just the United States but the Western Hemisphere as a whole and that, in his opinion, the main lighthouse keeper is not called Donald Trump but Javier Milei.
