By GILBERTO MARINGONI & DENISE LOBATO KIND*

What is the meaning of the apparently chaotic initiatives at the beginning of the Trump II administration?

The path of rupture

Donald Trump wants to trigger a global revolution. Revolution is understood as a sudden break with a certain established order.

This is a reactionary and defensive revolution to prevent the shift of the axis of global power from the West to the East. To do so, it needs to make immediate and profound changes in the functioning of the US state and in the geopolitics of global power. On the battlefield, the strategy is to defeat its most dangerous competitor, China, in the economic, financial, military and commercial spheres.

So far, Beijing has shown signs of moving within the framework imposed by the hegemonic power and of advancing in every direction, establishing privileged agreements and partnerships with former allies of Washington. In other words, it is playing the enemy's game based on its own rules. That is why Donald Trump is constructing a general turnaround with a strong sense of urgency.

To gain an advantage, the US plans to split the partnership between China and Russia and redefine European alliances that hinder its moves. Traditional tactical moves appear to be under permanent review

Republicans disagree with the Democratic administration (2021-2025) and most of their traditional Old World allies, who believe that the two Eastern opponents form an amalgam of interests to be fought together. The recognition, after three years of war in Ukraine, that Russia is unbeatable by conventional means, has led the United States to propose a radical change in strategy.

We are facing something unprecedented since the end of World War II. As with revolutionary projects, the immediate outlook is highly unpredictable and everything solid can melt into thin air.

The global agenda

In this dispute, Donald Trump's government needs, as already noted, to rebuild or reform parts of the structure of the national state, strengthen the dollar economy, review dysfunctional partnerships, focus precisely on the target to be hit and set the global agenda. The head of the White House knows that this last item is an essential condition to confuse enemies and dispensable allies through the incessant creation of political facts, with strong media and public opinion appeal. A kind of shock doctrine, as defined by Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine.

By controlling the agenda, Washington also intends to control the political timing of its confrontations. All countries in the world are impacted by its pace and direction, and the goal is to transform possible counteractions into merely reactive movements. Domestically, the objectives involve consolidating control over the military-industrial complex, incorporating the big tech, to State action. It is imperative that the articulation between political decisions and effective actions be both unbureaucratic and powerful, to enable sudden tactical movements.

If we guide our analysis by the first steps of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, the changes concern especially the removal of internal opponents from areas of defense, security, intelligence and high technology, under the argument of reducing costs through the dismissal of an intended 1,5 million public employees. One of the preferred targets is the Pentagon.

The intention is not to destroy the State, as it seems, but to recreate it on new bases, adjusted to current needs. It is urgent to oil the gears of the institutions that favor the new power, which implies redefining consolidated pacts that are proving dysfunctional and running over anyone who gets in the way. With a certain poetic license from Joseph Schumpeter, one could say that the Republican is adopting an accelerated policy of creative destruction. The road is bumpy, as there are obstacles in Congress, in the Supreme Court and among state governors.

Roosevelt Moment 4.0

The elected official exacerbates his “Roosevelt moment”, those first hundred days in which the ruler, fresh from the polls, uses his still-fresh legitimacy to move heaven and earth in presenting his guidelines.

Between his inauguration in early March and the end of June 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's government sent almost 150 bills to Congress, creating financing funds, engineering programs, social projects and electing emergency works, among other initiatives, with the aim of overcoming the Great Depression, which had begun four years earlier, overcoming possible setbacks. Many of the plans were not accepted by the Legislature and many others were rejected by the Supreme Court. However, Franklin D. Roosevelt took control of the political agenda and imposed, from the outset, the basic characteristics of his administration.

This is the playbook followed by Donald Trump, with one important caveat. The comparison is limited to the method of action and not to merit. The current president does not appear willing, like Roosevelt, to make large investments in infrastructure and social programs. His Blitzkrieg on the State and its international relations focus on institutions, that is, on the superstructure. State intervention is strengthened, but in a different way from traditional Keynesian actions.

Differences from Joe Biden

The Republican took office for his second term after a mediocre economic performance by Joe Biden's government. Without any major achievements to show off, the Democratic administration presented two calling cards to the electorate in 2024. The first was the countercyclical policies, known as bionomics. Initially, it was a bold range of investments totaling US$4 trillion planned at the beginning of his term and which was disfigured by the Republican majority in the House. The second was the post-pandemic economic recovery. Joe Biden had in his favor an average growth above 2% per year and a drop in unemployment.

However, the inflationary peak of 9,2% in 2022 , as a by-product of the war in Ukraine, has had a major impact on workers' real wages. Income at the bottom of society has been eroded by the rising price wave.

Externally, Barack Obama's former vice president has gotten himself into two quagmires: military support and financial sponsorship of Israel's genocide against the Palestinians and a costly, endless and futile proxy war against Russia, waged on Ukrainian soil, under the NATO flag.

The administration’s lack of strategic vision has proven disastrous in encouraging and financing the conflict in Eurasia. The United States, in its drive to encircle Russia politically, economically and financially, has undermined the supply of cheap gas to Europe – by destroying two pipelines under the Baltic – which led to prices more than quadrupling between 2021 and 2022. Much of the current recession in Germany is due to rising energy prices. Washington’s aggressive direction of NATO’s eastward expansion has resulted in the consolidation of a strategic alliance between Russia and China.

Donald Trump's first-term diplomacy had given different weights to each of the two countries and negotiated separately with them. The picture became clear from the United States National Defense Strategy 2018 , released by the Department of Defense: “It is increasingly clear that China and Russia seek to shape the world in ways consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over the economic, diplomatic and security decisions of other nations. (…) China is a strategic competitor that uses economics in predatory ways to intimidate its neighbors. (…) As China continues its economic and military rise, asserting power through a long-term strategy (…), it continues to pursue a military modernization program that seeks regional hegemony in the Indo-Pacific in the short term.”

Dismantling of post-war agreements

These movements include the most surprising tactical reorientation: the rupture of the Atlanticist axis, built in the post-war period. The Dumbarton Oaks agreements that resulted in the creation of the UN in 1944 are being torn apart, with the abandonment of organizations within its system, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council, the Paris Agreements, etc. The next step is the possible exit from NATO (1949), an organization that has 70% of its budget financed by Washington.

To this end, the White House is taking advantage of Europe's economic fragility in the wake of the conflict in Ukraine and the reduced credibility of its leaders to keep up with the turnaround in global dynamics. In a territory where Russophobia is prevalent, Trump is proposing to reach a selective understanding with Moscow.

Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14 made the White House’s priorities clear: removing Russia from the enemies list, broad freedom for far-right parties and movements, and a frontal attack on immigration. The next step was to establish separate peace negotiations between the US and Russia regarding Ukraine at the Riyadh conference in Saudi Arabia. The follow-up was the Zelensky-Trump telecatch in the Oval Office. The ham-fisted reaction of European leaders in the following days was a kind of receipt for the crisis over the North Atlantic Treaty.

Practical proof of the change in US foreign policy occurred at the UN General Assembly on February 25. Two resolutions were on the agenda condemning Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The United States separated itself from its traditional European allies and voted with Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The result was 93 countries against Moscow, 65 abstentions and 18 in favor. Among the latter were the United States and its new ally.

Since the turn of the century, we have been living in times of loss of political influence in Europe, of the widespread advance of far-right and neo-fascist movements, and of strong population displacements from the periphery to the rich world. The environmental crisis has become a decisive factor in relations between countries.

Multilateralism and bilateralism

What is Donald Trump trying to achieve by undermining the UN and threatening to leave NATO? While historical analogies are imprecise, they help us examine the essence of what is at stake. Let’s go back a century. Consider Democratic President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, at the end of World War I, and his global plans.

The Treaty of Versailles, which put an end to the conflict, presented in its first part (26 articles) the proposal to establish a multilateral organization with the aim of establishing rules for the functioning of the interstate system. Wilson suggested the creation of the League of Nations, an important part of his peace proposal, known as the Fourteen Points. The victorious allies welcomed the proposal with enthusiasm. However, the US Congress, with a Republican majority in both houses, rejected the Treaty and the country did not join the organization. This fact impacted its legitimacy and the League became an almost decorative organization.

According to the British historian Peter Gowan, in an article in the New Left Review (2003), “the purpose of the League of Nations – as well as the UN – was to bring the capitalist powers and their military confrontations to a terrain of collective rules and avoid wars. For the old and decadent European powers, it was a good deal. According to Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State (1949-1953), for the US it was not. Even more so because the country, unlike Great Britain until 1914, did not just want hegemony, but unilateral power and the capacity and freedom for planetary intervention”.

The United States never thought of the UN as a world government, but as an organization under its total control, stresses Peter Gowan. The US's prominence in the entity, created at the end of World War II, represented the other side of the results of the Bretton Woods conference – which validated the new architecture of the international financial system in June-July 1944. There, the dollar was imposed as the global currency, in the same way that the Security Council was created through force, a month later, at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington. Although established as a multipolar mechanism, the UN was designed to exercise US unipolarity. From then on, when this was put in check, the organization faced crises.

The UN and its crises

FOR Jose Luis Fiori (2024), the post-World War II world order began to crumble in the early 1970s, “when the US abandoned the Bretton Woods and unilaterally disengaged from the parity between the dollar and gold, which they themselves defined in 1944.” In his words, a second stage of this order (1992-2008) was sustained by the unipolar power of the United States. After the collapse of the USSR and the victory in the Gulf War (1991-1992), “the United States reserved from the beginning the unilateral right to wage ‘humanitarian wars’ and to declare and attack ‘terrorism’ anywhere in the world, at its sole discretion, and without any concern for the United Nations and its Security Council, which were literally scrapped in 1999,” he writes.

The 78-day bombing of the former Yugoslavia is the greatest milestone of US unilateralism in the period. In the economic and financial sphere, it is the neoliberal order, enshrined in the Washington Consensus (1989), with broad dominance by financial oligarchies and imposed through military force or political blackmail on the periphery.

Almost three decades later, Donald Trump is designing an even more unilateral and isolationist imperialism, which aims to implode multilateral organizations to return to a situation similar to that which the US Congress intended after Versailles, when the dispute for hegemony with Great Britain intensified.

An era is being reopened in which negotiations between powers and between these and smaller countries become bilateral – in which the most powerful has an advantage, without setbacks in collective debates.

Selective interventions

Donald Trump's government is simultaneously attacking on several fronts, carefully choosing its targets. The immediate path to combating China is to increase import tariffs and strengthen the dollar economy, eliminating attempts by BRICS countries to replace it with another currency and maintaining hegemony in what really matters. The next steps are to encourage the production and sale of energy (US gas and oil), eliminating independent regional exchanges, and fostering the arms market in order to recover the ground lost by the US military-industrial complex.

Donald Trump appears to be pursuing a diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, hoping to establish a type of bond that separates the country from its preferred ally. Without giving any breathing space to allies or enemies, he has stated his desire to buy Greenland from Denmark.

Imperial initiatives for the global North unfold into specific agendas for other regions of the world. In the Middle East, support for Israel's genocidal policy and the possibility of a regional conflict, whose primary target would be Iran, does not differentiate between Democrats and Republicans. And for other regions, it is a matter of denying any challenge to the order under construction.

In the Americas, the current threat is to raise customs tariffs in an attempt to repatriate US companies abroad, a measure that could be extended to the entire globe. The goal: to satisfy the Republicans' working-class social base, which has lost jobs over the past four decades, a period in which successive governments have encouraged companies to move to Mexico and Canada, as well as Asia, in search of reduced production costs.

This is the center of the “Make America Great Again” and may result in an internal inflationary problem. It is not yet known how the Fed and the economic area will deal with the economic problems that will come. In addition, Donald Trump threatens Panamanian sovereignty over the canal and unilaterally changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of the Americas.

The strategy for Latin America is to accentuate regional hegemony, maintaining its economies as producers of commodities and as an expanded domestic market, in addition to blocking immigration and hardening diplomatic relations with Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Colombia. Initiatives such as sanctions and military threats would once again be on the radar.

The rapid deindustrialization of the continent (which will continue to be a platform for financial appreciation for the United States), the discarding of national projects, extensive privatization processes and the worsening of poverty and income and wealth disparities in the region were some of the consequences of the new pattern of capitalist growth. It is worth noting that deindustrialization has affected, to a lesser extent, the United States and Europe, which are also facing worsening social tensions and income concentration.

The law and its limits

Many of Donald Trump's actions clash with the foundations of so-called international law. This does not seem to be his concern, given his repeated attacks against the UN system and its multilateral organizations. The head of the Executive constantly tests limits and goes beyond them whenever he can. He does not act as just another member of the interstate system, but as an empire.

In a recent article, Perry Anderson (2023) sought to define the theoretical-conceptual bases of what international law would be: “In any realistic assessment, international law is neither truly international nor genuinely law. This, however, does not mean that it is not a force to be reckoned with. It is an important force. (…) A formidable instrument of power. (…) International law (…) has never ceased to be an instrument of Euro-American power.”

Power may cease to be Euro-American. By breaking in two the imperial supremacy shared with Europe, the Republican aims to change the entire post-war geopolitical configuration and focus on the main enemy. The consequences are so unpredictable that formulating the right questions becomes more crucial than developing definitive answers.

The game is just beginning, it is a time of transition and success is not guaranteed. It is not known whether the former protagonist of the television show The apprentice You have a detailed plan of action for your next steps. There is a general outline and there will likely be a lot of imprecision in your movements. A frantic pace can cover up improvisations, but the confusion generated between allies and opponents can guarantee you a long-lasting offensive.

Revolutions usually have as a basic rule the breaking of all rules.

*Gilberto Maringoni is a journalist and professor of International Relations at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC).

*Denise Lobato Gentleis a professor at the Institute of Economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

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