Trump Axes a Stricken World Order – But There’s Opportunity Amidst the Turmoil
Trump’s actions were neither ‘spur of the moment’, nor whimsical. The ‘tariff solution’ had been pre-prepared by his team over years.
The Trump ‘shock’ – his ‘de-centring’ of America from serving as pivot to the post-war ‘order’ via the dollar – has triggered a deep cleavage between those who gained huge benefit from the status quo, on the one hand; and on the other, the MAGA faction who have come to regard the status quo as inimical – even an existential threat – to U.S. interests. The sides have descended into bitter, accusatory polarisation.
It is one of the ironies of the moment that President Trump and right-wing Republicans have insisted on decrying – as a “resource curse” – the benefits of the Reserve Currency status that precisely brought the U.S. the wave of inward global savings that has permitted the U.S. to enjoy the unique privilege of printing money, without adverse consequence: Until now that is! Debt levels finally matter, it seems, even for the Leviathan.
Vice-President Vance now likens the Reserve Currency to a “parasite” that has eaten away the substance of its ‘host’ – the U.S. economy – by forcing an overvalued dollar.
Just to be clear, President Trump believed there was no choice: Either he could upend the existing paradigm, at the cost of considerable pain for many of those dependent on the financialised system, or he could allow events to wend their way towards an inevitable U.S. economic collapse. Even those who understood the dilemma the U.S. faces, nonetheless have been somewhat shocked by the self-serving brazenness of him simply ‘tariffing the world’.
Trump’s actions, (as many claim), were neither ‘spur of the moment’, nor whimsical. The ‘tariff solution’ had been pre-prepared by his team over recent years, and formed an integral part to a more complex framework – one that complemented the debt-reduction and revenue effects of tariffs, by a programme to coerce the repatriation of vanished manufacturing industry back to America.
Trump’s is a gamble that may, or may not, succeed: It risks a bigger financial crisis, as financial markets are over-leveraged and fragile. But what is clear is that the de-centring of America that will follow from his crude threats and humiliation of world leaders ultimately will cause a counter-reaction both for relations with the U.S., and also in global willingness to continue to hold U.S. assets (such as U.S. Treasuries). China’s defiance of Trump will set a ‘tone’, even for those who lack China’s ‘heft’.
Why then should Trump take such a risk? Because, behind Trump’s boldfaced actions, notes Simplicius, lies a harsh reality facing many MAGA supporters:
“it remains inarguable that the American workforce has been gutted by the triple threat of mass migration; general worker anomie as consequence of cultural decay – and in particular, by the mass alienation and disenfranchisement of conservatively-minded men. These have been strongly contributing factors to the current crisis of doubt about the ability of ‘American manufacturing’ to ever return to a semblance of its previous glory, no matter how big an axe Trump takes to the stricken ‘World Order’”.
Trump is mounting a Revolution in order to invert this reality – an end to the American anomie – by (Trump hopes) bringing back U.S. industry.
There is a current of western public opinion – “by no means limited to intellectuals”, nor to Americans alone – that despairs of their own country’s ‘lack of will’, or its inability to do what needs to be done – its fecklessness and its ‘crisis of competence’. These people hanker for a leadership believed to be tougher and more decisive – a longing for unconstrained power and ruthlessness.
One highly-placed Trump supporter puts it quite brutally: “We are now at a very important inflection point. If we are going to face ‘The Big Ugly’ with China, we cannot afford divided loyalties … It’s time to get mean, brutally, harshly mean. Delicate sensibilities must be dispatched like a feather in a hurricane”.
It is no surprise that, against the general context of western nihilism, a mindset that admires power and ruthless technocratic solutions – almost ruthlessness for its own sake – could take hold. Take note – we are all in for a turbulent future.
The West’s economic unravelling has been made more complicated by Trump’s often contradictory statements. It may be a part to his repertoire; yet nonetheless, the haphazardness evokes the thought that nothing is trustworthy; nothing is constant.
It has been reported by ‘White House insiders’ that Trump has lost all inhibition when it comes to bold action: “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f**k anymore”, a White House official familiar with Trump’s thinking told the Washington Post:
“Bad news stories? He doesn’t give a f**k. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail”.
When some portion of a country’s population despairs of their own country’s “lack of will” or inability to “do what needs to be done”, Aurelian argues, they begin, from time to time, to identify emotionally with ‘Another Country’, believed to be tougher and more decisive. In this particular moment, “the mantle” of being “some sort of Nietzschean super-hero – beyond considerations of good and evil” … “landed upon Israel” – at least for an influential layer of both the U.S. and European policy-makers. Aurelian continues,
“Israel, whose combination of a superficially western-style society with audacity, ruthlessness and a total disregard for international law and human life, was exciting to many and has become a model for emulation. Western support for Israel in Gaza makes much more sense when you realise that western politicians, and parts of the intellectual class, secretly admire the ruthlessness and brutality of Israel’s war”.
Yet, despite the disruption and the pain caused by the U.S. ‘turn’, it nonetheless represents a huge opportunity too – an opportunity to shift to an alternate societal paradigm beyond neo-liberal financialism. This has been ruled out, until now, by the élite insistence on TINA (there is no alternative). Now the door is open a crack.
Karl Polyani, in his Great Transformation (published some 80 years ago), held that the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime – the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication – had but a single, overarching cause:
Prior to the 19th century, Polyani insisted, the human ‘way of being’ (economics as an organic component of society) had always been ‘embedded’ in society, and subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations; i.e. subordinated to a civilisational culture. Life was not treated as separate; not reduced to distinct particulars, but was viewed as parts to an organic whole – that is, to Life itself.
Post-modern nihilism (that descended into unregulated neo-liberalism of the 1980s) turned this logic on its head. As such, it constituted an ontological break with much of history. Not only did it artificially separate the ‘economic’ from the political and ethical ‘way of being’, but open, free-trade economics (in its Adam Smith formulation) demanded the subordination of society to the abstract logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “meant no less than the running of community as an adjunct to the market”, and nothing more.
The answer – clearly – was to make society again the dominant part to a distinctly human community; i.e. given its meaning through a living culture. In this sense, Polanyi also emphasised the territorial character of sovereignty – the nation-state as the sovereign pre-condition to the exercise of democratic politics.
Polanyi would have argued that, absent a return to Life itself as the central pivot to politics, a violent backlash was inevitable. Is such a backlash what we are seeing today?
At a conference of Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs, on 18 March 2025, Putin referred precisely to a ‘National Economics’ alternate solution for Russia. Putin highlighted both the imposed siege on the state, and set out the Russian response it – a model which is likely to be adopted by much of the globe.
It is a mode of economic thinking that is already practiced by China which had anticipated Trump’s Tariff Blitz.
Putin’s address – metaphorical speaking – constitutes the financial counterpart to his 2007 Munich Security Forum speech, at which he accepted the military défie posed by ‘collective NATO’. Last month however, he went further – Putin stated clearly that Russia had accepted the challenge posed by the Anglo ‘open economy’ financial order.
Putin’s address was in one sense nothing really new – It was the shift from the ‘open economy’ model towards ‘National Economics’.
The ‘National Economic’s School’ (of the nineteenth century) argued that Adam Smith’s analysis, which was heavily focused on individualism and cosmopolitanism, overlooked the crucial role of the national economy.
The result of a general free trade would not be a universal republic, but, on the contrary, a universal subjection of the less advanced nations by the predominant manufacturing and commercial and powers. Those advocating for a national economy countered Smith’s open economy by advocating a ‘closed economy’ to allow nascent industries to grow and become competitive on the global stage.
“Hold to no illusions: There is nothing beyond this reality”, Putin warned the gathered Russian industrialists in March 2025. “Set illusions aside”, he told delegates:
“Sanctions and restrictions are today’s reality – together with a new spiral of economic rivalry already unleashed”.
“Sanctions are neither temporary nor targeted measures; they constitute a mechanism of systemic, strategic pressure against our nation. Regardless of global developments or shifts in the international order, our competitors will perpetually seek to constrain Russia and to diminish its economic and technological capacities”.
“You should not hope for complete freedom of trade, payments and capital transfers. You should not count on Western mechanisms to protect the rights of investors and entrepreneurs… I’m not talking about any legal systems – they just don’t exist! They exist there only for themselves! That’s the trick. Do you understand?!”
Our [Russian] challenges exist, ‘yes’, Putin said; “but theirs are abundant also. Western dominance is slipping away. New centres of global growth are taking centre stage”.
These challenges are not the ‘problem’; they are the opportunity, Putin argued: We will prioritise domestic manufacturing and the development of tech industries. The old model is over. Oil and gas production will be simply the adjunct to a largely internally circulating, self-sufficient ‘real economy’ – with energy no longer its driver. We are open to western investment – but only on our terms – and the small ‘open’ sector of our otherwise closed, self-circulating real economy will of course still trade with our BRICS partners.
Russia is returning to the National Economy model, Putin implied. ‘This makes us sanction and tariff resistant’. ‘Russia is also inducement resistant – being self-sufficient in energy and raw materials’, Putin said. A clear alternate economic paradigm in the face of an unraveling world order.