Dark Side of the Sun

Twelve weeks into Trump’s second term, it is time to acknowledge that the US president has broken with the post-1945 international order with the aim of creating a new one. As his imposition of tariffs demonstrates, he is ready to take a short-term economic hit to achieve his aims. Whether Trump will succeed is another question, but it would be foolish to underestimate or ignore the administration’s gritty determination. We are witnessing not just a shift in politics but the dawn of a new epoch: a post-Atlantic world.

In the future, we may well look back on this period as being as pivotal as 1989/91, 1945 or even 1815. Events are dramatically accelerating – from the US taking Russia’s side over Europe-backed Ukraine, to its territorial claims to Canada or Greenland, to an all-out trade war with China. The White House shows no sign of slowing down.

The Trump 2.0 shock is arguably more dangerous to Europe than that inflicted by Putin. Whereas Russia’s invasion of Ukraine finished the chapter that started in 1989, Trump has closed the book on the entire post-1945 order. It is profoundly disorienting simply because the US, by its own design, underpinned the global multilateral system through the UN institutions, the globalized economy through the dollar and Europe’s existential security through military superiority.

The US positioned itself at the centre of a closeknit and dependent constellation of allied states, which are now reeling from the abrupt withdrawal of the star at the centre of their universe. A situation that benefited both the sun and its orbiting satellites, with its predictable patterns and universal laws of motion, has been plunged into chaos.

Take the US dollar, since Bretton Woods (1944) the currency around which all others evolved. Its role has been questioned by previous US administrations and challenged by other actors including Europe’s single currency. However, now policymakers are doubting whether the Fed will continue to offer swap-line liquidity to the global financial system, the monetary equivalent of a security backstop. In the latest developments, US Treasury bills are no longer considered the world’s safest haven.

Defunding of the United Nations, the embodiment of global international order for eighty years, has also accelerated under the Trump administration. It leaves the New-York-based organization starved of support for its operations. Early in 2025 UN diplomats observed how Russia and America are acting as revisionists, openly seeking to undermine the body’s normative authority in favour of a ‘sphere of influence doctrine’, whereas China lends it political support.

Instructively, the White House is looking to the future with a view to creating ‘a new order for the next hundred years’– as a high-level US trade official put it in late March to a German diplomatic mission. Plans are ready for winning the AI race, for commandeering the critical raw materials and fossil fuels from home and abroad to bring victory in future wars, and for gaining technological surveillance of the American population, which is at risk of losing further civil liberties.

Team Trump does not yet know what the unintended consequences of its actions will be domestically or overseas, but it acts with the boldness of a nation drawing strength from its past.The MAGA sphere is able to transcend and unravel the post-1945 order because it is itself rooted in the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine for its foreign policy and has the masculine frontier mentality from the same Gilded Age of industrialization and expansionism.

It is worth noting that Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, also alluded to the end of the post-1945 order, when explaining how the rise of China changes the game; how the US in its 250-year history has held other economic doctrines and foreign-policy beliefs than the ones it acquired under F.D. Roosevelt, Truman and Reagan. Which is, according to Sullivan, why the US can undo bits and pieces of the WTO-backed free-trade paradigm and grant massive industrial state aid to the semiconductor and other strategic sectors. The Trump version, less sophisticated, is born from the same American inappetence for upholding a global order that now seems to benefit its main rival. Where Obama and Biden opted for tinkering and adjusting, Trump goes for the full and sudden reset.

It exposes the psychology of a superpower in decline. While the US is still the world’s top dog, it no longer holds the huge economic advantage over its strategic rivals that it had in 1950 or even in 2000. It can no longer afford to be as generous vis-à-vis its partners and allies as in its heyday. The benign hegemon, the ‘empire by invitation’ (as Norwegian political scientist Geir Lundestad memorably put it in 1986), is getting prickly.

In the uncertainty of a moment that leaves Europe utterly exposed militarily and economically, there are three things that must be done. The first is to realize that, as the US is now reluctant to bear the cost of upholding global order, there is space for Europe to step up, but it cannot save the multilateral order on its own. It will need to act in concert with others and quickly, as some states or groups such as BRICS may want to push ahead without European involvement. We have friends but not as many as we think.

Second, plans for a European defence strategy are picking up speed after the 27 EU leaders agreed with the Commission’s proposal (Readiness 2030) for investment in military spending on Europe’s defence capacity to the tune of €800bn. Behind the headline numbers, progress is hung up on the policy detail; currently under negotiation between Council and Parliament are the parameters of a preference clause for European industry to avoid spending EU taxpayers’ money on furthering dependencies on the US. The choice should be blatantly obvious, yet some still have not reconciled with the new era.

Finally, we should not wait in the hope of the US mid-term election delivering any hammer blows to Trump’s plans. That was the mistake Europe made in both the first Trump administration and the Biden years, and it must not be repeated. All the evidence points to structural shifts in US domestic and foreign policy that have been long in the making, despite the current supernova.