Whatever Trump ends up achieving (or more likely, not achieving) in his second term, he has made personality cults great again. Exhibit A: the shameless ass-kissing of acolytes whom he once viciously insulted– “Little” Marco Rubio come to mind- gushing about how Trump is the only one who can reform government, cleanse America’s body of illegal immigrants and its soul of woke platitudes, bring about world peace, and restore American manufacturing dominance. But one month in, there have been no substantive achievements and his poll numbers are dropping: only 49 % of Americans approve of Trump’s performance. What will happen when his cuts start to hit home? Poor and white working class Americans can feel proud that Ivy League colleges which they will never attend can no long use race as a factor in admissions, but when their social security payments are chopped and Medicaid is reduced, they will not be able to blame Democrats or illegals. At that point– probably just as mid-term election season gets into high gear– Trump’s coalition may well start to unravel. Remember his signature promise from his first term: ending Obamacare. He did not end it because Congress realized that even his most rabid working class supporters in red states had learned that Obamacare, flawed as it may be, actually helped them meet their healthcare needs.

Trump would love an eighty foot bronze statue of himself on Wall Street, but through his first term and one month of his second he is more Wizard of Oz than Stalin: a sad old man madly pulling levers to sustain the illusion of fundamental change. But it is mostly theatre. Take for example his crackdown on illegal immigration. While the pace of deportations has increased, the raids seemed staged with future political commercial in mind that will remind voters that “Trump does what he says.” However, only one month in to the “biggest crackdown on illegal immigration ever” ICE officials are being re-assigned because of the slowing rate of removals. Slow or fast, there is no way that Trump will undermine the agricultural economy by targeting migrant labourers en masse. There are about 11 million undocumented migrants in America now, and in 2028 I predict there will be just about 11 million undocumented migrants in America.

His other signature piece– tariffs, have yet to be imposed, save on China, and then only at 10% rather than the 60% he promised. Inflation is creeping up and while that may not dissuade him from going forward with the broader suite of tariffs he has promised, the disruption to industrial supply chains that will cause will not leave American workers unscathed, at least in the short term. Auto executives have been sounding the alarm about the impact tariffs on Canadian and Mexican manufactured parts and American brands is evidence that the American ruling class remains split on Trump. Those splits are likely to get wider if Trump does proceed with his attempt to return to an essentially mercantilist global political economy with America at the centre. If enough workers start to hurt from disrupted supply chains, higher costs for consumer goods, prescription drugs, and the generalized chaos mass layoffs in the federal government are likely to cause, Trump’s Napoleonic period will be even briefer than the real one’s reign.

But the past week’s news cycle has been focused on Trump’s foreign policy, and here his goals, while contradictory, are not uniformly wrong. Trump is correct: the Ukraine war does need to end and it never should have started in the first place. He is also correct that it is not America’s job to protect the whole world– that argument has been a staple of Realist thinking since the end of the Cold war, not to mention a key plank of peace and anti-imperialist movements. His “plan” for Gaza, is abhorrent and needs no further critical comment, but the people of Gaza do need to live in peace and material security. The danger that Gazans face is less from his plan than from Israeli unwillingness to allow Gaza to be reconstructed. While still astoundingly callous and arrogant, he also sometimes says some surprising and welcome things: he has proposed nuclear talks with Russia and China to reduce stockpiles and there are reports that Secretary of Defense Hegseth has ordered a review of Pentagon spending that could lead to epochal reductions (32% over four years, if reports are true) in the military budget.

The Democrats pursued none of these laudable- in the abstract- foreign policy goals. At the same time, we are not witnessing a retreat of America from the global stage, but a re-configuration of the way in which American power is deployed. Despite liberal hand-wringing we are not seeing the decline of the ‘rules-based international order,” because there never was a “rules-based international order.” There was and is a power-based international order in which the most powerful nations wrote and re-wrote the rules to suit their interests. The rules were written differently in the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union had to take into account the existence of the other, then they shifted after 1919 to become, on the surface, more cooperative and multilateral in some respects, and are now shifting again, as Trump re-positions American foreign policy under the assumption that America is the preponderant global power and needs to use its military and economic might to serve a different interpretation of its interests.

Trump’s gambit may fail, but it is not an incoherent stew of half-baked ideas as critics like to pretend. It is a return to a nationalist and realist foreign policy. But this shift is in keeping with the times. First the 2008 crisis and then Covid caused a return to some aspects of Keynesian economic stimulus and a hardening of borders that have not disappeared with the end of the pandemic. Right wing nationalist-populist ideologies are in the ascendant across the world– Trump is less disruptor-in-chief than a creature of the times. The nationalist re-trenchment across the globe proves– if further proof were needed- of the absurdity of the argument that an anonymous “Empire” of capital and digital flows had replaced American imperialism, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argued. American imperialism never went anywhere- ask Gazans and Ukraninians, who were killed by American bombs and pushed into war with Russia by a Democratic government stuck in Cold War thinking and a closely allied European security establishment haunted by nonsensical fantasies of Russian tanks rolling across the Donbass all the way to Normandy.

Trump is wrong that Zelensky started the war but he was used as a tool by the US and NATO in an overt and publicly acknowledged plan to degrade Russian power. Trump is correct that the war has become a World War one-like stalemate that needs to end. And he is also correct that Ukraine is in a much worse bargaining position and will most likely have to cede territory that it would not have had to ceded had either the Minsk 1 or Minsk 2 treatises been agreed to or Russia engaged in serious talks in December 2022 when a list of negotiating points were sent from Moscow to Washington, only to be arrogantly rebuffed. The Ukrainian people have paid the price.

Can Trump deliver peace, not only in Ukraine, but in the Middle East and globally? One cannot deny that Trump can shape the rhetorical field. He seemingly extemporizes shocking proposals which rarely come to pass, but get everyone’s attention and crack open formerly fixed positions. Trump knows that America still wields massive military and economic power and he is willing to threaten to use it to bend other nations to his agenda. But there are serious tensions and contradictions at work in the overall strategic picture that is emerging.

Looking carefully at the moves Trump has made or is threatening to make, it becomes clear that he is trying to rid himself of the Ukrainian and Middle Eastern entanglements the better to compete exclusively with China for manufacturing share but also for control over the world’s rare earth critical mineral supplies. Trump is not subtle: the cat does not need to get out of the bag because it was never in it. His envoy hands Zelensky a contract to sign over 500 billion dollars worth of rare earths and tells him to shut up and sign. Bad news for Denmark/Greenland, Canada, and perhaps Norway: Trump is proposing a new era of US-Russian Arctic co-operation (i.e., joint domination). None of this is motivated by Trump’s love of Putin, it is designed to weaken the alliance between Putin and Xi. But that is also the strategy’s main weakness.

However much Putin welcomes the feigned respect paid to him by Trump and Rubio, they are setting him on a collision course with the reality of Trump’s desire to hem in and weaken China. Russia is and will remain dependent on China as the major customer for his oil, natural gas, and minerals. European markets for oil and gas are not coming back, and Trump has no intention of helping them come back, because he wants to keep the European market open for American Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) deliveries. Trump also wants to use threatened tariffs as leverage to open up the Indian market for American LNG, which just happens to be another major purchaser of discounted Russian oil. Over the next few years these contradictions are going to amplify. How they will play out is not certain, but it is much more probable that the globe is heading towards a generational political-economic conflict. China cannot lose access to the American market and continue its manufacturing-led economic rise. Putin cannot lose access to the Chinese market for his oil, gas, and minerals. Trump cannot back down from his goal of re-patriating American manufacturing industries. While his commitment to shrinking the American global military footprint is long overdue, no one should mistake his agenda for a commitment to a project of comprehensive, life-valuable, positive social peace. He may well imagine that other countries will fall into line. The evidence from South Africa, Mexico, and even dangerously dependent countries like Canada is that they will not.