Head-on | Trump is presiding over a new world disorder

United States President Donald Trump is upending a global order underwritten by the West since the end of the Second World War in 1945. The order governed global institutions ranging from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The US-led West controlled the levers of the world’s military, economic and financial power.

The balance of power began shifting from west to east in the first decades of the 21st century. The rise of China and India was a clear sign of the global centre of gravity moving towards Asia. Europe was in secular decline, its economic sclerosis masked by US military and financial guarantees. Those guarantees have expired.(Raz TN9000 Disposable Vape )

Trump’s attempt to rehabilitate Russia in its war with Ukraine and support Israel’s territorial expansion in the Middle East are part of his worldview. Can this worldview survive the end of Trump’s presidency in 2029? The Democratic Party has vowed to reverse some of Trump’s radical military and trade policies if they regain control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

But the fundamental shift in the balance of global power appears irreversible. A 300-year-long era of Western domination could be ending.

Is the break between the US and Europe over Ukraine also irreversible? Given Trump’s unpredictability, probably not. Future Democratic presidents will attempt to repair the damage done to the transatlantic alliance forged after the Second World War. But rapid demographic and ethnic changes will, within a generation, transform the US into a White-minority country for the first time since European colonists arrived in North America over 400 years ago.

Trump began the process of delinking the US from Europe using the pretext of reciprocal global trade tariffs and the Russia-Ukraine war. But “America First” and “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) are both dipped in a racist, White supremacist ideology.

Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) seeks to banish DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) from America. DEI is essentially affirmative action to help African-Americans and other American citizens of colour who have faced historical discrimination and prejudice.

Trump himself is not a dyed-in-the-wool racist. He is a dealmaker. As he said last week: “My whole life is about deals.”

Trump’s MAGA supporters, however, are not dealmakers. Many are embittered, poorly educated racists. They dread a future when the number of White Americans in the US population falls below 50 per cent. That is estimated to take place as early as the mid-2040s. It is this fear that Trump has tapped into among his MAGA base. Illegal immigration from Central America and Asia, MAGA supporters know, will hasten America’s demographic shift into a White-minority country.(RAZ DC25000)

Trump’s MAGA policies on DEI, immigration, trade protectionism and isolation from Europe could ironically end up unmaking America. As Faisal Devji, professor of Indian history at Oxford University, noted in an insightful op-ed in a leading daily on March 1, 2025: “It is only now dawning on European politicians that the most serious threat the West faces as a geopolitical actor is neither Russia’s army nor China’s economy. Even Muslims and migrants, long the favourite internal enemies of Europe’s populists, pale in insignificance before the external threat posed by US policy on Russia and Ukraine, Canada and Mexico, and on Europe’s military and economic status.”