Over the last decade, as China dropped its show of geopolitical obeisance and began to perform similar games of dominance — telling the 10 nations of the ASEAN regional alliance, for instance, China is a big country, and you are small countries, and that is a fact — it inspired a new foreign-policy term: wolf-warrior diplomacy. This scandalized the foreign policy institutionalists of the West, including Biden, who in juggling not just China but Russia and Israel dedicated much of the second half of his presidency to a nostalgic diplomatic restoration project. The MAGA riposte is, Let’s not be naïve and let’s not be suckers: We are all wolves on the world stage, and the game begins when we show our teeth.
When Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire just before Inauguration Day, it seemed to many like a credit to Trump, whose emissaries had, on one exceptional Sabbath, apparently bullied Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting a deal that had been available for many months — and perhaps a sign that those who voted for the once and future president imagining he was the candidate of peace were not entirely deluded. But just a few weeks later, it seems clear that he regards demolition and mass displacement of millions as a straightforward matter of eminent domain. The ultimate acquisition of Gaza would be a simple “real estate transaction,” he said last week, and it wouldn’t even be Israel but the United States presiding over the closing. “We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it,” he said on Tuesday — “Mar-a-Gaza,” some have called it.
None of this was exactly unforeseen. The American-led international order has long been criticized as a cover story for the exercise of U.S. power, especially on the left, with critics on the right more likely to see it as an anti-nationalist plot to bring about global government. And though the United States remains a central global power, we are now well past what was once called the unipolar moment and perhaps nearly as far from the time when Madeleine Albright or Barack Obama could refer to the country as the world’s “indispensable nation.” (“Hegemonic decline is a done deal,” the historian Adam Tooze remarked recently. “It’s over.”)
And yet Trump’s second term “marks a symbolic end to global neoliberalism,” the economist Branko Milanovic wrote last month, a sharper break than his first term — in part, Milanovic later added, because in the meantime so many impulses that once seemed outlandish (on China, on trade, on industrial policy) had quietly hardened into elite conventional wisdom.
The difference is also marked abroad, with far fewer global leaders falling into alignment against Trump — even if a few seem to enjoy mixing it up with him personally — and acknowledging that the basic terms of engagement have changed. The office of the Russian foreign minister has publicly applauded the assault on U.S.A.I.D., as has Viktor Orban of Hungary’s political director. China seems happy to watch America detonate large parts of its infrastructure of global power. In Europe, the European Commission’s Josep Borrell got into trouble a few years ago when he described the continent as an orderly and peaceful “garden,” surrounded by the “jungle” of the rest of the world. Now the president of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is striking a very similar tone — calling it a “hotheaded world” and an “era of hypercompetitive and hypertransactional geopolitics.”
In other words: It’s a jungle out there.
David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), a writer for Opinion and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.” Sign up for his newsletter here.
