‘G minus one’: Trump’s new world disorder
OXFORD—More than a year before United States President Donald Trump’s reassumption of power, I raised the possibility of ”de-risking” from a more unpredictable America during a high-level forum organized by a Western think tank (one of the panelists would end up as a key member of Trump’s Cabinet). Interestingly, no one bothered to take my question seriously. Practically everyone in the forum focused on threats posed by an aggressive Russia and a resurgent China. Few had the strategic bandwidth to look at what a second Trump presidency could mean for even its closest allies in Europe.
The following year, a full six months before Trump’s formal election, I publicly raised the issue in these august pages (see “Should we ‘de-risk’ from Trump, too?” 3/26/2024) after an illuminating visit to Berlin, where I had the chance to exchange views with, among others, then German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and some of Europe’s leading strategic thinkers.
The talk of the town in Berlin was “Zeitenwende” (epochal turning point) and the realization that the “End of History” geopolitics had ended. For Germans, it was crystal clear that their “Wandel durch Handel” (change through trade) strategy had spectacularly backfired in the case of Putin’s Russia, which seamlessly weaponized Europe’s profound energy dependency. In subsequent conversations in Brussels and the Baltic area, it had also become clear that China was now seen as a comprehensive “systemic rival,” if not a potential enabler of a more aggressive Russia, or a future aggressor itself against like-minded democracies in Asia, most notably Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines.
In that article, I warned that no current Asian or European leader can reliably lean on “personal diplomacy” with Trump. For some reason, however, strategic denialism persisted well into last year. I noticed this especially in Paris, with at least one aide at the Quai d’Orsay reassuringly mentioning Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron’s ”personal rapport” with Trump. By the opening days of 2026, however, there was no more room for denial, especially for Europeans.
The full extent of Trump’s “Jacksonian” foreign policy became crystal clear when top American leaders reiterated that the absorption of Greenland was an extension of the so-called “Monroe Doctrine,” namely, Washington’s core interest in preserving its primacy in the Western Hemisphere.
By now, it had become clear that not only Caracas but also Copenhagen had to seriously worry about a more machtpolitik turn in American foreign policy. Europe’s new (yet belated) strategic awareness of the new world disorder was best captured in Edward Luce’s latest Financial Times column, titled “How to de-risk from America”—the issue I raised back in 2023! Europe’s core powers have vowed to reinforce their military presence in Greenland in solidarity with Denmark. Why? To prevent an American takeover. Wild!
A decade earlier, debates emerged on the (preferred and prospective) future of global order. Economist Fred Bergsten proposed a Group of Two (G-2) composed of America and China because it’s an “imperative if the world economy is to move forward both cyclically and structurally.” Meanwhile, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly promoted the idea, including during a 2009 visit to Beijing, where he declared, “Interdependence between us is one of the key sources of global political and economic stability … The relationship between America and China has to be truly a comprehensive, global partnership, paralleling our relations with Europe and Japan.”
As US-China relations descended into a new Cold War, however, other analysts began speaking of a world without a center of gravity. Ian Bremmer famously argued, “We have entered a G-Zero world … a power vacuum where no one appears to be in charge. No one is leading … This is not a global order, but every nation for itself.”
What we perhaps need to seriously consider, however, is a “G minus America” or “G minus 1” scenario, whereby Washington acts more like any ”normal” power by historical standards: more focused on narrow and short-term national interests than on policing global order. To prevent the total collapse of a rules-based global order, therefore, it’s paramount that like-minded ”middle powers”—from Australia, Brazil, and Canada to Germany, Japan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines—collectively preserve the ”internationalist” foundations of the post-World War II order. Otherwise, the future will resemble Thucydides’ brutal ancient world, where “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
—————-
richard.heydarian@inquirer.net
