When returning US president Donald Trump eyes up Greenland, Panama and Canada, as Vladimir Putin once eyed Crimea and Xi Jinping eyes Taiwan, he is both symptom and cause of a new world disorder. Trumpism is just one variant of transactionalism, which is the leitmotif of this new disorder. Liberal democracies, especially those in Europe, need to wake up and smell the gunpowder.
Russia and China are now revisionist great powers, which aim to change or overthrow the existing order, while middle powers like Turkey, Brazil and South Africa are happy to play with all sides. This is also a world of wars – in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan. Most Europeans carry on pretty much as if we still lived in late 20th-century peacetime, but the world around us increasingly resembles the late 19th-century Europe of fiercely competing great powers and empires writ large. For the geopolitical stage is now planetary, and most of the players are non-western states. Trump’s United States is likely to behave more like those other transactional great powers than like, say, Germany or Sweden.
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