The past week has seen the most decisive reordering of the international order since the fall of the Soviet Union. From the end of the second world war, the United States has positioned itself as the guarantor of European defence against a presumed threat from the East – first for western Europe against the Soviet Union and then, since the late 1990s, for the east against Russia. President Trump, and his vice-resident JD Vance, speaking at the Munich security conference, have made clear this no longer applies. Nato will still exist as a structure, but the US will not come to Europe’s military aid and is insisting on Nato members ramping up their defence spending. The resulting panic and disorganisation amongst Europe’s leaders is all too visible.

Directly tied to this hegemony of force was the US’ role as an economic hegemon. The US has acted as the provider of the world’s most important currency, the dollar, and US borrowing has sustained economic growth across the rest of the world. The removal of barriers to trade and the flow of money around the world, under the guise of “neoliberalism”, cemented its position. Crucially, this included the growing integration of China into the US-centred economy from the mid-1970s onwards. From the point of view of US capitalism, this worked. By the mid-2000s, the US was the world’s absolutely dominant power, militarily and economically.

The failure in Iraq on one side, followed shortly after by the 2008 financial crisis, ended the good times. Major economic crises in the US and across Europe cleared the path for China, already growing rapidly, to achieve parity with and even overtake western economies in key areas, most obviously renewables and electric vehicles. Countries across the global south, from Brazil to Angola, became increasingly tied into a China-centric trading model, supplying raw materials essential for its growth whilst Chinese investment in turn spread across much of the globe. By 2015 Washington was already beginning to fret about the emergence of its first peer competitor.

Trump’s first presidency marked the first significant US break with the neoliberal rules of the game, stepping up the use of trade tariffs against China. Joe Biden’s presidency merely reinforced this, making greater use of legal sanctions against Chinese companies, including bars on technology transfer, whilst also spending heavily domestically to try and outcompete China in key industries like semiconductors and renewables. Trump version two is a further extension and deepening of the approach – to the point of breaking its longstanding commitments to its historically closest allies. Faced with serious competition, Washington’s response has been to retreat and retrench.

Trump’s attempted deal with Russia over Ukraine has to be seen in this light. The greatest triumph of US geopolitical strategy in the last five decades was to divide Russia and China, isolating two potential rivals. But Western sanctions on Russia (after its invasion of Crimea in 2014, and then Ukraine in 2022) had helped bring the two countries into far closer alignment. Trade between China and Russia has surged in the last decade, and, two days before Russian tanks crossed the border with Ukraine, the new closer relationship was formalised with the announcement by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin of an “unlimited” partnership, signed in Beijing.
By setting up talks with Russia directly, notably in Saudi Arabia – a longtime US ally itself with increasingly close trade, investment and diplomatic relations with China – over the future of Ukraine, the Trump administration is hoping to reverse the last decade: pull Russia closer, and push China further away.

China has repeatedly signalled its willingness to act as a neutral peacemaker in Ukraine and has even mooted sending peacekeeping troops. Its exclusion from talks is an intentional snub. On China’s side, the clear willingness of Trump’s administration – for all the rhetoric – to strike a trade deal is a sufficient incentive to allow US-Russia dealmaking to continue. That deal currently looks strikingly brutal – demands for reparations from the US and near-unlimited access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth on one side, with Russian territorial gains formalised on the other. It’s an old-school imperial carve-up of the kind that wasn’t supposed to happen in the postwar order.

As climate change bites and resource constraints tighten, we should expect more of these very direct carve-ups by the major powers. Increasingly, diplomacy and military conflict are likely to zero in on the issue of raw material access. Trump has made very clear, for example, that he intends to use the US’s own growing fossil fuel exports as a bargaining chip in future deals across the world, and it seems likely that the UK government will be willing to strike a deal for US liquified natural gas to curry favour with Washington.

The US’s unilateral retreat from the rules and institutions it once championed is necessarily disruptive and carries high risks of future conflicts – particularly as resource constraints bind. But it also contains the possibility of doing things very differently: remaking the world system so that it is less obviously exploitative and motivated by zero-sum competition. Britain could take the opportunity to radically reconsider its own role in the world, as Labour MP Clive Lewis has argued. Europe as a whole could reset its relations with the rest of the world in the wake of Trump’s exit, as a piece in the US establishment journal Foreign Policy suggested: quit Nato, strike a deal with Russia and repair relations with China. Donald Trump and those around him have their vision for America first in a new world. The rest of us need our own alternatives.