Thinking About A New Global Order (Or, Credit Where Credit Is Due)

Friends, nerd out with me here for this post.

I want to make clear that I am not interested in sane-washing the current administration's policies or their methods. I am deeply, deeply skeptical of the tiresome arguments of "oh, he's playing three-dimensional chess and y'all are just playing checkers"- and I will be honest with you: I straight up do not believe those arguments.

However...  we gotta talk about their foreign policy a little bit.

An underdiscussed aspect of what drives the Trumpian/New Right (whatever you want to call it) foreign policy is how much of it is a backlash to the neoconservative disasters of the early 2000s. As much as it pains me to admit it, Trump was very open about wanting to end our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and (again, to his credit) didn't start any new wars in his first term. (Granted, he didn't get us out of Afghanistan in Term One either-- Biden did that and caught the flack/fallout for it instead of Trump, which worked out fine for him in the long run to be honest.)

There is a lot of lofty rhetoric about solely acting in our national interests as being a driving force of our foreign policy going forward. That very much lines up with the Realist school of International Relations (which annoys me: I hate realists, they have this annoying tendency to be right all the fucking time) and it's not a particularly original idea- but the way they're approaching it, if you step back and look at it, isn't exactly... terrible?

Consider Ukraine. Going into 2025, things were coming to a head either way-- as much as I would love Ukraine to win this outright, things were shaping up as an ugly race: would Ukraine run out of men or would the Russian economy collapse first? If we accept the primary impulse of Trumpian Foreign Policy as being 'what is in America's best interests' then their approach starts to make a certain amount of sense.

Cut through the bullshit on the internet and the people yelling Slava Ukraini or yammering about Trump being a Russian asset for a minute and consider: from America's point of view, is the collapse of Putin's regime in our best interest? I don't like Putin. I'm damn sure a lot of Russians don't like Putin. His regime meddles and sows chaos in a lot of places, but if his regime collapses, what comes next? Do we know? Can America control the outcome of the collapse of the Putin regime? Russia's demographics are not on their side long term so I am prepared to accept that if the United States is not willing to ensure a controlled collapse of the Putin regime, then him losing this war is not in our best interests.

However, Ukraine losing is not in our best interests either. I have never understood all the anti-Ukraine folks yammering about World War III and the risk of World War III. Don't get me wrong: I don't think Ukraine should be in NATO-- Russia made that a clear red line and I'm pretty sure even Biden wouldn't have gone there, no matter how much the Ukrainians might have wanted it. But, a Russian client state or Russia itself butting right up against a large swathe of Eastern Europe? That raises the stakes of a general European war (again) that we would get dragged into (again). (The Baltics, yes, are members of NATO, but they have their backs to the sea, strategically it's a different ballgame.) There is no evidence that Putin would stop with Ukraine. None.

So honestly, at this point, the best way forward is something that preserves Ukranian independence and sovereignty while keeping the Russian regime (as much as I object to it) intact. And, again-- I disagree with the methods, the way they're going about it and how they're comporting themselves, but so far that sure does appear to be what they're trying to do. 

(And, given that the Trump administration is now making noise about sanctions against Russia, it seems like this is the general idea they're aiming for. They want a deal and they're willing to smack around both sides to get it done.)

But, there's a bonus to be had here: Trump smacked the Europeans around a bit in the first term, because the US does shoulder a lot of the bill for Europe's collective security. Trump's approach to Ukraine in the second term has horrified the Europeans and while the collateral damage to our trans-Atlantic alliance is something I am uneasy about if the long term consequences of these moves result in getting Europe to shoulder the responsibility of it's own collective security, so that America no longer has to foot the bill, I would call that a win too.

I don't know if Europe has the ability to fill the gap without actual political consolidation over the long term and I'm not sure I would necessarily trust the Europeans not to fuck it up again (they have before and dragged us in to clean up their messes in WWI and WWII) but we are now absolutely in a post-Cold War landscape. The security arrangements and alliances that resulted from the Cold War are something I don't think we should necessarily ditch at the drop of a hat, but we should expect them to evolve in a changing global order. I don't know how or what form that evolution should take and honestly, I don't want to leave NATO right now, because I think some international cooperation is better than none, but I get the instinct to kick the tires on this stuff I get the instinct to ask, 'does this still serve our national interest?'

Let's consider Trump's approach to Gaza. People were rightfully horrified about his plan to take Gaza and make it into a hotel paradise (that AI video with him and Netanyahu sunbathing was frankly insane) but you know what? As insane as that approach has been, it appears to be... working? The neighboring Arab states are never going to accept mass displacement of the Palestinian population into their territories and Egypt is now developing it's own plan to rebuild Gaza (with a price tag of something like 53 billion dollars) and however much you may hate the insanity of the original pitch, there is no question: serious proposals are being developed. Everyone seems to be in agreement that some kind of post-Hamas structure needs to be put in place there. Will it work? I don't know-- but if the Arab states pay for it and come up with a plan to get Hamas out there and replace with something that everyone (including the Israelis) can live with, how is that not a win from the point of view of our national interests?

(Granted this is a more complicated example: it doesn't resolve the question of the West Bank. It doesn't resolve the larger Palestinian question. It doesn't effectively reign in the honestly bad/underhanded behavior of Israel's current government either. But from the point of view of strictly Gaza, what I outlined above would be a win from a foreign policy point of view.)

It's messy. It's chaotic and appears to be a 'shoot from the hip' approach to foreign policy and the results, I think the results will be mixed. But, just because you're shooting at a weird angle from the hip doesn't mean you're going to miss all your targets, either. There is the outline of something that could be considered a 'New Global Order' lurking under all the insanity. How we get there (right now) is a bit of shambles, but they're stumbling towards something, anyway. And that's interesting to me.

This puts the Left in an interesting conundrum. Do they defend the status quo Global Order?

The amount of rhetoric online about The Democrats and what people think is wrong with them is voluminous, I don't want to go into the psychoanalysis thing here, but consider Trump's positioning here: if someone had been in a coma since 1987 and woke up today and got told the Republicans wanted to pull out of NATO and the UN, they would straight up assume that the Soviets had won. The whole 'no new wars' things that Trump beats the drum on as little as twenty years ago would have considered fairly radically leftist positions. (War = bad, after all.)

Whether he meant to or not (and I tend to lean towards the latter) it's a fairly interesting bit of triangulation that puts the Left in something of a bind. Do they defend the status quo Global Order or do they start thinking about something new? The problem for the Left, of course, is that being anti-tariff means being pro-Free Trade and that's going to get them into a pretzel knot amongst their own coalition, never mind with the voting public. On the other hand, if Trump's massive bet on tariffs doesn't pay off (or if people see their retirement accounts being shredded enough and get nervous) then the pendulum could swing towards that end of the spectrum in short order.

Are Democrats the pro-war party now? I don't know. Do they want to be? I don't think they need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but the foreign policy establishment desperately needs to move beyond Cold War binaries and Trump, for all his chaos is presenting the Left with an opportunity to at least start thinking about what that might look like.

(Minor Tangent Here: Academia-- at least when I was going through a quarter of a century ago- damn I'm old-- was awash in a post-Soviet politics, Russian experts and a few China people here and there. There were some people from the developing world now and again, and there was almost nothing about India and South Asia. You had to go hunt for that and it's honestly one of the many reasons I tapped out after a Master's Degree in Political Science. Could I have found something? Probably-- but my impression, at least in political science, was that life was very much Russian, Chinese, and everything else politics in terms of Comparative Politics. I assume that reflected what we saw and still see in the Foreign Policy establishment at the time, and even though that was way closer to the Cold War than it is today, it is still reflective of the problem. Establishments are ponderous things, hard to steer and even harder to change.)

Personally, I tend to be an incrementalist on this stuff. Should we honor any 'sacred cows'? Continuing to do business just because 'it's always been done that way' is an answer that I find incredibly annoying. Do I think we should throw out both baby and bathwater just because we can? No. Would I prefer this be done in a less chaotic way? Absolutely-- I think there are real worries about the long term consequences for the security of this country that are being underdiscussed and underplayed. There is a cost to everything, but if change is due, it's due. 

I am therefore, forced (reluctantly) to give credit where credit is due: you can hate it, you can be convinced that there's absolutely no plan to this other than chaos but you can't deny: they want to change the existing global order and for good or for ill, they're doing it. Everyone else needs to stop putting their hands over their ears, closing their eyes and pretending that it isn't happening, because it is. And someone else needs to figure out what it's going to mean when the dust settles.