What a week. Last Friday night Donald Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, ambushed the embattled Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office and chucked him out of the White House.
On Monday they froze military aid to Ukraine and on Tuesday they stopped supplying intelligence that helps Ukraine defend itself from Russian bombardments. On Wednesday, Trump warned “the people of Gaza” that if they continued to hold hostages, “you are DEAD!”
In Europe, still blinking at the rupture in the transatlantic relationship, leaders held an emergency summit and resolved to rearm as quickly as they could. The bloc will now change its strict rules on government borrowing to enable faster rearmament.
French president Emmanuel Macron, in a televised address to his country, warned that Russian aggression “knows no borders”, will not stop at Ukraine and is a direct threat to France and Europe. He offered to extend the protection of France’s nuclear arsenal to other European countries, and said he would convene a meeting of European military chiefs who are willing to send peacekeepers to Ukraine next week.
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So the North still says no. But for how much longer?
In Moscow this was reported as “Macron tells Europe to prepare for war with Russia”.
[ Burning question for Europe now is how to deal with an elected American tyrantOpens in new window ]
And also on Tuesday, President Trump delivered his state of the union address to Congress. To get a full sense of this extraordinary presidency, watch it back, or read a transcript. Here’s an excerpt: “The people elected me to do the job, and I’m doing it. In fact, it has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency – it’s our presidency – is the most successful in the history of our nation. By many. And what makes it even more impressive is that do you know who No 2 is? George Washington. How about that? How about that? I don’t know about that list. But we’ll take it.”
Not exactly “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, is it? (My favourite bit was where Trump decried expenditure by the Biden administration “$8 million for making mice transgender – this is real.” It turns out the research programme was on “transgenic” mice, where their genetic make-up is altered to better gauge the effects of experimental medicines.)
Anyway, all this in less than a week. It’s dizzying.
This is not a column denouncing Trump. You will have no difficulty finding one of those if you wish. Rather it is a suggestion that the clear-eyed study of Donald Trump is necessary because the world is being remade by him before our eyes. Will it last? That’s the big question.
In fact, the single most important question for the world now is whether this is a temporary reset or permanent revolution in the US’s relations with the rest of the world. The US has previously gone through periods of inward-looking isolationism. But each time this was followed by the realisation that the US’s own interests required it to engage with the world.
Both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D Roosevelt promised voters that they would not take the United States into wars between the European powers before doing precisely that. Some of this was driven by a concern to defend democracy, for sure. But primarily it was the calculation that the US’s interests were served by engaging with the world and seeking to make it safe to do business. The business of America, after all, is business.
And so, the period of prosperity and growth since the second World War has been grounded in free markets and free trade, liberal politics and American security. All of those principles are now under threat.
Is the United States permanently abandoning the postwar order? That’s not certain
The irony is that the greatest beneficiaries of all this were Americans. As Tom Friedman noted in the New York Times, the US paid more than any other country to construct the pillars of the liberal world order over the past 80 years. But in doing so, Friedman wrote, America made the global pie much larger and more stable for everyone. “And since we were the biggest and strongest economy, our slices just kept getting bigger and bigger than anyone else’s.”
As European leaders have now grasped, watching the casual discarding of Ukraine, that period is at an end. But what comes next?
Is the United States permanently abandoning the postwar order? That’s not certain. The country is, after all, still a 50-50 nation. Trump won clearly in November, but narrowly. Let’s see how he fares after a tariff-induced inflation shock and a stock market slump. The price of eggs, after all, is not coming down.
What is certain is that Europe will no longer take US-guaranteed security for granted. We are entering an age of huge global military build-up. Nowhere is that clearer than in Europe, which now seeks to transform itself into a military power. The sooner we grasp this in Ireland, the better. This will go far beyond fretting about the triple lock.
One of the things about times of great turmoil is that our way of understanding the world, and our vocabulary to describe it, seem suddenly inadequate. Many of Trump’s supporters count themselves as conservatives. But in fact, their man is anything but conservative – he is embarking on a programme of radical, perhaps revolutionary, change in the way the administrative state works at home and the place of the US in the world, its alliances, its values and how it perceives its interests. Moreover, he is doing this without a detailed, worked-out plan on how it ends. This is another way of saying: anything can happen.
