1 week Ago
In ten whirlwind weeks, Donald Trump had already smashed the international system of rules and alliances that more or less kept the peace for the past eighty years, but his bizarre "tariffs on everybody" policy has given us a glimpse of what may take its place. It's the United States against the whole world, and America's only possible great-power ally is Russia. Mr Trump is expressing some irritation at the moment about Vladimir Putin's foot-dragging on a cease-fire in Ukraine, but his admiration for the Russian dictator and former KGB agent is deep and lasting.
Besides, he has convinced America's former allies in Europe that he is not to be trusted, so he really has nowhere else to go. Selling this switch of alliances to the public will take a lot of work. However, if Franklin Roosevelt could persuade Americans that the Godless Communists of the Soviet Union were suitable allies for America in the war against Hitler, Mr Trump can sell Mr Putin to his "base" as a man who loves God and hates gays and "woke" just as much as they do.
This new de facto alliance will easily survive Mr Trump's probable collaboration with Israel in a massive joint strike against Iran in the next few months because Russia doesn't like the Islamist regime in Tehran either. The real question is: Where does China go now? China has loyally refrained from criticising Russia about its invasion of Ukraine because, until now, it, too, had nowhere else to go. But China is far less expansionist than Russia under Mr Putin or the United States under Mr Trump (Greenland, Panama, Canada, Gaza).
It is basically a status quo power that wants to preserve the current international order. The one exception that has allowed Beijing's enemies to portray it as expansionist is its insistent claim on Taiwan, but this dispute is just a loose end from a long-ago Chinese civil war. So long as China does not actually invade Taiwan, it is a suitable partner for the European Union in a new alliance dedicated to preserving the rule of law in the world.
It wouldn't be a marriage made in heaven and it would never be as formal an alliance as the old Nato arrangement, but a joint undertaking by China and the European Union to protect the peace of the world from the rogue states of America and Russia makes perfectly good sense and may well come to pass. This is all the more likely because China and the EU have a shared interest in rescuing the low- or no-tariff free trading system of the past eighty years from the attack launched last week by Donald Trump. They would constitute a nucleus around which Japan, Korea, Australia, India, Canada and most other countries could rebuild that system without the US.
Mr Trump has greatly overestimated the ability of the United States to prevent a realignment of global trade that simply goes around it. The US still accounts for 25% of the world economy, the same share it had in 1980 -- proof, if any were required, that it has not been taken "ripped off, raped, pillaged and plundered" by its trading partners. But being largely self-sufficient, the United States only accounts for 13% of world trade -- so Mr Trump cannot blackmail everybody else into doing his will.
Some individual enterprises and even a few entire countries will suffer greatly from his tariffs, but for the most part, the supply chains will just be adjusted to avoid running through the United States. The US share of global trade will drop further, and everybody else will get on with their lives. All unwitting, Mr Trump is abdicating the leading role that the United States has enjoyed in world affairs since the Second World War and getting nothing of any value in return.
Nobody saw this change coming and it's too early to be sure of where it will take us, but it may be a better place than the recent past. What could still go wrong? The major European powers may prove unable to sustain Ukraine if the US again withdraws military aid, and a Russian conquest of Ukraine would lead to the remilitarisation of all Europe, probably including nuclear proliferation. American invasions of Greenland, Panama, and perhaps even Canada would have a similar effect but on an even bigger scale.
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have the same impact in Asia, and it's still not clear if Beijing will keep its distance from Moscow now that it has better options. But on the whole, things are looking up. Apart from the growing climate catastrophe, of course.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries..
