Trumpism and Geo-Politics

The new regime is in place and uncompromising - Europeans are finding it hardest to adapt

As we all know, President Trump’s Inauguration took place yesterday. We were already expecting an almost immediate barrage of vengeful change. Trump did not disappoint. You can read the list of Executive Orders and the analysis of these elsewhere, whether in the legacy or social media. Some of them will be subject to legal challenge (this is America after all) and some are just the negotiating positions of an instinctive businessman but the general intent is clear - to ensure that no one is in any doubt that Trump will keep his campaign promises to the extent that he is constitutionally able. What might be useful here is to lay out the ‘heads’ of the coming era geopolitically, that is the issues being flagged up for global political change so that we have some template for our future understanding. Right up to the last minute there were Europeans still either deluded or desperately hoping that Trump was not what it said that he was on his tin. They now know that he will negotiate ruthlessly from strength and that his ‘ideology’ will be present and protected from afar in the European world. The link between attempts to ban the AfD and tariffs may not be explicit but they are there.

The essence of the Trump regime is American imperial nationalism – the ideology of MAGA. This has several aspects but it is very different from the previous ideology of liberal values ‘imperialism’ whose emphasis was on negotiation and manipulation to build an American-led global system that actively sought to eliminate alternatives. Trump’s USA is not interested in a costly global system whose values compromise national integrity and which, over time, came to serves the interests of the satrapies called ‘allies’. We are reminded that the Soviet Empire damaged the interests of the Russian people in favour of socialist elites in the outlying republics and that this was a major trigger for its eventual implosion. From this perspective, MAGA is more rational politically perhaps than economically and so is eventually rational economically. It anticipates and corrects a possible fall of empire through over-extension. Trump is playing Diocletian. MAGA concentrates power on the dollar and financial manipulation, on trade and tariffs to strengthen the core at the expense of the periphery, on technological-military superiority and on a viable raw materials-based ‘sphere of influence’.

Global liberals may bleat about loss of growth at the global level but, like any good businessman, Trump is giving to the nationalists (in his view) in order to get - he is re-ordering things so that national capital (which veers into international capital in the American case) gets primacy over international capital that is not American. Chancellor Reeves’ trip to Davos, on the other hand, appeared to be a game of sacrificing national capital in a desperate attempt to attract international capital in order to hold together a collapsing welfare system. Embarrassingly, almost to the point of nausea, Foreign Secretary Lammy and Ambassador (if approved) Mandelson were contemporaneously kow-towing to the new Emperor in the desperate hope that they would be noticed and that the Divine Presence’s anger at past British behaviours could be assuaged. It was all very undignified but it shows us just how worried Labour (which had seized the leadership in a coup against democratic socialists) has become.

Right-wing Labour’s political raison d’etre was liberal Atlanticism in a rather dubious partnership with liberal Washington in a global trading economy in which capital could be allowed to float freely yet here is its ally effectively unravelling the entire ideological justification for its claim to be of the Left, a claim now barely credible even to its own supporters. Worse, the growth problem in Britain is such that running around trying to attract global capital and please markets (a process likely to be reasonably successful in the short term) merely results in the United Kingdom becoming even more of a dependency of the US with no way out that does not crash the economy. The UK has turned into Venice after the loss of its empire and may yet end up as little more than a services-driven tourist trap if its technological leaderships are simply purloined systematically by large global corporations and taken off-site at the first sign of a Government that tries to restore first the primacy of national capital and then social democracy (let alone socialism). But we digress … let us return to MAGA.

The logical sphere of influence for MAGA is primarily North America and not the periphery of the imperium. This includes control of Greenland (minerals) and the pricing structures of the Panama Canal (trade) as well as the Caribbean and Central America. It also means relations with Canada and Mexico that are reconstructed on American terms as far as possible. Trump has been quick to announce the intent to impose swinging tariffs on these two countries even if we suspect that both are contingent on other political considerations - in Canada’s case, the final collapse of Trudeau-ism and US preferential access to Canadian mineral resources and, in Mexico’s case, the leftish Government of Scheinbaum easing the reception of deported migrants and weakening economic relations with China. The former should be a walkover, the latter less so but the designation of Mexican drug gangs as terrorist organisations is a serious threat because it creates the conditions for American military intervention and not in an entirely unjustifiable cause.

In terms of geo-political clash, this concentration on North America implies effectively telling ‘allies’ like Canada and Europe what the terms of engagement are, challenging China strategically in Latin America and pushing Russia out of the region altogether. The flash point here is not Cuba which is likely to fall back into the American sphere of influence from economic necessity (although Trump rapidly reversed Biden’s friendly final gesture of relieving Havana of its status as a ‘sponsor of state terrorism’ [rather rich coming from the land of CIA operations but there we have it]) but Venezuela whose regime is constantly fighting for its survival. Pro-American forces have grown nasty in recent months with attempts at anti-democratic operations in places as distant as South Korea, Georgia and Romania but these are leftovers from the old regime and the last two of those are actually more European operations. Venezuela, however, is in the US’ back door and a major oil producer. The Maduro Government has little to lose in adopting the same sort of defiance that we see from Tehran and Moscow. More liberal South Americans (such as Lula in Brazil) may turn to Europe or the BRICS but their concerns are equally driven by the rise of internal challenges such as Milei’s in Argentina made possible by Musk’s social media dominance.

We can perhaps simplistically divide the rest of the world into a) challengers to American hegemony, b) increasingly worried allies who see serious internal divisions emerging from the process of global regime change, and c) ‘neutrals’ wondering how to steer their way between empires to their own best profit as much as survival. If we take these in order, we should divide the challengers into i) China whose primary focus is economic (maintaining the global trading system against protectionism with Taiwan and the South China Sea the issues of principle necessary to maintain Chinese nationalism within the Communist family) and ii) Russia, Iran (we have noted Venezuela) and their increasing numbers of small allies who are far more concerned with regime survival under conditions where the US is not actually expansionist any more. The point here is that the US is just as concerned as the challengers with clear boundary drawing and economic competition. Ironically, this gives Washington the opportunity to cut deals with Beijing and Moscow which may even be at the expense of weak allies.

There is a hint of this in both the invitation to XI to the Inauguration (which he courteously turned down but sent a high-ranking alternate) and the self-evident readiness to by-pass professional diplomatic channels and work towards a direct summit meeting between Trump and Putin over the heads of the Europeans and Ukraine. The very quick reaffirmation of the Russo-Chinese alliance by Putin and XI suggests that the world order is going to be decided by discussions in the imperial capitals and their various satrapies and proxies will not be consulted very much. Trump is, of course, a skilled negotiator as is much of his team. He is very good at it because he is not dragged down by having to please too many interests or maintain some pre-set ideology additional to his American nationalism. He knows how to negotiate through engaging in preliminary propaganda (the Greenland case is a perfect example of this) and then following up through tougher over the table negotiations designed to get something for both sides in order to solve a problem. This is not so different from using the media in New York real estate deals to set the terms of engagement around that table. The abstract and morally absolutist theories of liberal internationalism and of the old new world order (neo-conservatism) are simply academic in that context.

The game plan is simple - to protect American industrial strength, jobs, national security and technological leadership rather than waste resources trying to ‘contain’ any rival power through vastly expensive imperial projection. By-passing alliances such as NATO or organisations such as the UN, American power is simply asserted as something that can destroy from the skies or through blockade and exclusion (a very real threat to the Chinese economy). On the ground power is used selectively (as in Syria today) or only in extremis. It follows an old eighteenth century doctrine that warfare is about manouevre and that the greatest general is one who never has to fight a battle. It is a way of seeing geopolitical reality that is suitable for a world of balance between Great Powers (although in this case the US is undoubtedly primus inter pares) rather than seeking imperial expansion with global governance aspirations to meet some abstract ideal. The latter also inevitably triggers wars as its ideology creates resentment and resistance. Those wars eventually tend to be lost and so they have been since Vietnam. A war that takes place at the level of direct Great Power conflict is far less likely to be lost because the entire military and economic strength of America could be applied to it. No one (including Trump) wants to get to that point.

This leaves us with one major anomaly – Iran. Iran is to be targeted for one reason and one reason only. It has set itself up to be an existential threat to Israel which, for mysterious historical reasons, has become an absolute in terms of its defence within ‘Western’ (that is, American and allied) ideology no matter what extreme behaviour it exhibits. This includes war crimes that would perhaps never have been tolerated at the high point of a now discredited liberal internationalism. Europe and the UK have been much morally diminished by their engagement with the war on Israel’s side only because they claimed to be better than that. Harris (it seems) did lose the election on Gaza. Trump does not pretend to liberal moral outrage and so cannot be diminished in the same way by amorality - it is expected of him. Yet it is his team that actually brought the ceasefire about and which looks set to offer the best hope of peace in Ukraine.

The Russia-Iran strategic agreement signed within recent days (its timing is important as with the Russo-Chinese reaffirmation of its alliance) mirrors the Russia-North Korea agreement that has so outraged Western liberals. Yet both agreements may be good things for peace in the Middle East and East Asia respectively because both mean an end to the local isolation of a defensive local nuclear or near-nuclear power and encourage acceptance of Great Power restraint on their lesser allies. Russia offers some degree of protection and, in return, Tehran and Pyongyang will listen to what Moscow (and Beijing) have to say. Neither of the latter actually want Israel or South Korea destroyed and both Israel and South Korea (the latter process is already happening) are likely to shift to more pacific internal politics as may Taiwan and Japan. Trump may prove (as he has done already) a restraint on Israel too because his open ambition is to bring Jerusalem and Riyadh into a Middle Eastern co-prosperity. It is clear that Riyadh would like Tehran to be part of that as well. Trump is sending out some fairly pessimistic signals about this at the moment but it is clearly his intention and that of his team. Palestine may yet get its recognition as a State over the heads of radicals in both its territory and Israel. These are thus all not quite client states or proxies but they can perhaps all feel more secure so long as they do not implode internally. Great Power politics both protects and restrains.

This brings us to regime change as instrument of policy. Stability is enhanced to the degree that the US ceases to engage in regime change strategies and security is decreased to the degree that European and East Asian states decide to take them up. The situation here is thoroughly confused but the probability is that the US will now become very specific in its internal interference programmes. This assumes that the Trump team are in full control of entities like the State Department and CIA and of their proxies like the undoubtedly sinister NED. As a pressure point, it is hard not to see regime change continuing to be targeted at Venezuela and perhaps Iran but it will otherwise be an expensive distraction that simply creates instability elsewhere in the region. Furthermore, the East Asian allies already have internal political pressures working against local ‘war hawks’.

The flash point here is Europe. The European West increasingly looks like a system of ineffective men and women of straw. This is a fragmenting mess of competing interests and ideologies. ‘Liberals’ (essentially a mix of petty state neo-nationalists, liberal Atlanticists and European federalists) seem to want to take up where America is leaving off. It is largely this wing of Europe that has led on the failed Georgia pseudo-Maidan, encouraged anti-democratic manouevres in Romania, interfered in Hungarian decision-making and promoted regime change in Belarus. It is this wing that wants to trade butter for guns and controls NATO when Washington’s eye is off the ball. And it is this wing that is pouring cash and military supplies into the black hole of Ukraine and even contemplating more formal use of military personnel. To a considerable portion of this community we can attribute the belief that Europe can go it alone, that the population should accept less butter for guns and that the best solution to political dissent is to crush social media and deploy lawfare along US Democrat lines (we saw how that worked!). The symbolic picture of the last week was the open public conflict between Prime Minister Scholz and Foreign Minister Baerbock when the former simply recognised electoral and economic reality and blocked aid for Ukraine. Baerbock is one of a peculiar set of Valkyrie of radical green, liberal or neo-nationalist female politicians who have emerged across North-Central Europe in recent years.

Russia, probably now wanting to end the war, simply needs to achieve its core aims – an end to regime change attempts driven from the West, the incorporation of the Russian-speaking Donbass into Russia and ensuring that Ukraine never joins NATO and places NATO troops on the Russian border. Given the Chinese and Iranian alliance and the way Russia is plugging itself into BRICS market regardless of sanctions, relief from sanctions, return of funds and reconnecting the Eurasian energy economy into Europe would be very nice but are secondary conditions to be negotiated through a peace process that may take many months to unfold. Washington is now relatively uninterested in all the passions of Biden-type and European liberals. It will be happy to see Europeans dependent on American energy, mineral and military supplies so the secondary aspects of the case may never happen without regime changes within Europe. There is certainly room for negotiation here between Washington and Moscow, leaving the Europeans to carry the costs of their own increasingly peculiar Russophobia.

The European mess is thus the main geopolitical problem of 2025 on many grounds. It is notionally one of the most economically developed parts of the global economy but it is flat-lining (especially in Germany). It is technologically falling behind the US and China (and even behind the UK and East Asia). The European Project now depends on further integration but its ideological priorities have created large discontented minorities who are turning to populism (depending on the country) or towards the less realistic and romantic elements on the Left. The fragmentation of Europe means open cultural and political warfare between a core under pressure (the EU Commission, Parliament and the current majority of liberal-led States) and emergent protesting States such as Hungary and Slovakia who have powers of veto and disruption. We have rehearsed all this in previous notes so there is no need to go too far down that route today.

However, Europeans (especially the UK) have serious cause to worry about the implications of the change of regime in Washington. The British, led by a Government of now staggering incompetence, are all over the place trying to run with the fox and the hounds. One track has been to panic by clamping down on peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrations in London perhaps in order to try to change Musk’s tone of voice. Another is sending the hyper-liberal Mandelson to Washington as Ambassador who then writes a toe-curlingly ingratiating article kow-towing to the new Emperor. Another has Prime Minister Starmer flying over to Kiev to offer a peculiar 100-year alliance at an estimated £3bn per annum just as the Government appears to be threatening to end the so-called ‘triple lock’ on pensions in order to save the economy (which is actually likely to do better than most non-US G7 economies) from market attacks. This Government can afford to be incompetent because it not constitutionally dislodgeable and its Party is structured around placemen, careerists and opportunists with no incentive to bring their own leadership to account. Not since the 1830s has the British Constitution looked so dysfunctional.

The British present an extreme version of European worries and concerns. Does the European political class bend the kneee in submission to the new imperium in order to try to salvage influence, keep Washington on side with NATO, encourage officials to challenge Russia and assist in negotiating trade deals that avoid threatened tariffs (this last is the primary British driver)? Or does it stand up to Washington and follow up on a phrase ironically promoted by Musk – MEGA [Make Europe Great Again]? This is further complicated by the conflict between pro-American liberals still hoping to manage and moderate Washington through deep state connections (hence the appointment of Mandelson) and those populists who see American populist ideology as the means of making their individual countries great again. We see the latter with Farage in the UK or the AfD in Germany. Further complication ensues when you realise that MEGA advocates certainly do not mean rule by the European Commission and are not friends to Ukraine whose salvaging (again ironically in view of its neo-nationalist aspects) is regarded as a liberal project.

We have not covered economics (essentially an incoming new trade and financial order), internal US affairs (with the likelihood of a brutal cultural and administrative purge of American liberalism to come) or the detail of specific regions (such as the Middle East). All of these and other topics will emerge for review in the coming weeks and months. All have implications for Europe. There will be surprises. We suspect that some feared changes will not happen but see the fear being used to effect changes in the interests of the US. We also suspect that ideologists like Musk and Bannon actively want similar regime changes within allies (especially in Europe) so that a new world order can be created that is essentially financial, technological and ideological. The great cultural battles in 2025 may well be over American sponsorship of global free expression from Brazil to Romania, in the UK and in Germany. The difference from the past will be that this challenge will be directed at transforming the West and not expanding it.