The rules-based global order, its institutions and value system face a crisis of legitimacy and credibility as the US turns away
‘The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight”.
In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.
During such eras, Gramsci more famously wrote, “morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass”. And at present there is no more morbid phenomenon than the crisis of legitimacy for the networks of rules and laws on which the international order was based – the world that the US was central in creating in 1945.
No one can say they were not warned about the wrecking ball that was about to be inflicted on the global order by Donald Trump.
always has been, nothing new under the sun.
trump just made it more obvious, but the US has been above the law for very very long.
Nah, don’t give up that easily. Trump has as much power as we let him
While that’s true, world leaders and those backing them have learned well the known weaknesses in human psychology. They’ve figured out how to use this knowledge to make large groups of individuals believe falsehoods, and even convinced them that those stating the truth are the liars, despite what all evidence shows.
I think that to return the world to a state of stability, one of the first steps must include criminalizing and enforcement of public figures knowingly making false statements and those with no evidentiary backing.
I think that any victories for the common man gained before that can and will be temporary. The problem is that these ideologues have is much power as we want to allow them to have, but we as a group have been convinced/fooled/hacked into thinking that we want them to have as much power as they say they need, which is clearly to much to allow for a stable global society.
If we concentrate power so much that one person is all it takes to, say, tear up a treaty or trade agreement, we’re always one temper tantrum away from global unrest.
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the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.
I would argue COVID did more damage to international trade, travel, and diplomacy than any '25 US foreign policy.
The pandemic era quarantines/economic contractions and their reactionary backlash polarized nations along the axis of preserving life versus growing the economy.
Modern Trumpism lives downstream of that crisis.
It’s been a sharp decline since 2020, sure, but 2025 has made that unrecoverable
I’ve heard “unrecoverable” for decades. I don’t see unsolvable problems, I see intractable people.
Then pay attention to history:
Hitler kept ratcheting-up the leverage, until he could remove opponent-leverage.
Trump’s now got laws in-place that give him the power to “de-naturalize” all citizens except Republicans, letting ICE control/manage the population, while he gets to be the worshipped ruler, by his cult’s members.
The escalation is going to continue, until machine-gunning protestors becomes “enforcement”, & probably level-off there, stable.
Narcissism’s dictatorship wants what it wants, & when the people/laws/agencies which were supposed to prevent dictatorship won’t do their job, … then dictatorship’s totalitarianism happens
The only way this could have been prevented, would have been to enforce that quality critical-thinking education reach all kids, AND that sufficient-percentage of the population became identifying within that kind of thinking-competenced.
It was a lost-cause years ago, but it’ll only be Civil War Part2 beginning in 2026, sometime.
You have to actively get sufficient-fraction of the population in critical-thinking, XOR … reversion-to-ideological-rampaging is going to be happening, sooner or later.
Same as Palestine could have been protected, but that would have required enforcing completely-neutral, ZERO-politics UN-gov’t there, & neither side wanted to be blocked-out from their future-veneance…
Uprightness costs, & non-uprightness costs, too.
Choose which cost to pay, because cost, itself, is intrinsic to existence…
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And things keep getting worse, rarely better. So yeah that tracks.
Tomato Tomato. You’ve been hearing things.
