Over the nine years since Donald Trump first became US president, the world of global diplomacy, multilateralism and longstanding rules of engagement has been shaken to its core.
Trump’s antagonistic approach to politics has offended and humiliated political foes and allies alike, and left many global leaders scrambling for a new playbook.
The primary problem is that in the world of global trade, geopolitics and much else, the US plays a central role, and its tentacles stretch a long way across all facets of the world as we know it.
For decades the US pursued a strategy of broadening its influence through a strategy of spreading its largesse across the world to countries and institutions that would otherwise have to find alternatives that weren’t always available elsewhere in the world.
Programmes such as the African Growth & Opportunity Act (Agoa) allowed the US to create a network of allies across the globe and ensured that it maintained workable relations across the geopolitical landscape.
The binding condition of such alliances is that recipients of the various forms of benevolence needed to avoid working “against US interests”. This definition included nebulous elements such as “being friendly towards American foes”.
The US currency’s pre-eminence in global trade, together with its oversized influence on financial and economic architecture, meant it could create self-serving rules aligned with its global soft diplomacy mission.
The ability to apply crippling sanctions to those that failed to toe the line showed how dependent the global trade system had become on the US. While it was directly involved in the creation of the global and multilateral institutions that have come to shape the post-war world, the US does not always feel obliged to sign up for membership and mandates.
It can — and usually does — simply claim that some aspects of the agreed rules work against US interest, and it simply opts out of such structures. This inconsistency and hypocrisy survived for so long because even those who object to the differentiated sets of rules that create a significant distinction between the global superpowers and the rest of the world had to acknowledge that the dependency of such institutions on American benevolence or direct support was critical to their continued existence.
Trump’s disdain for everyone has finally forced even those who spent decades accepting a system that was flawed... to accept that the time of reckoning is finally upon them.
Trump’s downright disdain for institutions and those who preside over them forced the world to engage in a game of perpetual vacillations. Institutions such as the EU and Nato, which had long operated under the belief that American benevolence was unshakeable and that a shared purpose existed, found themselves caught in reaction mode, having to fashion crisis responses to every new demand Trump made.
The army of bureaucrats and diplomats who have for so long been central to managing tensions and relations across nations became moot in the world of executive orders. Even longstanding consensus on economic instruments and issues such as tariffs was rewritten.
The collective chaos affecting protocols and relationships continuously escalated, and when Trump refused to participate in the G20 summit in South Africa, America’s drift from the world it helped form crystallised.
The next global event where the rules of yesteryear seem unsuited to the current climate is the World Economic Forum, where Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney finally dragged his counterparts to the right side of history by acknowledging the hypocrisy of a world order whose rules were set to favour the big nations.
Trump’s disdain for everyone has finally forced even those who spent decades accepting a system that was flawed — but was fine for as long it accommodated them — to accept that the time of reckoning is finally upon them. None of us will be spared the knock-on effects.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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