appeasement
The imperial presidency of Trump was inaugurated with a sequence of executive orders orchestrated like coups de théâtre, signed off with the bold strokes of a hyperbolic signature and exposed in performances worthy of an art biennial. These salvoes of regulatory artillery came with territorial claims over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada; tariff threats on China, its American neighbors, Europe, and the rest of the world; and with declarations, decrees, and pardons that threaten U.S. democracy and the international liberal order. It has been such a hyperactive start that he has not even respected the news cycle, and which has been rounded off with proposals for the two main ongoing conflicts: after the ceasefire in Gaza, rebuilding the Strip as a Mediterranean resort, while two million Palestinians are moved to Egypt or Jordan; and ending the Ukraine war by reopening the dialogue with the Russia of Putin, in a negotiation that leaves out Kiev and Brussels.
The outlines of the U.S. assault on a global order based on rules, and its fracture of the Atlantic link, already shown by the opening of a commercial war with the EU, was clearly expressed on 14 February at the Munich Security Conference, where vicepresident J.D. Vance questioned the values of European democracies, regretted the retreat in them of free speech, and supported the continent’s far-right parties, as they are the most strongly opposed to immigration. Munich evokes the agreement of 1938 by which the United Kingdom and France left Czechoslovakia to its fate for the sake of Hitler’s appeasement, perhaps like today’s effort to please Putin by handing him Ukraine’s future, as seems implied by the public statements of U.S. leaders. Sadly, Europe’s response to the ‘Munich’ of Trump was simply a meeting convened by Macron in Paris on 17 February, and that only served to highlight the differences among participants and ultimately the continent’s impotence.
In this new imperial era, the uncertainties are not limited to the mapping of the areas of influence of the superpowers or to their number, because if for many the G-20 has given rise to a G-2 with the U.S. and China, the nuclear weapons and the eleven time zones of a Russia that is also an Arctic power give it a prominence acknowledged by Trump, whose Secretary of State Marco Rubio met in Riyadh on 18 February with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to talk about Ukraine, closing a week that has shaken the world. The main uncertainty now is whether we will see the emergence of a new global order to control economic flows, arbitrate conflicts, and channel migration, or if unfortunately these convulsions are only a prelude to future social and ideological fractures. We do not know if these meetings are a Yalta 2.0 or a Munich 2.0, and it is not easy to foresee if these geopolitical tsunamis will leave in their wake an order different to the current one, or if the predicted coming disorder is already with us.
