Trump Brings World Over to the Precipice

The world we thought we knew is gone. The liberal world order — born from the rubble of World War II, anchored by U.S. leadership, and sustained by faith in institutions, alliances, and shared rules — is collapsing before our eyes. Donald Trump didn’t just walk away from this order. He burned its foundations.

In his second term, Trump has shattered the idea that America is the custodian of a rules-based international system. He has dismantled alliances, abandoned multilateralism, weaponized economic power, and aligned himself openly with authoritarian regimes. For the first time since 1945, the United States is no longer the guarantor of global stability — it is the disruptor-in-chief. The result is a world without anchors: a fragmented, Hobbesian landscape of competing powers, coercive trade wars, collapsing security guarantees, and a growing vacuum no single actor can fill.

Since the end of World War II, U.S. leadership rested on a simple bargain: America would underwrite global security and open markets in exchange for influence and loyalty. That bargain is dead. Trump has made it clear that America no longer sees alliances as strategic assets but as bad investments. NATO, once the backbone of Western security, is now an object of his contempt. The World Trade Organization — the very institution Washington helped create — has been sidelined. At the 2025 Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance stunned European leaders when he openly questioned whether the U.S. and Europe even share values anymore. The message was unmistakable: America is no longer in the business of building consensus or sustaining partnerships. The liberal order that relied on U.S. leadership now faces an existential crisis.

For decades, the architects of Pax Americana believed that free trade, open markets, and collective security were antidotes to war. Trump has replaced this philosophy with brute-force economic nationalism. He has slapped tariffs on nearly every major U.S. trading partner, from Canada and Germany to Japan and South Korea — punishing allies as harshly as adversaries. Trade has become a tool of coercion, not cooperation. Nations that refuse to bend to Washington’s demands face tariffs, sanctions, and exclusion.

This is not a return to isolationism. It is something more radical: an America-first mercantilism that treats global interdependence as weakness and sees multilateral institutions as obstacles to raw power. The era of consensus-driven globalization is over.

 If tariffs fractured the economic order, Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine has detonated the security order. In February 2025, Trump refused to support a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion, openly breaking with NATO allies and siding with Moscow and Beijing. Days later, in a tense White House confrontation, he humiliated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, dismissing European security concerns and touting his own “deal” with Vladimir Putin to end the war.

For European capitals, this was a seismic moment. The bond forged from the ashes of World War II — the belief that America would defend Europe against aggression — has been shattered. The transatlantic alliance is no longer a bedrock of stability; it is a hollow promise.

China has moved swiftly to exploit the vacuum. By positioning itself as a more predictable, rules-respecting power, Beijing has expanded its influence across Asia, Africa, and the Global South. It presents itself as a responsible stakeholder in multilateral forums while quietly rewriting the rules to suit its interests.

And yet, this is not a seamless handover from Pax Americana to Pax Sinica. China remains a revisionist power, unwilling to offer universal norms or shoulder the costs of global stewardship. Beijing can disrupt, but it cannot yet lead. The result is not a world dominated by China but a world without leadership — fragmented, unstable, and increasingly dangerous.

The collapse of multilateralism hits the Global South the hardest. Small states, long reliant on international law and collective security, now face exposure to aggressive neighbours and proxy wars. From Gaza to Taiwan, from the South China Sea to the Balkans, conflicts once contained by American power are now metastasizing. Without the protections of a rules-based order, nations are reverting to the raw calculus of survival: build your military, choose your patrons, or be swallowed.

Professor Karim Emile Bitar of Saint Joseph University captures the paradox starkly: “The so-called liberal order was always hypocritical, shielding U.S. allies from accountability while punishing rivals. But its collapse offers no comfort. We are entering a Darwinian world where power, not norms, defines justice.”

The unravelling of the global order mirrors the crisis within the West itself. Liberal democracies are in retreat; illiberal populism is on the march. Across Europe and North America, oligarchic wealth dominates politics, institutions are eroding, and the very norms that sustained collective action are under assault. This is the most dangerous shift of all: the ideological core of the liberal order — the belief in universal rights, collective security, and rules-based governance — is being hollowed out from within. Without a coherent vision of democracy at home, the West cannot sustain leadership abroad.

The lesson of the 20th century was clear: without shared rules, chaos reigns. The United States and its allies-built institutions, forged alliances, and established norms to prevent another descent into unrestrained great-power rivalry.

Trump’s second term has dismantled that architecture — and no actor, not China, not Europe, not Russia, has the capacity or legitimacy to replace it. What emerges is not multipolar stability but multipolar disorder. Competing spheres of influence are hardening. Institutions are hollowing out. Power, not principle, is once again the organizing logic of global politics.

We are entering a 21st-century Hobbesian struggle — a jungle where the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. This is not simply the decline of American leadership. It is the death of a system — the end of a 75-year experiment in building a world governed by rules rather than raw force.

Reconstructing that system will not be easy — perhaps not even possible. After all, the liberal order was born from the shock of global catastrophe. It may take another one to imagine anything like it again. Until then, the post-Trump era will be defined by instability, opportunism, and fragmentation. What began as the promise of Pax Americana may end as the prelude to a new age of chaos.