Patrick Wintour writes:

‘The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight”.

In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.

During such eras, Gramsci more famously wrote, “morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass”. And at present there is no more morbid phenomenon than the crisis of legitimacy for the networks of rules and laws on which the international order was based – the world that the US was central in creating in 1945.

No one can say they were not warned about the wrecking ball that was about to be inflicted on the global order by Donald Trump.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spelled out with admirable clarity in his Senate confirmation hearing in February how Trump disowned the world his predecessors had made. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,” he said. “And all this has led us to a moment in which we must now confront the single greatest risk of geopolitical instability and generational global crisis in the lifetime of anyone alive here today.”

The rules-based international order had to be jettisoned, Rubio said, because it had been built on a false assumption that a foreign policy serving core national interests could be replaced by one that served the “liberal world order, that all the nations of earth would become members of the democratic western-led community”, with humankind now destined to abandon national identity and become “one human family and citizens of the world. This was not just a fantasy. We now know it was a dangerous delusion”.

Rubio’s assessment was echoed in the recent US national security strategy, with its warnings of European cultural erasure and determination to back nationalist parties that believe in “strategic stability with Russia”. The US would no longer seek to “prop up the entire world order like Atlas”, the document said.

On paper these sound like relatively coherent statements of “America first”, but in practice Trump’s foreign policy is a mass of confusion in which this formal non-interventionist ideology has clashed with sporadic interventions that uneasily blend notions of global order with the US national interest. There is no linear Trump foreign policy, just a catherine wheel of disconnected explosions thrown out across the night sky. As Donald Trump Jr asserts, as if it were a virtue, his father is the most unpredictable man in politics. The hugely personal nature of US foreign policy gives Washington’s erstwhile allies just enough false hope that the break with America is not real.

Amid this chaos there has been one consistent target for Trump’s contempt: the constraints imposed by international law, and its value system built around national sovereignty, including the prohibition of the use of force to change external borders. In its place Trump pursues “sheer coercive power” – or what has been described as mobster diplomacy, in which shakedowns, blackmail and deal-making are the agents of change. [Continue reading…]