Will Trump end the American-led post-war world order?
The post-1945 world is coming to an end. Some commentators predict that Trump’s re-election as US President will hammer the final nails in the coffin of this supposed American-led post-war world order. But is this prediction supported by quality world history; or is it a tired meme of geopolitical journalism?
“Trump 2.0 seems certain to put one of the final nails in the coffin of the post-1945 Pax Americana…. American voters have done a terrible and unforgivable thing this week. We should not flinch from saying they have turned away from the shared ethos and rules that have shaped the world, generally for the better, since 1945.”
(Martin Kettle The Guardian)
Martin Kettle is a veteran British journalist, known as one of Tony Blair’s loyalest defenders. But his rhetoric was not isolated. The Financial Times proclaimed that Trump’s win in the 2024 USA election “signals the end of US-led postwar order.” The major German newspaper Der Spiegel went further, declaring a new era of history.
“One era is coming to an end and a new one is beginning. Nothing marks this shift as clearly as the election of Donald Trump to a second term as president of the United States. The West has lost its dominance and the shared foundation of values, which has been crumbling for some time, is now collapsing. There are tensions everywhere – between countries and within societies. The right wing is on the rise in Italy, France and Germany. The West as a block of liberal democracies no longer exists.”
“The End of the West: A DER SPIEGEL Editorial by Dirk Kurbjuweit,” Der Spiegel 10 November 2024
With false grandeur, these opinion pieces exposed the brittle fantasy of the US-led liberal rules-based international order. One puff of Trump’s rhetoric blew the house of cards down, at least in the over-excited imagination of today’s journalists.
If you read history, not newspapers, however, you will find the post-1945 world had a distinctive, persistent, hard reality. Historians are your best guides to map this world in its unique topography. My posts over the next five weeks will introduce you to one of the best quick maps to the chaotic post-1945 world, chapter eight, “Empire Denied” of John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000.
But most commentary on the post-1945 world, especially in Western media and geopolitics channels, does not draw from such quality world history. It draws from international relations theory – liberal and realist – that in turn elaborates the doctrinal orthodoxies of USA foreign policy.
Over time the gap between the doctrinal orthodoxies and historical realities has diverged. The gap is exposed every day at the United Nations, the true institutional embodiment of international law and a world of sovereign nations. Yet the UN’s ability to secure processes of peace in the world are blocked by the victor powers of World War Two in the UN Security Council and the usurpers of the liberal rules-based order, that is the American-led “free world.”
The post-1945 world can be broken down into three periods: the early years of chaos, recovery, and revolution to 1949; the Cold War to 1989, which itself thawed and froze through several different phases; and the aftermath of the Cold War, characterized by Western globalization and the follies of the American Unipolar Illusion. Most journalistic accounts of this post-1945 world are versions of the last stage of this history. They were bred in the USA’s unipolar moment. They do not understand the whole history of the post-1945 world.
If Donald Trump’s election has banged the final nail in this world order’s coffin, then the American-led post-war world order must have been dead for some time. Within America the elites cling to their belief in their greatness, primacy, and crown of global leadership. They recite the oath that what is dead can never die. Despite all the febrile fantasies about Donald Trump “accelerating the collapse of the post-World War II international order,” MAGA, Republican and Democrat, Biden, Harris and Trump share the delusion of American Primacy. Trump aspires to Make America Great Again. The world shrinks from the bombastic slogan. But is President Biden’s desire to remain the greatest power ever seen on earth any more conducive of peace? Is not the goal expressed by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Adviser, a prolix reworking of Trump’s MAGA slogan?
“Since the end of World War Two, the United States has stood for a fair and open international economy; for the power of global connection to fuel innovation; for the power of trade and investment done right to create good jobs; for the power, as Tocqueville put it, of interest rightly understood.
Our task ahead is to harness that power to take on the realities of today's geopolitical moment in a way that will not only preserve America's enduring strengths, but extend them for generations to come.”
Observers outside the USA, however, are not fooled. They may not agree on when the American plan of global hegemony drew its last breath. Was it 2022 and the conflict in Ukraine? Was it Donald Trump’s election in 2024 or 2016? Was it the follies of endless wars begun in 2001? Was the plan stillborn in the 1990s, only to prowl the world for three decades like the armies of the living dead? But both observers and statespersons around the world see the gap between idea and reality, theory and history, grandiose dream and sordid conspiracy.
Those observers look to the history of the world and their own regions, before and since 1945, and they do not see the self-deluding mirror in which American strategists gaze. The External Affairs Minister of Bharat/India, Dr S. Jaishankar wrote:
“We have been conditioned to think of the post-1945 world as the norm and departures from it as deviations. In fact, our own pluralistic and complex history underlines that the natural state of the world is multipolarity. It also brings out the constraints in the application of power. A behaviour and a thought process that can facilitate the creation of a more favourable equilibrium with others.”
(Jaishankar, The India Way, p. 21)
How would the history of the world since 1989 have changed had American strategists looked upon the post-1945 world through pluralistic, complex and multipolar lenses? How many fewer people would have suffered had the strategists of the USA not pursued primacy, American Greatness, and full-spectrum dominance, but rather a more favourable equilibrium with others?
Jaishankar’s observation shows how the way we tell the history of the post-1945 world bears directly on how we all choose to live in today’s real world. Do we live in peace, harmony and equanimity with plural others? Or do we submit to a USA-led rules-based order, united coercively by American liberal values and stained by endless wars?
The way that we tell the history of the post-1945 world also shapes our response to emerging processes, institutions, and ideas for how to conduct diplomacy in the real world. If we know the pluralistic, complex history of international organizations, global conflicts, civilizational traditions, globalization and the multipolar world, we will not lock ourselves forever in the house that America built. We will take a walk outside to meet our neighbours. We will begin a dialogue with the Global Majority who meet in the Long House of BRICS.
We may also see how the major conflicts of today are not the late insurgency of an autocratic “axis of upheaval” (Anne Applebaum). We will understand that those conflicts emerged from the failure of the USA-led post-war world order to bring peace and prosperity to the world. Conflicts were swept under the carpet by Western consensus, only to re-emerge every few years with greater pungency. At least six hot spots of the world today reflect the unresolved conflicts of the post-1945 world order. The conflicts in Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel/Palestine, Iran, West Africa, and the Korean Peninsula all have their roots in American choices of grand strategy in the decade after 1945.
The real history of the post-1945 world did not follow the scripts of international relations theory, nor American grand strategists, whether George Marshall, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Jake Sullivan or Steve Bannon. Those scripts are ambitious projections. They seek to dominate the world, and not to understand, let alone live at peace with the world.
To live in tune with a changing world, we need to turn away from geopolitical fables and towards nuanced world history. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 is a great starting point to reframe the stories of the post-1945 world with quality world history.
Darwin’s book presents a broadly accepted account with which you can rethink the ways in which the post-1945 world is coming to an end. His discussion of the post-1945 world comes in chapter eight, “Empire Denied”, which presents the last phase of the story of the rise and fall of global empires since 1400.
The seven periods of this story are:
1. Eurasia and the Age of Discovery c1400-1600
2. The Early Modern Equilibrium c 1600-1750
3. The Eurasian Revolution c 1750-1830
4. The Race Against Time c 1830-1880
5. The Limits of Empire 1880-1914
6. Towards the Crisis of the World, 1914-42
7. Empire Denied 1945-2000+
Throughout the book Darwin focuses on three key themes, that are essential to rethinking both the post-1945 world and the world we are living in today. He stresses:
How late and insecure the Rise of the West was
How the world was always multipolar – that you cannot tell the story only from the perspective of Europe, or the Greater Europe that includes North America and Russia, however much they came to dominate in the 19th century, and
How processes of globalization constantly change and undermine the dreams of world “hegemons”
I have begun a series of videos on my YouTube channel on this story.
The first video summarized the key themes of Darwin’s book:
The second video summarized the overall narrative of the rise and fall of empires from 1400 to 2000:
The third video told the story of the rise and fall of empires between 1400 and 1600:
Six more videos will examine the main events in each period of Darwin’s history of the rise and fall of global empires.
Here on Substack over the coming weeks, I will be taking a deep dive into this post-1945 world, guided by John Darwin’s authoritative account.
In Monday’s audio-mini, I read key excerpts from chapter eight, “Empire Denied” and commented on how it helps us understand today’s world. This audio-mini is available now for paid subscribers.
Over the next four weeks in my Wednesday posts, I will summarise the story and ideas of this influential account of world history.
On 20 November, I will present the section “Eurasia Partitioned”, and explain how the Cold War established American power at both ends of the Eurasian Continent, but at the tragic cost of partitions that remain with us today.
On 27 November, I will present the section “Decolonisation”, and explain how the conflicted processes of decolonization still cast a long shadow on the world of liberal democracies.
On 2 December, I will present the section “Empire Denied”, and explore the astonishing development of the American post-1945 empire and how it fought and collaborated with other global empires.
On 9 December, I will present the section “Unlimited Empire”, and explore whether the American Unipolar Moment was built to last.
Darwin’s history of the post-1945 world will help you see through the myths of the rules-based world order. His long view of history and global empires taught the same pluralistic lesson that Dr S. Jaishankar drew from decades in diplomacy: the natural state of the world is multipolarity.
“if there is one continuity that we should be able to glean from a long view of the past, it is Eurasia’s resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules. In that sense we still live in Tamerlane’s shadow – or, perhaps more precisely, in the shadow of his failure.”
(Darwin, After Tamerlane, pp. 505-506.)
This series will present in concise form, linked to commentary on today’s events, one of world history’s leading accounts of how the post-1945 world came to be.
If you subscribe to the Burning Archive, you will be able to think about the current moment beyond shrill headlines and panicky reporting. You will add to your intellectual toolkit the nuanced thinking of one of the world’s best historians of empires.
You can join that intellectual journey by becoming a paid subscriber of the Burning Archive, where you can make sense of a puzzling world with history.