The best way to understand Donald Trump’s approach to international affairs is as a great-power doctrine in which the United States will dominate the Americas from the Arctic to the Antarctic. In this worldview, Russia is recognised as having legitimate interests in its former Soviet regions and China’s emerging power in Asia will be contained. It is a brutal neo-imperial realism.
That vision has been dramatically expressed by the Trump administration in recent days over Ukraine and Europe, leaving their centrist leaders shocked and confused. The liberal internationalist credo bolstered during the Biden years as a western rules-based approach has been shattered. This credo was particular to the transatlantic area and not shared by the global south or by China and Russia. There, a multipolar account, in which world power is more equally distributed and values less inconsistently applied, has increasingly prevailed.
Trump’s victory is paradoxically welcomed in the non-West, the so-called rest of the world, actually the majority of humanity. His transactionalism is seen to bolster state interests, so that simultaneous economic and political dealing with the US and China – or with Europe – is legitimised.
But such unanticipated outcomes of his neoimperial realism could return to haunt Trump. He wants to separate Russia from China, in the belief that this favours US interests in the longer term. But as Stefan Wolff, professor of international security at the university of Birmingham, points out, such a deal with Putin on Ukraine is “not the same as dividing Russia and China. On the contrary, it is more likely to ‘un-unite’ Europe and the US, and to further weaken the transatlantic alliance. Rather than making America great again, Trump could further hasten its decline by mistaking the destruction of what is left of the liberal international order with its reshaping according to US interests.”
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That is a valuable lens through which to examine the currently shattered European diplomatic and political landscape after Trump’s assault. His brand of realism has little or no place for an integrated Europe as a global core. That puts him in the same camp as Putin, also of Eurosceptics such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Germany’s AfD, France’s Marine Le Pen and British conservatism. One should not underestimate their potential power and co-ordination in advance of Sunday’s German elections.
There are lessons here too for Europe’s centrist leaders. They rightly rally to Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s imperial invasion, but are divided on whether to provide national troops as a security guarantee without any US backstop. They will have to find a way to fill the security vacuum left by Trump’s approach. They can be helped by Trump’s decision that Nato enlargement to include Ukraine is now off the cards; they should recognise that this post-cold war enlargement has been an abiding Russian concern. How to square the circle of who should provide the necessary security guarantee depends on Nato’s future. It is likely to survive in a more limited way and be renegotiated to allow for European autonomy.
Trump’s abandonment of multilateralism and humanitarian law is exemplified in the US decision not to attend the G20 summit this week in South Africa. Ireland is there as a special guest of the South Africans, and it is an interesting pointer to possible pathways for this State and the EU through the transatlantic crisis. That was articulated in an interview Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Harris gave to RTÉ, in which he stressed the continuing value of multilateralism for Ireland as a small state.
The same values were put forward by the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi during his visit to Dublin last weekend, in advance of the Munich security conference and subsequently at the United Nations. In Munich, Wang said: “China is a beneficiary of the existing order, so what China is doing and will do is, as most countries expect, to move the order in a more just and reasonable direction,” he said. At the UN, he said “under the new circumstances, international affairs should no longer be monopolised by a small number of countries”.
If the EU is to be a “pole of attraction” in this new multipolar order, it must develop the capacity and structures to project its post-imperial values against Trump’s neo-imperial doctrine. That is a huge challenge, but a realisable one. It would involve developing its outward links with China, Africa and the middle powers now asserting their role. A crucial test is whether the EU has the political capacity and will to do this, as hard-right leaders close minds and borders to migration and global interaction.
Ireland can make a contribution to this EU endeavour by developing its international position – including in security for its own interests and self-respect – while drawing on its own valuable anti-imperial tradition.
